Day Two of AGI Geocommunity kicked off with some heavy-weight (in the nicest possible sense of the word) speakers in the shape of Lai Wah Co from the CBI and Vanessa Lawrence of Ordnance Survey. Lai Wah Co gave us an economic perspective to hang our insecurities onto, focused mainly on the impact on public sector jobs. That kind of thing makes my head all fuzzy, so I’ll bow to the wisdom of the twitter back channel- and say that some people’s mortgages are going to go up, some people’s will stay the same, and we’re looking at about 2 more years of hardship before getting back to the same sort of state we were before.

Vanessa Lawrence probably enjoyed her talk much more this year, after all she stayed for the full two days rather than making a quick escape. Again quoting from the twitter back channel- at least there were no angry mobs burning maps in the car park this time! The key point of interest was on the new licensing and derived data rules, that have subsequently been released and are much simpler than before (though still not perfect).

Bill Oates showed us some very pretty maps and apps that his team at the Welsh Assembly have been delivering- making the point that “maps are our best sales tool”. This does hark back to the point made a number of times on Day One- that we as an industry need to provide solutions to problems rather than just talking about the tools. He was followed by a value-for-money talk from Ian Painter of Snowflake Software on how exactly you go about doing this whole “open data thing”.  He made the really good point that to the rest of the IT industry, GI is just a tiny pimple, and our shape files and georeferenced tiffs are pretty much unknown outside our own little community. So when we talk about making our data open, we can’t just go around giving people shape files, we need to focus on the xml-based web formats that other IT people will actually understand.

In the afternoon I attended a frankly perplexing talk on cartography for the 21st century, that made me feel like I’d stepped back 10 years. I was expecting to be shown some really pretty maps, perhaps with a dash of MapNik or similar, but what we got was an ode to rasters and a total confusion about the difference between data and display. Oh well…

The Plenary session was clearly chosen to keep as many bums on seats as possible! Nigel Shadbolt delivered a rapid-fire discussion on open data, and the rationale behind it. Finally, the prizes for best paper as voted by the committee, and by the delegates, both went to Lisa Thomas of the Coal Authority, which I’m sorry I missed!

There have been a number of comments about this year’s conference, and the dislocation between the energy of the preceding W3G unconference and the main conference itself. Perhaps it was a mistake not to include a geoweb stream in the main conference, or perhaps W3G should have followed on afterwards, who knows. From my totally uninformed position of not having attended W3G, I wonder whether there has been a game change since last year though? We’ve got our free data to play with, and Ordnance Survey is officially not so evil. There are less things to rant about, and quite frankly when people are worried about their job, less justification for shiny web apps and cool things…

Yesterday was the first official day of AGI Geocommunity 2010 (second for those that attended the W3G unconference the day before).

A lot has happened in the UK Geospatial Industry since last year- when one of my highlights was Ed Parsons talking about the ludicrous situation of data ownership in the Ordnance Survey. Now, we have lots of free data to play with, and indeed one of the over-riding themes yesterday was how we use this data properly. The poor old Asborometer was highlighted not once but twice as an example of what we shouldn’t be doing.

Recession has clearly focussed people’s minds- there was a lot less worrying about “palaeo” and “neo” in the sessions I went to, and a lot more worrying about raising our game and increasing the profile of GIS across the public sector and in business. We all know how useful GIS is, and how it can improve efficiency and save costs, but we have to convince others of that fact too. We do, however, need to focus on solutions to problems rather than the technology itself.

Of the keynote speeches my personal favourite was from Andy Hudson-Smith of CASA, maker of Talesofthings and MapTube. Anyone who’s mantra is still “wouldn’t it be great if…” amongst all the doom and gloom and budget cuts is alright with me.

Steven Feldman’s paper on Cocktails on the Titanic presented open, free, and the cloud as the proverbial icebergs that traditional GIS vendors need to steer round or crash into. Personally I’d prefer a life-raft analogy, but it was good to hear open source and data being highlighted in this way.

Lunch time saw an informal get together of OSGeo:UK, developments around which are worthy of a blog post on their own asap!

Matthew Perrin of Envitia presented a great paper on the use of open source software and open standards at the Welsh Assembly Government. This is an example of open source and proprietary solutions working well together- it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach.

