On Wednesday I presented at a great conference in Manchester, organised by the AGI Northern Group, entitled “Innovation and Value in Geographic Information”. The presentations covered a wide range of subjects, and to be honest a few were barely “GI”, but I really enjoyed them, so there! You can find all the talks here.

The stand-out presentations for me were probably Gary Gale’s, which was hardly about “GI” at all (unless you count FourSquare, which I don’t) but was about archiving our personal data from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook et al, and Bob Barr’s, which was about the bonkers situation that is Addressing in the UK. Bob, as usual, had everyone in fits of laughter, which is impressive when talking about such a dry subject.

My own talk was entitled “Consuming linked and open data with open source tools, or: actually doing something useful with all of this free stuff”. You can find it on slideshare here. It was really meant to be a live demo, but it’s impossible to be sure you can connect your linux laptop to projectors at these places and get a link out to the internet, so I chickened out. This talk was, though, the first public outing for a couple of python scripts I have been working on, to download open data via the police.uk api and linked transport data from naptan. When I’m feeling brave, I will be putting the scripts on the Astun Github Site but not just yet.

All in all, an enjoyable day- so thanks to the AGI Northern Group for inviting me along!