I’m sure everyone has been to some kind of social function, often an extended family gathering, where the first few lines of conversation with someone you’ve not met before invariably include the following: name, relationship to instigator of gathering, relationship to other attendees, and so on. I’ve often thought that some sort of heads-up-display would come in handy, providing you with this vital information, to avoid those awkward first few minutes of a meeting.

Wessex Archaeology are releasing their impressive gallery and flickr collection of photos under a creative commons license, according to Tom at Past Thinking. This is really good news, and shows that the idea of open access is catching on in British Archaeology. I’m going to submit an abstract for FOSS4G07 on the idea of “openness”, be that in terms of data or software, in UK Archaeology, and would welcome any comments or examples of use from readers.

A post from Daily Cup of Tech a while ago inspired me to add a “tumblog” to my site, for short-format posts on tips and tricks. I will be posting to this regularly to build up a library of code snippets, linux and windows tips and archaeological information. It’s taking me a while to get it properly integrated into the site, but the feed is working and can be subscribed to separately from the main site rss].

This is an idea that seems to come up every so often- what GIS programmes can you run from a USB stick. Well it appears that the list has just got longer. I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools.

Archaeogeek is now back in the saddle/desk-chair after a few weeks break- firstly entertaining visiting parents and most recently scuba-diving in the Sound of Mull (Scotland) In the mean time I have a few projects coming to fruition, and have been catching up on a few things that I wanted to learn more about (hello google maps and database integration). Firstly, we at Oxford Archaeology have been fortunate to have the services of a very skilled and enthusiastic work-placement student called Matt Jones from the University of Southampton for the last few weeks and he has been helping up get our basic web-based mapping sorted.

There have been a thought-provoking series of posts about the relevance of the Ordnance Survey. It’s good that people are questioning the need for a national mapping agency, but I think the answer has to be a resounding YES. The OpenGeoData blog doesn’t. To quote: “Me, I just don’t care about the Ordnance Survey. It’s not “evil" or “immoral”, it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Maps can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Maps, but it’s not a crusade it’s just a superior way of working together and generating maps.

Last night I was at the Free Our Data? discussion at the University of Manchester, running as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2007. This was interesting, not least because I have been thinking about this debate purely in terms of geographical data, yet other types of data bring other issues and concerns. The question-mark is important, as it represents the crux of this evening’s debate. Should public sector data be available for free, or freely available?

Exposing our data using WFS has certainly prompted some debate, which is good! Particular thanks go out to Andrew Larcombe, who put together a great OpenLayers page, with some nice ajax touches, and a clever mechanism that clusters nearby sites together and reduces the load on the server. We had a few requests to release this data by wms as well, so here is the request for that. The process of doing this has thrown up some challenges, which I think are mostly down to my ignorance than anything else!

Well, at last it’s OK for me to tell people that Oxford Archaeology now has a WFS server that is accessible from the outside world. The address is: http://mapdata.thehumanjourney.net/cgi-bin/mapservwfs.cgi It’s a standard MapServer setup, and at the moment contains static data about the sites we have worked on over the last thirty years. This is still a work in progress and there are a whole bunch of things I would like to improve (but at least it’s up and out there):

Well, my first attempt at getting Mapguide Opensource working on Ubuntu screeched to a massive halt last week with some version conflicts that even the mighty mailing list couldn’t solve. I’m kinda hopeful that if I start from scratch and install only the absoloute basics, then I might avoid the same problem. Unfortunately I can’t get anyone on the list to admit that they’ve successfully managed to install it on Ubuntu, otherwise I could pick their brains mercilessly!