About three weeks ago I decided to give my Sharp Zaurus a well-earned rest and try going back to a paper-based approach to project planning and time management. Well, I say “going back” but in all honesty I’ve never tried the paper-based approach, it’s simply that I have never managed to find exactly what I want in a PDA to-do list/calendar, and there is always that low-level worry of data loss and breakage.

I was at a workshop today in York, run by the Archaeological Data Service, entitled XML for archaeologists: Beyond the Hype. I went along because I felt that I didn’t really understand how XML works, and have to say I was very pleasantly suprised because I absolutely loved the workshop and came away feeling that I’d made the conceptual link that I needed in order to understand XML. My problem was that I was confused by the idea of a “language”.

At FOSS4G last week, my colleagues and I got chatting with the folks from OSGEO. It was difficult not to, given that they played such a huge part in organising the conference. Anyhow, we identified that it would be a good idea to set up a UK Local Chapter, to provide a UK-specific focus and slant on the work that OSGEO are doing. The kind of things we might look at include providing a first port-of-call to newcomers to the world of geomatics in the UK, with a particular focus on the open source tools available; providing a focus for lobbying for public access to Geodata (you know, the stuff we’ve paid for with our Taxes but have to pay again to use).

On this page I’m going to list the books and papers that I find most useful. **Archaeology Related Texts: ** Digital Archaeologyby Thomas L Evans and Patrick Daly Actually, this is a new book that I haven’t had chance to read yet, but Tom used to be the Head of Geomatics at Oxford Archaeology and did a lot to move the department forward so I’m sure it will be good (and I’ll be buying it myself for sure).

Back from Switzerland after the FOSS4G conference, and a weekend in Geneva. Whew! Geneva would perhaps have been more enjoyable if our hotel wasn’t on a street having an all-weekend party, complete with blaring music (Pink Floyd and Reggae mix one night, Slipknot or similar the next). Anyhow, we got about- went out to CERN and visited the United Nations, and even took in a little archaeology at St Peter’s Cathedral.

FOSS4G Day 3. Fantastically inspiring lectures on Open Source Spatial Data Infrastructures, which is just what we (in an Oxford Archaeology sense) are looking for. Time to go back and re-evaluate a lot of these products, which are maybe two major releases further on, and a great deal more developed and sophisticated, than last time I looked. Prize for the most exciting new product of the conference (IMHO) goes to MapChat- which the conference abstract describes as “a prototype web-based tool for synchronous multi-user communication via a mab interface”.

Soooo, yesterday was FOSS4G 2006 Day Two, and the key point of interest for me was the interaction between the old-school learning-intensive traditional approach to GIS with the “anything goes” Google Mashup approach. Several of yesterday’s speakers acknowledged the undeniable debt that web-based mapping has towards Google for lowering the barriers and raising the profile of the discipline, but some also pointed out that often this means abandoning core ideas in GIS such as coordinate systems, because you don’t need this knowledge to create a mashup.

Well, today was day one of the FOSS4G conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. I’m a bit of a conference n00b, having only made it to UK events in the past, and certainly nothing of this size or calibre. So, couple that with the fact that I’ve forgotten most of my school french or german vocab and it’s been a learning experience! The workshops that I attended today were on MapGuide Open Source, which was what I was concentrating on when I signed up but I think I would rather have attended the workshop on PostGIS instead of the Introduction to MapGuide Open Source this morning.

This morning I took delivery (thanks to the nice people at Amazon UK) of Time Management for System Administrators from O’Reilly. I’m really looking forward to reading it, because I could do with something to help me deal with the many different calls upon my time at work. The trouble with being a sysadmin (in everything but name) AND working on GIS projects is that I find it difficult to focus on any one task when I am constantly being interrupted for assistance with Microsoft Word, printers, changing backup tapes, getting together deployment kits of computers and associated gear for remote sites, etc, etc.