Yup it is the time of year for some reflection and some goodwill unto all men, particularly those in California, Southampton, Denver, Westminster, Haiti, Seattle to hint at just a few. Several people have or will shortly pronounce on what they consider to be the geo-events of the year, their favourite maps, the top tips for success in 2011 and a load of other stuff in that vein including OS and Google Maps Mania. So […]
Yearly Archives: 2010
64 posts
Thanks to Bob Barr for drawing my attention to the PAF Advisory Board which publishes some useful bits of information that the Address Management Unit of Royal Mail share with their user group. One gem which caught Bob’s and my attention was a brief presentation on the accounts for PAF. PAF was a profitable business unit in 2009-10, returning 10.5% profit on just under £25m revenues. Put another way it costs £22.3m to run the […]
I had been planning to write blog piece about the poor state of local authority gritting maps after a little rant on gritting maps on twitter a couple of weeks ago and now I need a gritting map myself. The roads in Muswell Hill are completely impassable this morning, there isn’t that much snow but the gritting lorries have not been seen and the “Hill” bit is a dead giveaway for the slithering chaos around […]
Last week the long awaited announcements on a National Addressing Gazetteer called GeoPlace arrived from Ordnance Survey, the Local Government Group (I thought it was Association), National Land and Property Gazetteer, Department for Communities and Local Government, Intelligent Addressing and Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – in alphabet soup language that’s a NAG (yes really NAG) called GP from OS, LGG, NLPG, DCLG, IA & DEFRA! Note the absence of Royal Mail […]
At long last the georants from AGI GeoCommunity ’10 have been posted. By popular acclaim the tallest and funniest georanter in 2010 was Thierry Gregorius Thierry beat last winner Ian Painter by a short head, here is his rant on open source and free was a pretty top performance I also thought that this year’s conference chair was pretty funny Finally here is my grumpy old geoman rant You can find the rest of the […]
That is a statement not a question. I have been at the 1Spatial user conference at Homerton College in Cambridge today. Several people commented on the difficulty that they had in finding the conference centre on Google Maps which matched my own experience. Search on Google for Homerton College and you will get directed to the centre of the Addenbrookes Hospital complex famous for heart transplants but not to my knowledge a conference venue. The […]
I am a sceptic about sound maps in general because I can’t normally see any significance in the spatial distribution of sound clips or why you would want to search for sound clips by location. I think there may be a real challenge in linking sound and maps in a meaningful way. Among the silliest in my opinion is the UK SoundMap from the British Library. I doubt that much of value will come from […]
A couple of weeks back when I was at W3G and GeoCommunity there was a lot of discussion about Open Data (not sure whether there should be a space between the words or not or whether someone has a (c) to the phrase by now). I sensed that there were two very different perspectives on Open Data and to some degree these views were categorised by whether you were at W3G or GeoCommunity but then […]
The 1st of October, hereafter to be known as Double D Day, will be marked in the annals of the Free Our Data campaign and the those supporting Open Data and the reuse of public sector information and within local and central government and within the world of geogeekery and perhaps even at Google Towers. We now have a Derived Data policy that we can read, understand and most importantly that enables lots of data […]
Last week I was trying to get from Stratford on Avon to meet up with my wife in Glaston, Rutland after GeoCommunity. No PND and no printer available to print out a map and directions but I wasn’t worried I had my trusty iPhone. Not quite so simple. Lets start with the limitations of an iPhone and particularly an old 3G as an in car navigation device – battery life, lack of mounting, low volume […]
I presented Cocktails on the Titanic to a pretty full room at GeoCommunity on Wednesday. I have been developing my thoughts for this presentation over the last 6-9 months. It started with the AGI Foresight study and my section of the editorial on social and economic trends, it evolved with “Without a business model you are FCUK’d” at wherecamp.eu and then presentations to the ESRI UK user conference, The GeoData 2010 event, State of the […]
I was pretty scathing about CASA’s Survey Mapper in my “Just because you can put something on a map…” talk at W3G. When I met up with Andy Hudson-Smith after the talk in Stratford we had a very good conversation about Survey Mapper, he made a good case for putting the tools into peoples’ hands and seeing what they could do with them and I argued that self selecting polls on topics that may not […]