Gary Gale talked about silos of geodata being collected by, for example, foursquare, facebook and gowalla, in an entertaining talk about the four horsemen of the geocalypse. There are attempts to create global, open, databases of places- like Geonames, so perhaps what we now need to see is the big players rallying around these existing efforts rather than re-inventing the wheel…

I talked about the opportunities that have grown from the transition to open source at Oxford Archaeology- slides and my paper will appear on slideshare asap. The usual questions about “risk” and “costs” came up- so I think there’s room for a blog post on those points fairly soon too!

The last session I attended was a panel on the AGI’s Foresight study that I contributed to last year. The discussion did dwell a little on issues of open data and transparency- reinforcing my feeling that this is the key point people are concerned about this year.

Roll on day two…

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Spurred on by some great talks at FOSS4G, and also by a bit of cynicism elsewhere in the geospatial blogosphere, I finally got around to having a play with Spatialite at the weekend. There have been posts elsewhere about it working really well, so all I’ll say here is “it works for me as well”. I’m not really trying to tout it as a shapefile replacement, but a useful tool in a particular use case as an alternative to the ESRI personal geodatabase.

The use case I’m thinking of is the rather prosaic issue of file management. We are moving over to the KnowledgeTree Content Management System for file management, which works well for single files, like Documents, Spreadsheets, etc, but is pretty useless for multi-part files (for want of a better term) like CAD or GIS data. I can’t speak for CAD, but the average GIS scenario is going to need at least one project file, plus shapefiles with at least three parts to them, and usually rasters with at least two parts to them. Logically, file-based geodatabases work well in this scenario, providing you with a single file to hold your geospatial data. With Rasterlite support becoming more common, perhaps with Spatialite we can have our rasters nicely packaged up as well as our vectors. Getting data in and out is easy, and can be automated using scripts so easily that even I can do it.

So- why are we not doing using PostgreSQL for all of this? Well, in an ideal world we’d have big and powerful enough servers and network bandwidth to cope with the myriad GIS work we do.  Some of the GIS work is quite ephemeral, so we don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up new databases/virtual machines every time someone needs to use GIS for a project. Spatialite seems ideal for this, and I look forward to exploring it further over the coming weeks.

Slightly delayed round-up on the last day of FOSS4G (I was on holiday!), and some thoughts on the conference as a whole…

In the morning I attended a tutorial on GeoNode, which I’m very excited about. It’s a new project from the OpenGeo team that links together Geoserver, GeoNetwork, and Django. The aim is to make it easier for people to work with geospatial data and metadata, providing a content-management-system AND social network approach. This might sound weird, but I can think of lots of ways in which it might make the use and discovery of geospatial data more easy and interesting. We’ll see!

There was a lot of interest in the “alternatives to PostGIS” stream of talks, especially around CouchDB and SpatiaLite. Perhaps at some point we’ll need to have a database shoot-out to go with the WMS server one! When we have more packages supporting SpatiaLite and RasterLite, I foresee a great future for them- even if it’s just as a data transfer format, or for facilitating the storage of spatial data in a CMS.

Then we were on to OpenLayers-related talks- I particularly enjoyed Andreas Hocevar’s talk on performance configurations- and talking to other people who saw it there were some light-bulb moments!

Then on to the final Keynotes from Raj Singh and Tyler Mitchell, and notices- congratulations to Helena Mitasova for winning this year’s Sol Katz award!

So, on to final thoughts. It’s interesting to come back to FOSS4G after a 2 year gap while it’s been in unaffordable (for me) parts of the world, but also because the world is a very different place financially to how it was in 2007. In between 2007 and now, my conferences have been limited to mainstream UK GIS such as the AGI, and to OSGIS. I was surprised at how much self-confidence and excitement there was this year- in contrast to the slight introspection that I often see at the AGI (no one was worrying about whether they were Neo or Palaeo in any of the talks I went to). There was as much professionalism, research, development, and business strategy as at any other conference, but with the added excitement that came from people simply doing things they really enjoy. Many thanks to the conference organisers, and here’s to Denver next year!

