Education, Education, Education

At the AGI Conference Angela Baker of ESRI spoke about the inclusion of GIS within the National Curriculum in our debate about GI Careers.

She offered to share with the GeoCommunity some useful links to educational sites and true to her word she mailed me:

Steven mentioned that he was going to put together some useful websites following the conference. My educations ones are:
http://www.geographyteachingtoday.org.uk/ Action Plan for Geography http://www.rgs.org/HomePage.htm RGS
http://www.geography.org.uk/ The GA
http://edcommunity.esri.com/ ESRI Education Community (I know its ESRI but there are loads of fab free resources on here) http://www.esriuk.com/teachingresources ESRI (UK) free teaching resources

Angela Baker Community Programmes Manager ESRI (UK)

Thanks Angela

I am going to start posting these links onto the links panel so that they will be easy to find. If others want to add more links just include them in a comment here.

Chelsea going south

Sorry I just couldn't resist it.

To all those Chelsea fans who gave me stick over TH14 - cheer up guys :)

We could have a Russian oligarch before the season is over then the last laugh will be on you.

But until then - Ho ho ho

Go out and Build a GeoCommunity

"Go out and Build a GeoCommunity" - my closing words at this year's AGI Conference.

500 people over two days attended 51 papers, workshops, keynotes, debates and hands on training sessions.


Mike Hickey of Pitney Bowes and Ed Parsons of Google kicked off the first day giving their perspectives on the emergence of neo-geography.

Eat, drink, learn and discuss sleep, network and party Geo. Great Party, hangovers, old friends, new friends. Ideas, business, fun and serious people dressing up in sillly costiumes. We definitely started to build a GeoCommunity.

Chris Holcroft, Simon Doyle and their drummer from Dusseldorf were joined on stage by another past chair of AGI, the venerable Peter Capel in a memorable session (they are available for weddings and barmitzvahs - not)

Some usually sensible people took the fancy dress theme of Village People a bit too seriously. Would you buy a GPS from the guy on the left? Would you trust your planning application to this couple below? Great costumes guys.







We learnt a new vocabulary at the conference which extended from neo-geography to paleo-geograhy (thanks to Ed Parsons) which describes us old time GIS heads and then on to post-neo-geography (thanks to Simon Doyle) which is where the paleos might be when they recognise the neos. Oh and David Maguire introduced folksonomy as well - a bottom up taxonomy. We heard a lot about democratisation and crowd sourced data and realised that "the plates are moving"

As an industry we face the challenge of articulating the business case for what we do higher up the organisation and particularly in putting £s in our RoI statements so that GI is not just a nice to have.

There was a lot of talk about SDIs and about INSPIRE at the conference but no one seemed to be clear whether the UK will ever have one and if they do will it work and will anyone engage with it? Vanessa Lawrence updated the conference on the progress of the GI Strategy for the UK (Now renamed a Location Strategy). The final document has now been sent to ministers for approval, time frame for announcements is unknown (well at least to mere mortals) but my hunch would be before the end of the year if Mr Brown doesn't call a pointless General Election this week.

A couple of interesting announcements from the OS courtesy of Vanessa Lawrence's key note:

1. OS will now extend the licensing of their data to third sector (not for profits orgs) if they are working on behalf of a Public Sector body who is part of the PGA or MSA. Good move which will respond to one of the justified criticisms of OS licensing, check details with OS - do not rely on my interpretation.
2. OS have launched Explore which allows you to plot and share your favourite walks and points of interest on top of 1:50k maps. Neat and a step in the right direction. Rumour has it that this is a mash up based on the long awaited open Space API
3. Open Space will be launched by OS before the end of the year and will be free for non commercial use

Can't really complain about any of this, could always ask for more but one step at a time (in this case three). Who says they never listen? The wheels of the civil service just move at a slower pace than some of us would like.

The best paper award was won by Andy Coote with "Show me the money, making the CEO listen". Papers by Craig Moulding of Calderdale MBC, Andy Elliott of East Riding of Yorkshire Council and James Proctor of the Environment Agency were also commended. My congratulations to everyone.

Thanks to all of the sponsors, without you there would not have been a conference so I hope you networked into some lucrative business and will be back next year.
If you didn't get to the conference you missed out. If you are a neo-geographer who thought us paleo-geographers were from the dark side come along next year and meet with us, persuade us and partner with us, together we can do loads more.

I asked every delegate at the conference to return to their work place and talk about the conference and try to encourage one extra person to attend next year. If they all did that we would have 1000 post-neo-geographers and the venue wouldn't be big enough.

Dream on!

Building a GeoCommunity - my intro speech

For those of you who missed it or anyone not here, this was how I opened the conference (except for the ad libs)

Good morning everyone. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to this the 19^th AGI Conference. Looking around and seeing over 400 people here in this hall and knowing that nearly 500 delegates will be attending over the two days, I cannot hide a little bit of pride on behalf of the fantastic conference working group and AGI team who have created this event for you.

When we finished last years conference there was a strong sense that we needed to do something different. Well this is it – a 2 day residential conference with 51 key notes, papers, workshops and debates plus 8 hands on training sessions. I know that you are going to have a stimulating and educational conference; hopefully it will also be fun. The challenge will be choosing which sessions to miss; you just can’t get to them all.

A word of thanks to all of our presenters, without your willingness to share your projects, ideas, opinions and skills with us there would be no conference. Please show them your appreciation by giving them and the AGI feedback using the forms that will be in each session.

The theme for this conference is “Building a GeoCommunity”. The idea for this conference came to me when I was attending last year’s Awards Dinner where AGI recognises achievements and contributions. I was struck by the interdependence and cooperation which characterises the way that we work together, AGI is a very special organisation representing all of the different interests within our industry.

