Just because you can put something on a map …
Posted: September 29th, 2010 | Author: steven | Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »Gary Gale invited me to talk to one of the 3 W’s of geo at W3G. I chose the “what”
That's me thanks to Paul Clarke
You can probably guess where this went. After a preamble about relevance, spatial patterns, distortion and open data I launched into my personal trawl through the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. My final message was “Think before you map”, I got a few laughs and a couple of people who I had not met before actually came up to me afterwards and said nice things in agreement with my opinions.
Word spread through the twittersphere to Andy Hudson-Smith that I had launched into SurveyMapper, which I had and I thought woops I may have pissed him off again – when we had a lengthy conversation much later in the evening fuelled by some geoLagavulin it actually turned out that we were pretty much in agreement.
Apparently there was some surprise that I won the unconference prize for the most over-running presentation.
Now it is on to GeoCommunity another presentation, a panel discussion and a georant. Going to be a busy day
The slides are here
And the mindmap that explains what I was talking about is here
[...] I was pretty scathing about CASA’s Survey Mapper in my “Just because you can put something on a map…” talk at W3G. [...]
[...] W3G Conference – Like Geography Only Cooler Steven Feldman - Goodbye #W3G, hallo #GeoCom and Just because you can put something on a map … Nic Bicanic - w3g conference in Stratford Gary Gale - W3G – A Chair’s Eye [...]
[...] Organisations across the public sector have been filling data.gov.uk and the London Datastore with masses of data including a lot of expenditure information, transport, health and environmental stuff (you have to go and browse these sites to appreciate the wide range of data available). Now the presumption for Central and Local Government is that data that is non personal should be published, a simplification but I believe a fair one, and that publication should be in a machine readable form (more on that in a bit). Much of this data has a location context which has encouraged the mappy’s to create some brilliant and some awful mapplications, I outlined some of my reservations on these early poster children of the Open Data movement in my talk at W3G. [...]