Monthly Archives: July 2009

Only days after the Premier League’s self styled greatest striker and most famous citizen of Togo chose to pursue trophies (and money) outside of London by moving to Manchester and weeks after a certain slick haired Portugese left the same city for Madrid it is gratifying to see the Tweetometer showing the balance of interest between the two. Note the mutiple geo references in this post

Peter Batty has an interesting post on his geothought blog about how neogeography is moving into the traditional GIS space and predicting major disruption in the next 5 years. No need to recap the ideas because you should go and read them. Suffice it to say that I think Peter has it spot on but may be understating the speed with which the changes are taking place. If there is major disruption which organisations are […]

Last night my brother asked me “what was that stuff mentioning you in the Guardian the other week?” I explained about the elusive internationally renowned expert and he agreed it couldn’t possibly be me. Sibling humour. Then the conversation got interesting when he questioned why the Guardian had been banging on about this stuff for over 2 years? I tried to explain the issues and potential importance. Did anyone read this stuff he asked? Apparently […]

Last year the INSPIRE reps were indicating that about 55% of the 4 year budget had been committed by DeFRA and other participants. There was optimism about gaining support from others for the remainder. Now it appears that the crunch has hit budgets within government departments and the funding commitment is down to 33%. This has forced a rethink and may result in a slimmed down Location Council as apparently there is no seat at […]

About 4 years ago my old company GDC hosted the first meeting of the OGC UK Forum. The great and the good of the UK GI indudtry turned up for a couple of hours discussion and some drinks and networking. 4 years on I am sitting in on a Forum meeting at UCL. Not sure that a lot has changed. The mix of delegates is from academia, government departments (several INSPIRE people) and agencies and […]

The Tweetometer has switched from Open Data and Intellectual Property (the former won most of the time) and is now comparing The Ashes and The Open (Cricket vs Golf) – yawn you may say if you are a pure football and geography man. But then there is geography at least in the nations competing in both competitions, weak you may say and I would agree. What should be the next Tweetometer?

If you are coming along to our briefings next week (or thinking about coming along) you might want to have a look at this short note on GeoVation to get an idea of what we want to do. Want to find out more? Mail me or come along to one of the events, there are still a few places left. Register for free at https://geovationcofeelondon.eventbrite.com London: 08:00 – 09:30 https://geovationdrinkslondon.eventbrite.com London: 18:00 – 20:0 Venue […]

I was invited to give a keynote this morning at the Cambridge Conference: Exchange which is a conference of delegates from National Mapping agencies from developing, transitional and developed world. My talk was about the two big changes that NMA’s were facing: The need to deliver better return on investment to their customers Switching from being producer centric to customer responsive and understanding that the value of geospatial data was determined by customers and their […]

If you couldn’t find the notes that accompanied my slides it is because for some reason Slideshare cut them off. Don’t ask… So I have dropped them here

GeoVation is a new innovation network sponsored by Ordnance Survey that will help individuals and startups to turn ideas for using geography into reality. Come along to one of the GeoVation launch briefings, at each location we will be running a breakfast briefing with coffee and croissants and an early evening briefing with pizza and beer. The registration pages for the briefings are now open, please select the location and time that you would prefer […]

OpenStreetMappers are passionate about maps and are coming up with some great ideas for using maps in new ways. During State of the Map we saw several great new ideas including augmented reality from Layar and transport maps from Ito but the one that most impressed me was a tactile map for the blind. Why didn’t someone think of this ages ago? Could it be that open data really does encourage innovation?

I am in Amsterdam for State of the Map, the OpenStreetMap conference. This has been an amazing event, well organised, full of energy and riding the crest of a wave. No one who attends this event from within the mainstream of the geobusiness could go away thinking that crowdsourcing cannot produce a detailed, accurate and richly attributed and themed map. The OSM community are getting their act together on coverage, quality and tag structures, the […]