The second day of the conference was great as always, book-ended by an
interesting keynote from Michael Gould of ESRI and the now infamous
WMS shoot-out, complete with glitter vest and song, so I’m told!
Michael Gould’s speech on fostering greater collaboration between open
developers and ESRI has been widley reported on, but personally I
think he made an incorrect assumption early on, and missed the point.
He assumed that everyone is doing what they do to make money, and this
is probably the one conference where that is simply not true. People
work with, and use, open source software for many other reasons
besides money (although that helps) and lowering the financial
barriers to entry in EDN isn’t a massive incentive in this
environment. There was much talk of “open”, but with a very limited
definition of that term.

Ironically this was followed by Ivan Sanchez and his talk on game
theory and its application in software development- in which he
“proved” that the only way to “win” is to share, and then Helena
Mitasova’s keynote on open source software in academia.

Proprietary software is often thought of as “necessary” for a career
in “industry” and of course pretty much free to academic institutions,
so tends to dominate. However increasingly students need more choice,
even if it’s just so they can install a copy of the software on their
laptop.  Helena listed a number of institutions teaching open source
GIS, sometimes alongside proprietary GIS but called out for more
collaboration in preparing modules in areas other than desktop GIS.
More information is available on the OSGeo wiki.

I divided the afternoon between Postgis and Inspire- related talks,
and learnt a lot, particularly about Inspire. Open source
implementations are starting to be developed, which the UK could learn
from and contribute to.

Finally an honourable mention to the OpenStreetMap map-in-a-box
project (it’s law that there has to be at least one OSM talk). This
takes the pain out of deploying your own instance of OSM data and
keeping it up to date. Sounds fun, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

The Gala Dinner was a triumph- good food, wine and conversation. Many
late arrivals and bleary eyes this morning!

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So… the tribes have gathered again. For me it’s the first time since 2007 in Victoria, and it’s interesting to see the changes. 800+ people have made it to Barcelona this year, despite the global recession. I think there’s a different mix this year- more women (always a minority but sometimes more than others), and a couple more sharp suits, but these are non-empirical trite statements so we’ll move on.

Having not attended and workshops this year, the plenary sessions were my first intro to the conference. Schuyler Earle inspired us and flattered us all by saying that, by developing the software behind Openstreetmap, used in Haiti and elsewhere for humanitarian crisis mapping, we have all helped save lives. Then he said he expects this to continue, so we’d better get on with it!

Arnulf Cristl made us think about the metaphysical side of what we do, taking in such concepts as the definition of the world, and space. It’s good to start with something high level to get those brain cells working!

With Miguel Montesinos of Prodevelop doing both a plenary speech, and sessions on GvSIG mobile, there ws plenty of GvSIG love to be had. Developments in GvSIG mobile suggest that’s well deserved- with a new interface and better integration with the desktop version as well as editing functionality and other goodies. It’s clearly being pitted against Arcpad, and tests seem to suggest it has the functionality and speed to be a worthwhile competitor, on windows mobile at least.

Sophia Parafina of OpenGeo did a good round-up of the options available for open source mobile augmented reality- I think “Promising but not there yet” sums that up, but there are a few things like Mixare to keep an eye on and she gets bonus points for including a picture of a unicorn.

Now who wants tapas?

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FOSS4G in Barcelona is only a few days away now, and I’m getting very excited. The programme looks great! As an experiment (and due to Easyjet’s baggage policy) I’m going to try and manage with just my smartphone and my ipod- no laptop. This is a test post using posterous to see how feasible that is, and to wish Archaeogeek.com a happy 4th birthday. How time flies…

I hope to catch up with loads of my geo-pals in sunny Barcelona!

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Once in a while, Oxford Archaeology get called upon to do some really big archaeological projects, like road schemes and airport expansion, that cover huge areas, go on for years, and generate loads of data. We love these, because it’s not very often that you get to look at whole landscapes- how multiple prehistoric villages interact, for example, rather than tantalising snapshots where you have to play “join the dots”.

Not only do we generate loads of data (thousands of artefacts, records, environmental samples, photos etc), but we ask difficult questions of them, based on statistical analysis of finds distribution, travelling salesman algorithms, best-path analysis. I think you can call this “real GIS”, though often people are surprised to hear that archaeologists use GIS at all.

