Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like [last year]((https://archaeogeek.com/blog/2006/09/14/of-neogeography-and-mashups/), Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak.

The Ordnance Survey’s shortsighted license agreement has put paid to the fantastic 3D Virtual model of London that the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL has spent six years researching and creating. The full story of the negotiations can be found in this Guardian Article, but briefly speaking the Ordnance Survey’s refusal to change the terms of their license has meant that the data cannot be made freely available on the web, although it can be used by the London Boroughs.

I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations). There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening. This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for Wordpress.

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.

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.