In December I was invited to the AGI Cymru Annual Conference to present a short summary of September’s discussions on paleo and neo-geography at AGI 2007. The following streams were focussed on Health and Environment and provided some great examples of the kind of applications that are “more than just pushpins” and which at the same time have the potential to blur the boundaries (if there are any) between neo and paleo. A common them […]
Yearly Archives: 2007
46 posts
Well almost. We have recently been migrating from good old stodgy Nokia workhorse phones to Blackberries, so that we can have the delight of 24 hr e-mail etc. So it was good bye to my trusty Nokia (I think it was the 5th one on the trot) and get used to a brave new world. The thing that I loved about my series of Nokia phones was that there was no learning curve with a […]
If you look at the browser usage stats IE is generally shown with 78-83% and Firefox with 13 – 15%. When I looked at the stats for this blog nearly 35% were Firefox. I wonder if there is a connection between blog readers and Firefox usage?
Just over a week ago the AGI held its annual Awards Dinner – the industries equivalent of the Oscars. Very generously Chris Holcroft, the Director of the AGI gave me his award for the work I did on this years conference. As I said at the time the award should have gone to the whole team who created the conference. A week later and the whole team assembled to kick off the plans for next […]
There has been a lot of talk about Nokia acquiring Navteq for nearly $7bn and more recently the privatisation and subsequent flotation of DERA with substantial profits for private equity investors and senior management has been in the news. An odd coincidence is that a couple of years ago Navtech changed its name to Navteq, at the time of privatisation the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency became QinetiQ – both of them decided to insert […]
An interesting article on Free Our Data. In a recent debate on Public Information (Comercial Use) Mark Todd MP and Gareth Thomas, seem to be agreeing on the benefits of the current trading fund model and the need for caution in determining an alternative. Good to see that politicians are seeing through some of the arguments. Could this be the beginning of the end? I doubt it, there is still a Trading Funds Study to […]
Let me start with a couple of common generalisations: SOA is Enterprise Enterprise implies big and good Desktop means small scale, possibly old fashioned and not so good Now you may quickly dispute those crude statements but I would guess that they will have a slight resonance for you or at the very minimum you will know several people who hold views somewhere close to them. At GDC we were very committed to delivering more […]
Recently I have been doing quite a lot of travelling, airports and travel seem to be plagued with hassle. I have flown with BA each time and used their on line check in, meal choices and text warnings of delays and thought “that’s not bad”. I went to Stockholm this week and by mistake flew with another airline, the on-line check-in didn’t work, they did not have self service at Heathrow, self service at Stockholm […]
My attention was drawn to an article on eGov Monitor extolling the achievements of the Locus Association in “working with the Government and EU institutions to effectively commercialise public sector information in EU” So who are the Locus Association? According to the article “The Locus Association is a group of private sector companies operating in the Public Sector Information (PSI) marketplace, who come from a range of sectors within the PSI marketplace..” actually it is […]
On Monday evening I was invited to speak in a debate at the House of Commons organised by the Debating Group opposing the motion “Government Information should be Free”. Speaking for the motion were Michael Cross of the Guardian and the Free Our Data Campaign and Neil Shepherd-Smith, Vanessa Lawrence (DG of OS) and I were opposing. My 16 year old daughter, Flora, who is studying politics could not resist the opportunity to hear her […]
One conference ends and the next one begins. Just over a week ago we held the wrap up meeting of the conference team for AGI 2007, after basking in the glory of a successful event our thoughts inevitably turned to “What next?” Amazingly all of the committee were enthusiastic about the prospect of “just one more” so we are about to embark on AGI 2008 and somehow I was persuaded to chair a second conference […]
I was in Australia recently visiting our colleagues and meeting some clients. I learnt about the national address database G-NAF (Geocoded National Address File) which has been built by PSMA in combination with Logica CMG and Geometry Pty and including data from local government and the Australian Postal Service and the electoral commission There seemed to be little of the acrimony between the parties that characterises addressing in the UK. Of course I may not […]