As part of our ongoing ”open approach”, and to prove that we put our money where our mouth is, we are now trying to do all of this in open source software rather than using the “standard” proprietary packages.  I’ve blogged previously about how pleased I was with the integration between QGIS and PostgreSQL, and how easy it was to manage large amounts of data without regress to proprietary packages, well  our current large project needs 3D analysis and large amounts of imagery manipulation, and again we’re finding that the open source tools out there do the job splendidly. Furthermore, we have a choice of tools, so if one approach doesn’t quite work the way we expect or want, then we can choose another. Now that can’t be bad, can it?

So, in brief, we’re using Quantum GIS and GvSIG pretty much interchangeably for our desktop GIS. All the vector data is in PostgreSQL. We use the QGIS Grass plugin to get data into a sensible format for 3D display and analysis in Paraview and Visit. We’re mosaicing up aerial photos using GDAL tools, and using Geoserver to publish everything to people who just need read-only access, and a direct connection to PostgreSQL for those that need to edit. We’ve developed a workflow for creating high-quality cartographic output by exporting to Inkscape, and the next step is a project website with links to our database and a nice openlayers map. Simples!

A couple of weeks ago was the OSGIS 2010 conference at the Centre for Geospatial Sciences at the University of Nottingham. This was expanded on the previous year’s event- it was spread over 2 days with workshops on the first day and the conference on the second. We also held the 2nd AGM of the UK OSGeo local chapter after the conference (a shameless attempt to get as many people as possible to attend).

The workshops went well- I reprised my “Databases and Web Mapping the Open Source way” workshop using the OSGeo Live DVD in the process. If you last tried Live DVDs a few years ago and think they are going to be unworkably slow and clunky then think again. The Live DVD team have done a very good job with the OSGeo version too!

As is usually the case when you’re involved in running an event, my memory of the actual papers on day two is somewhat hazy. Stand-out themes were TinyOWS and GvSIG in my book. The GvSIG team in particular were there in force, and very impressive.

The local chapter AGM went well, although I’ve committed my first mistake in calling it the local chapter, as we decided that was a bit too hells-angels, so we’re now called OSGeo:UK (branding updates to follow). Perhaps due to my (even more) shameless emotional blackmail in my introductory talk, there was a lot of new interest. We now have a mailing list of over 100 people for a start. The mailing list is actually the best place to go for my quick round-up of the AGM- check out the archive for more details. In particular though, if you are involved in promoting any workshops using open source software and you want some publicity then get in touch as we want to get a good list together of all the events that are taking place in the UK.

I followed up events in Nottingham with assisting at another two-day workshop in Leicester, at which I repeated my “databases and web mapping…” talk yet again, alongside talks on spatial statistics with R, and QGIS/GRASS. My talks for all these events are up on slideshare if you’re interested, and will follow in the downloads section of this website when time permits.

I’m helping to teach at a workshop on open source GIS at the University of Leicester in a couple of week’s time. As usual, this means running around trying to get all the software that we need installed on the university computers. As usual, what the course organisers think will be OK, and what the IT department think will be OK, are two different things!

We’d rather not use a LiveDVD, as we want the students to work in the environment which they are used to- in this case windows. We don’t really want to saddle the IT department with lots of PostgreSQL and Apache configuration, so we’re going to try using Portable GIS (gulp).

The current iteration (as available here), has an out of date version of Quantum GIS, doesn’t contain the statistical package R, and also contains a bunch of other stuff that we won’t use on the course (MySQL, GvSIG etc). The beauty of open source cross platform software though, is that rolling a customised version, containing just what software we need, and the latest versions, was quite easy.  Adding in the data, and even the course notes, will be straightforward (once we’ve written them, of course!). Installation is simply a case of copying everything onto each pc, and the students can take it all home with them when they are done.

The open source license is not the big deal here, despite the title of the post, but the added benefits that it brings are pretty cool. Free software means we can run the course without having to worry about buying licenses, or sending students home with limited demo versions afterwards. The cross-platform nature of the software means most of the donkey work is done in human readable files that can easily be edited to work in a portable fashion, and finally, because it’s open source, we can do that legally.

I think that’s all pretty cool…

(Small Plug) If you like the idea of using Portable GIS for a course, but don’t fancy customising or preparing it yourself, then get in touch!