Day Two of AGI Geocommunity kicked off with some heavy-weight (in the nicest possible sense of the word) speakers in the shape of Lai Wah Co from the CBI and Vanessa Lawrence of Ordnance Survey. Lai Wah Co gave us an economic perspective to hang our insecurities onto, focused mainly on the impact on public sector jobs. That kind of thing makes my head all fuzzy, so I’ll bow to the wisdom of the twitter back channel- and say that some people’s mortgages are going to go up, some people’s will stay the same, and we’re looking at about 2 more years of hardship before getting back to the same sort of state we were before.

Yesterday was the first official day of AGI Geocommunity 2010 (second for those that attended the W3G unconference the day before). A lot has happened in the UK Geospatial Industry since last year- when one of my highlights was Ed Parsons talking about the ludicrous situation of data ownership in the Ordnance Survey. Now, we have lots of free data to play with, and indeed one of the over-riding themes yesterday was how we use this data properly.

Spurred on by some great talks at FOSS4G, and also by a bit of cynicism elsewhere in the geospatial blogosphere, I finally got around to having a play with Spatialite at the weekend. There have been posts elsewhere about it working really well, so all I’ll say here is “it works for me as well”. I’m not really trying to tout it as a shapefile replacement, but a useful tool in a particular use case as an alternative to the ESRI personal geodatabase.

Slightly delayed round-up on the last day of FOSS4G (I was on holiday!), and some thoughts on the conference as a whole… In the morning I attended a tutorial on GeoNode, which I’m very excited about. It’s a new project from the OpenGeo team that links together Geoserver, GeoNetwork, and Django. The aim is to make it easier for people to work with geospatial data and metadata, providing a content-management-system AND social network approach.

The second day of the conference was great as always, book-ended by an interesting keynote from Michael Gould of ESRI and the now infamous WMS shoot-out, complete with glitter vest and song, so I’m told! Michael Gould’s speech on fostering greater collaboration between open developers and ESRI has been widley reported on, but personally I think he made an incorrect assumption early on, and missed the point. He assumed that everyone is doing what they do to make money, and this

So… the tribes have gathered again. For me it’s the first time since 2007 in Victoria, and it’s interesting to see the changes. 800+ people have made it to Barcelona this year, despite the global recession. I think there’s a different mix this year- more women (always a minority but sometimes more than others), and a couple more sharp suits, but these are non-empirical trite statements so we’ll move on.

FOSS4G in Barcelona is only a few days away now, and I’m getting very excited. The programme looks great! As an experiment (and due to Easyjet’s baggage policy) I’m going to try and manage with just my smartphone and my ipod- no laptop. This is a test post using posterous to see how feasible that is, and to wish Archaeogeek.com a happy 4th birthday. How time flies… I hope to catch up with loads of my geo-pals in sunny Barcelona!

Once in a while, Oxford Archaeology get called upon to do some really big archaeological projects, like road schemes and airport expansion, that cover huge areas, go on for years, and generate loads of data. We love these, because it’s not very often that you get to look at whole landscapes- how multiple prehistoric villages interact, for example, rather than tantalising snapshots where you have to play “join the dots”.

A couple of weeks ago was the OSGIS 2010 conference at the Centre for Geospatial Sciences at the University of Nottingham. This was expanded on the previous year’s event- it was spread over 2 days with workshops on the first day and the conference on the second. We also held the 2nd AGM of the UK OSGeo local chapter after the conference (a shameless attempt to get as many people as possible to attend).

I’m helping to teach at a workshop on open source GIS at the University of Leicester in a couple of week’s time. As usual, this means running around trying to get all the software that we need installed on the university computers. As usual, what the course organisers think will be OK, and what the IT department think will be OK, are two different things! We’d rather not use a LiveDVD, as we want the students to work in the environment which they are used to- in this case windows.