Talks (updated)
This page will eventually have links to all the talks that I’ve given recently. I’ve licensed them all (like the rest of the blog) under Creative Commons, which is a bit of an experiment but I’m keen to see whether they do get re-used. If you do find them useful, drop me a line.
- FOSS4G 2007, September 2007: Portable GIS: GIS on a USB Stick (pdf, 380KB)
- Gateway Group Seminar, July 2008: Getting your maps on the web- a philosophical approach (pdf, 560KB)
- Open Source GIS workshop, Lancaster University, 17th-18th November 2008: Why Web Mapping (pdf, 950KB), Web Mapping Course Notes (pdf, 190KB)
- AGI Northern Group, 27th November 2008: Open Source GIS in the UK (with particular reference to archaeology) (pdf, 650KB)
- British Computing Society geospatial and open source specialist groups, 22nd January 2009: Talk (pdf, 1.8MB), Notes (pdf, 125kb)
- AGI Technical Special Interest Group, 11th March 2009: Oxford Archaeology- Going Open (pdf, 850KB), Notes (pdf, 100KB)
- Gateway Group, 29th October 2009: Open Source for Local Government (pdf, 600KB)
- AGI Northern Group, Where2.0Now, 10th November 2009: The Impact of Open Source (pdf, 928KB)
- AGI Northern Group, World GIS Day, 18th November 2009: How Archaeologists use GIS (pdf, 15MB)
- Open Source GIS workshop, Lancaster University, January 2010: Databases and Web Mapping the Open Source Way. Talk (pdf, 600KB), Notes (pdf, 500KB)
Note these can also be seen (and downloaded) from Slideshare.
Hello Jo,
As a fellow archaeologist, I’m really glad to see that someone in the British archaeological establishment (commercial or otherwise), like OA, are supporting FOSS GIS. I’ve aready been in touch with one of your colleagues about gvSIG since I’m planning to use it on a project I’m involved with in the Sahara, but I’d like to know, how has gvSIG been received by your overall work force since you previously used ESRI products? Are people happy with it on a day to day level? If you use QGIS as well, when do you feel that that’s necessary?
My ‘day job’ is with the Welsh Royal Commission and they are tied to ESRI, so I haven’t had much contact with people or organisations that have used FOSS GIS, so I welcome your opinions.
All the best,
Sal
Sal
I have a friend who works for a company that’s tried gvSIG with little success. I guess it depends on how good your Spanish is too – all the error messages that were generated were in Spanish.
They found it ok for viewing shape files on the computer, but printing out was a nightmare as it wasn’t WYSIWYG – the text was an odd size and in a random place and the colours were wierd. I tried it out briefly as I thought they were exaggerating the problems and I wanted to see how it worked for me and what I do. I found that it didn’t save my work, even when I asked it to, so I lost half a day’s data. Not happy in the slightest.
I’ve heard that *some* of the bugs are going to be sorted out by the next release, but who knows when that wil be. I’ve even heard an IT person (open source fan) comment on the fact that the current release isn’t very suitable and needs a lot of work before it’s properly usable.
Having said that, I’m sure there are plenty of other open source gis programmes out there that are fine, I’m just a little wary of losing more data and wasting more time.
Hi Brunhilde (and Sal),
Sorry to hear that you and your friends had so many problems with GvSIG. I really wouldn’t abandon it as an option though because from your description of the problems you were having (the Spanish error messages) you were using one of the early versions that were not fully translated. There has been considerable progress with this. If you go to http://oadigital.net you will find a translated version of the stable release, which has considerably less spanish in it. However, the translated version of the latest edition is almost ready- this is going to be very exciting because a lot of work has gone into the new release. I should say that Oxford Archaeology use GvSIG (and QGIS, and GRASS, and ArcGIS) in our day to day work and find it does the job just fine now.
All the best
Jo (Archaeogeek)
Hi Jo,
I think it might be a good idea for OA if you assisted the gvSIG people in the English translation – you are probably one the major companies using the program I guess? So both you and gvSIG would benefit.
Karl
Hi Karl,
We are indeed helping the GvSIG people with the English translation! As version 1.1.2 was already out, and development was focussing on versions 1.9 and 2 by the time we got involved, we released our own translated version of 1.1.2, which can be found on our website http://oadigital.net. However, for the upcoming releases 1.9 and 2, we have worked directly with the developers. I’m still not sure when they are going to be released though…
Thanks
Jo
That’s fab, Jo. Great work!
Karl
Hi Jo,
Actually I’ve contacted Mario Carrera and I am now doing the translation into Danish together with my mate Martin.
By the way, do you know of any postgres/postgis based excavation databases. The national museum in Nuuk does not have any excavation databases, only a SMR. Excavations are only done few times a year, and mostly by foreign researchers from Denmark and elsewhere. But possibly next year they have to start up. My advice to them would be only to have a very lightweight system, so they don’t need to waste to much time on database design issues considering the span of use. Do you have any possibly to borrow or know of any interesting system?
Karl
Hi Karl,
Glad to hear you’re getting involved with the GvSIG project!
In terms of excavation databases based on PostgreSQL and PostGIS- I don’t know of any that are ongoing, though we (at OA) have been talking about this for a while and are working through re-designing our own onsite recording system to work on mobile devices and using synchronised databases. This is at the paper stage at the moment though! In terms of simplicity, you might want to look at sqlite and spatialite rather than PostgreSQL, so you have the convenience of a file-based approach. This is what we are looking at ourselves, with a server-based database acting as the master copy. If you’re interested in this, let me know!
All the best
Jo
[...] Talks (updated) [...]