Monthly Archives: November 2006

11 posts

The price of free is currency

Simon sent me a link to an article on the BBC website about the vintage of aerial imagery in Google Earth for Liverpool. Regeneration bosses in Liverpool have complained that the internet giant Google is ignoring the regeneration changes going on in northern cities. Liverpool Vision has complained that developments, such as the 42-acre Paradise Project, are not visible on aerial view website Google Earth. The site shows London landmarks such as the new Wembley […]

AGI Awards Dinner

I am not a big lover of awards dinners, black ties or other industry bashes. But the AGI Annual Awards Dinner is an exception worthy of note, particularly this year. I should say at this point that I am a big fan of the AGI and that the current chairman is our Director of Consulting, Simon Doyle. The Awards Dinner brings the geo-industry together in a celebration of the achievements of the year. It is […]

Listening to customers

Almost every company aspires to have good relationships with its customers and usually a key part of that will be listening to what customers say about products and services. GDC have always tried to be a listening company and our products have been strongly influenced by the feature requests of our clients. That does not mean that everything on the wish list will get into the next release of the product or even any release […]

Blogging responsibly

An interesting article on the BBC site today. It is all to easy to blog away criticising any part of government or the “establishment” in general without ever stopping to make well thought through suggestions for a different approach. Substitute OS for government/establishment and perhaps some of their most vociferous critics should be reading this article. Interestingly Mathew Taylor (Tony Blair’s retiring strategy advisor) whose views are quoted in the article is leaving to head […]

Lunatics and Asylums

When you read the latest article in Guardian Technology entitled “One way street to postcode madness” Thoughts about lunatics running the asylum do come to mind. Local authorities who are the statutory street naming and numbering authorities have provided information to Royal Mail who use it as a major source of change intelligence for the Postal Address File (PAF) which RM maintains to enable them to efficiently deliver mail to our homes and offices (some […]

NIMSA

The Guardian has a good article on the DCLG announcement that the NIMSA will end in December. Basically no subsidy to OS for surveying the big unpopulated areas of the country. Worth a read. Interesting how the Free Our Data folk have now started to realise the potential (unintended) consequences of their campaign. Look forward to hearing how the “innovative commercial sector” will come up with a way to keep these areas mapped for nothing. […]

GIS and Football

I have to confess to an obsessive passion for everything to do with football. It occurred to me that GI has quite a lot of connections with football. After all, the teams are each associated with a location so we could map them except for Man Utd who don’t really belong anywhere and certainly not in Manchester, a bit like a PO box. Then there are the fans, where do they come from, we could […]

On Quality

What constitutes value? It takes time and resources to do things well. Quality at any price is clearly not value so how do you judge the right point between perfect/best and good value? I am not sure that I know the answer, I know in our business it is a constant concern to me – how much can we afford to put into making a product better, will clients value that investment? Not sure that […]

Free Our Data

Have you been following the Free Our Data campaign? Have you noticed how few people are bothering to comment on the weekly postings? I used to be quite active trying to present a little balance in what seemed to me to be an OS bashing fest but I sort of lost interest. There used to be quite a lot of activity on this blog – has everyone lost interest in this stuff or is it […]

Welcome to GIScussions

Hi and welcome to my GIScussions. I am currently the MD of GDC, a London based Geo-Consultancy working with clients in UK Public Sector and Infrastructure. I didn’t start life as a geographer, in fact I am an economist who spent 20 years working in building materials before stumbling on GIS. Lots of what goes on in our community amuses and baffles me, some of it inspires me. Sometimes I wonder why ….. This blog […]