Being unable to attend FOSS4G this year, I freed up lots of space in my schedule to read the daily reports that would surely come streaming from my RSS reader. I’m still waiting. In previous years, there were a lot of posts about the conference, often posted during the conference itself. What was different about this year? OK, so we know that Paul Ramsey was awarded the Sol Katz award (though why he should be surprised by that, I don’t know), and that Chris Schmidt posted a video of Schulyer’s lightning talk (actually Chris did put a few posts up), but other than that there has been very little posting.

All Points Blog pointed me at the direction of a piece on the mess of mapping and postcode data in Northern Ireland, which got me thinking a bit about this rush to rely on location-based services and always-on connections to “the cloud/interweb”. At first glance, the situation in Ireland (National Mapping agency has copyright on maps, Post Office has copyright on property location) sounds very familiar. However, Ireland doesn’t have postcodes yet, so things are a not so cut and dried- in this day and age, if you had to go to an awful lot of trouble to implement a system for locating properties, would you invent the postcode system or something else?

I’m just back from the AGi Geocommunity 2008 conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. A very enjoyable time was had by all I think! I would have posted from the conference itself, but the hotel wifi wasn’t keen on playing with my linux laptop. I’ll talk more in other posts about the actual presentations, but this is just some of my general thoughts about the conference. My overall thought was that the AGI got it right with this event.

OK, day two of the AGI conference. This started with three more excellent keynotes, from Charlie Pattinson of the Environment Agency, Charles Kenelly of ESRI and Stuart Haynes of the Defence Geographic Centre. Charlie’s post was about flood risk management in a changing world. This begs a question posed initially by Steve Feldman in his opening speech as conference chair- are we shaping the world or being shaped by it? This is highlighted by the fact that people used to talk about flood defence, now we talk about management.

Day one of the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference began with the Keynote Speeches from Sean Phelan of Multimap, Vanessa Lawrence of the Ordnance Survey, and Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk. Sean Phelan had some really interesting insights based on his experience of founding multimap and surviving the dot-com boom, through to the recent acquisition by microsoft. He coined possibly the stand-out quote of the conference: “We are the last generation who will ever know what it means to be lost” , referring to the rising ubiquity of location-based technology and GPS.

I guess a lot of people will have seen the article on slashdot pointing to an article on a Stanford/Harvard paper on how businesses can win against open source software/technology. I don’t want to get into a debate about how the authors are in fact the spawn of the devil, as you can read the slashdot comments for that. Personally, I started off being slightly disappointed by a number of points that they made, and then quite up-beat about the prognosis for open source as a result.

The geospatial world rightly got quite excited over the last few weeks with the discovery that Geofabrik are offering openstreetmap data in shape file format. You have been able to export openstreetmap data to postgresql (and from there to shape or whatever takes your fancy) for some time, but this makes the process of really using the data far easier. However, I got to wondering exactly how useful it would be as a real-life background dataset (in the absence of anything affordable from the Ordnance Survey or similar), when you would need to repeat the process ad infinitum to keep the dataset up to date.

I’m off to the AGI conference tomorrow, ready to give my talk about Open Source GIS in the UK on Wednesday. (What kind of nutter agrees to give a talk about open source GIS at a conference supported by ESRI, Autodesk and the Ordnance Survey, amongst others… if I don’t post again you’ll know that I have been “removed” or something). Anyhow, if anyone wants to meet up, and perhaps huddle in a corner somewhere talking about OSGeo local chapters, or even, I dunno, non-gis things, then catch me there!

I don’t often (ever?) ask for help on my blog but I’ve hit a snag with my continuing investigations into installing mapguide open source on ubuntu. My questions on the mailing list haven’t been answered, so I’m hoping that some kind blog reader will help me out. The problem: I can only use arbitrary x-y coordinate systems. This is officially recognised as bug 582, where categories.txt is in the wrong place, and a fix has been suggested.