A community is defined as

• a group of people living in a particular place;
• a group of people bonded together by a common religion, nationality or occupation
• the word comes from the Latin communitas - fellowship

People, place, occupation and fellowship – I think that defines our GeoCommunity.

Attending this event are practioners from across the public sector, the insurance industry, utilities, engineering and environmental sectors, academics, students, policy makers plus the consultants and companies that together make up our GeoCommunity. Over the next two days I encourage you to celebrate our success as a profession and an industry and to learn and debate with each otherand perhaps most important of all at the end of a hard day’s work to party with each other. Together we can build our GeoCommunity.

Before I get out of your way and hand over to Alun Jones, the AGI Chair, who will introduce our opening keynote speakers I need to do a few brief thank yous. Without a conference working group of dedicated volunteers there would be no conference, I have been very fortunate to have had the commitment and humour of a fantastic group:

• Sallie White, Ordnance Survey
• Lee Braybrooke, Cadcorp
• Alice Froggatt, English Heritage
• Mark Percival, Coventry City Council
• Muki Hacklay, University College London
• Mike Tarrier, Infotech
• Chris Holcroft, Alan Wilks and Claire Huppertz of AGI and until she left AGI Angela Baker

Thank you, all of you and also to your employers who allowed you to contribute to this event.

Thanks to Ordnance Survey for design and production assistance on the conference brochure and program.

Thanks to all of the staff at AGI who are up here making sure that everything runs smoothly.

The new format of this conference has been enabled by the support that we have received from our 21 sponsors and in particular the 3 Platinum Sponsors, ESRI, Ordnance Survey and Pitney Bowes MapInfo. I am particularly grateful for the promises of support that came from some of you well before the event was launched. The sponsors have exhibitions in the area at the back of this hall and adjacent to the main lounge and coffee point, please take time to visit them, I know that you will find their presentations a valuable part of your conference.

Enough of the thank yous, now it is time to get on with Building a GeoCommunity.

AGI 2007 off to a great start

Day 1 proceedings are nearly over.

A great program including brilliant keynotes from Ed Parsons and Mike Hickey in which we learnt about Neogeography, paleogeography and Location Intelligence.

Loads of other presentations which I could not attend as i was judging in one of the rooms.

And a fantastic debate at the end of the day (even if I did chair it and get well flamed by Mr Doyle)
Apparently we do think that there is a carreer future for geo professional but we are going to have to up our game and talk location and analysis rather than geo.

now comes the tough bit rocking and partying until the wee hours. If you are attending the conference let me know what you liked best.

Building a GeoCommunity - starts tomorrow

We are just about there. I am packed and setting off for Stratford upon Avon tomorrow morning. no doubt there will be a few last minute details to attend to tomorrow afternoon. Then it will be time to start welcoming the early arrivals as they register tomorrow evening followed by the early networking and greeting of old friends. Must make sure I get a reasonably early night as I have to open the conference on Wednesday morning.

There is so much that I am looking forward to at this conference -on the first day I hope I can get to listen to Andy Coote on "Show me the Money: Making the CEO listen" and the debate at the end of the day “GI is a Bad Career Choice, Discuss” with Simon Doyle, Gesche Schmid, Stephen booth and Seppe Cassettari should prove to be fun.

I will try to post the odd thought from the conference if time allows. There will also be an open page on Chris Holcroft's conference blog where delegates can post their opinions about papers, presenters and topics of discussion.

AGI 2007 Sold Out

Would it work? Could we get 200 or even 300 delegates to a residential conference in beautiful Stratford on Avon? Would people miss the basement of Chelsea football Club? (You can guess my response to that one)

With 420 delegates registered for the first day of the conference and over 400 for the second (there are a handful of passes left for Day 2) the answer is clearly that we have a willing and enthusiastic audience. Now there are only 2 questions to be answered:

1. Can we deliver a conference that lives up to or even exceeds the expectations of delegates and sponsors?
2. Can we find a bigger venue for next year?

The answers are Yes and Yes thanks to a great conference committee and the super efficient AGI team.

If you missed out on registering we will be trying to podcast the keynote speakers and maybe the debates. Who knows whether the technology will all work, best to book early for next year.

Transliteration - a challenge for data providers, geocoders and mapping portals

Transliterate - verb (transliterated, transliterating) "to replace (the characters of a word, name, text, etc) with the nearest equivalent characters of another alphabet." - Source Chambers Online

I have just got back from a holiday in Tel Aviv. To my dismay I discovered that none of the big mapping portals (GYM etc) have any decent coverage for Israel. Initially, I thought that might be because of the lack of availability of street level data but eventually I found a demo site for Atlas CT which has some reasonable mapping from MAPA - Mapping and Publishing - at the time of writing the site seems to be down but it worked very well while we were in Israel.

The only problem is that the site uses an English language interface which whilst great for me (who doesn't write Hebrew very well) creates some challenging problems in transliterating the Hebrew road names. There is no precise way of switching from Hebrew to English and similar challenges exist for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and other languages that do not use our 26 character alphabet. Unfortunately soundex just wont solve these problems and the parser in the site was having all sorts of difficulty with my attempts to input street names. In the major cities of Israel Street names are shown in Hebrew, Arabic and English so it should have been fairly easy to adopt standard spellings but apparently not.

Having worked on the whereonearth global geocoder in the past, I know how difficult it is to find a solution to this challenge. I wonder whether that is why GYM have not included coverage of Israel?

Over half the worlds population does not use the western alphabet, global mapping portals and LBS need a consistent way of dealing with transliteration.