Going underground

I have always had an interest in maps as a representation of space. I remember hand drawing maps when I was little of my village and being obsessed by making the map match reality. Nowadays I much prefer maps which distort both scale, accuracy and reality. Beautiful maps loose their attraction when they are accurate.

I am a big fan of underground maps. Tube maps go beyond real world representations, and encompass functional design. I think tube maps represent some of the most used maps in the world. Beyond their day to day use they become icons of design and I love the way you can trace their evolution over time.

London underground 1933:

London underground 1999:

I just came across these really beautiful maps from Japanese design house zeroperzero which augment and warp underground maps for the traveller.

A close up of their Barcelona Railway City Map

I suggest if you’re still on a high from FOSS4G 2009 and are thinking about planning next years trip then you should pick up one of these beauties.

Beware, geogeeks to the rescue

DANGER DANGER DANGER – THIS VIDEO CONTAINS GEOPROFANITY

FOSS4G 2009. Done. I’m just starting to reflect on where things are since the last time I was at a FOSS4G.

I loved Ignite Spatial when I was at the conference this year – such a refreshing format and it felt like GIS without the beards and elbow patches. My friend the north shore telly tubby gave an great presentation and whilst it was tongue in cheek I thought it was relevent to the plenaries delivered at FOSS4G.

Representing Government, Warwick Watkins, Richard Marles and Kate Lundy were asking for help in their quest to modernise and become 2.0 certified – all good governments need a liberal dash of 2.0. Andy Pitman gave us a stark reminder of the bigger picture and shed light on the climate modelling communities challenges (some of these challenges are perhaps self inflicted). In general many GIS customers are looking at ways to deliver more on smaller and smaller budgets. Thunderbirds to the rescue – or rather geo geeks to the rescue. The open-source community, projects and businesses have much to offer, however one of the greatest challenges will be how to bridge what I sense to be a large gap in the picture – a community built on self help and self organisation, generating these innovations  - and a world not ready for them. There appears to be a some sort of translation missing between these two worlds.

People willing to translate  this chaotic open source world are slowly emerging. They are focused on knocking down the barriers to mass participation, presenting sensitive support models where customers can take the option of paying when they need that extra leg up or be essentially rewarded for being self sufficient and independent. This builds loyalty, trust and continuity in a customer base. There is a growing body of evidence which makes open-source geospatial technology much more palatable to traditionally risk averse organisations. Whilst the cloud is very ‘now’ both research and development by the likes of 52North and actual implementations by CampToCamp have proven how the ‘open-source’ stack within the cloud can robustly scale – this seems to be a major step forward. open-source Geospatial technology is appearing in the enterprise – a space traditionally occupied by the large propietary GIS vendors.

Amongst many very good presentations Paul Ramsey painted his vision of the future – ‘beyond nerds bearing gifts’, but how can this community manage to reach out to the other world? Perhaps OSGeo can learn lessons from the very work that goes on within its technical ranks? Just as the low level open source libraries are abstracted and wrapped for higher consumption so too should the message – It may sound dishonest but perhaps OSGeo needs to wrap this open source geospatial world in order to sell its virtues and benefits to those who don’t come naturally to its ideas and concepts. Open-source software may not be for lazy people however its success are in some way dependent upon it solving peoples problems efficiently and maintaining a reasoned cost point in all senses.

Beware of nerds bearing gifts perhaps? With such a strong focus on the technology will these new world vendors loose sight of what it is they’re here to do – will the technology eclipse its very purpose? Its hard to see this happening with such strong moral motivation however this is, after all business.

There was also a growing feeling that the walls between the proprietary and open source vendors are crumbling. Is there a place for us all in this new world order? Apparently so according to Dale Lutz, (make sure you click here for a good reason to keep your web page uptodate!!!!) this is the ‘end of religion’.

Many of the delegates at FOSS4G have stories of technical successes – ‘I made X package work with Y library and I hacked at Z to do it’. OSGeo presents the impressive commit figures. Some presentations have shed light on real world challenges which have been solved by toolkits and frameworks of one kind or another. But the bottom line is when the open-source geospatial technology becomes the enabler. For me it is the case studies and real world examples which will underpin the wider adoption of open source geospatial technology. I’ll leave this post with a thought from Paul Ramsey’s plenary  - we are still in the early stages of an evolution rather than some overnight revolution. It would appear we’re not about to be consumed by an open-source geospatial Tsunami. (although at times I look at OpenLayers and wonder)

Why FOSS4G 2009 is a bobby dazzler

This is my first very brief post from FOSS4G 2009 so far it’s been too busy and too good to spend time posting.  However I just watched this and felt all warm – this is choice kiwi geo goodness.

Ignite Spatial in Sydney coming very soon

One thing I’m really looking forward to when I’m in Sydney this year for FOSS4G is Ignite Spatial.  The presenters are now confirmed and I’m pleased to see Cisco representing  ESRI Australia.

I’m also really looking forward to catching up with Rob and hearing more about how Koordinates is going and of course ‘The North Shore Telly Tubby’ himself closes the show – brilliant

I really enjoyed reading Dave’s post the other day about conferences – if you’re not a fan of the old stale conference then first get booked up for FOSS4G and then register for Ignite Spatial.

See you all there. I’ll be the one wearing a red Carnation and heckling from the rear.

Mashing Darling

Mashing up….that’s so 2006 darling….this year you have to be doing it ‘in the cloud’ .

The Government 2.0 Taskforce (think pulled up socks, a sprinkling of  ’2.0′ magic and a whole bunch of semi automatics) are going all mashup on us – watch out!!

The thinking behind this borrows a great deal from a very valuable paper and has a bunch of merit. In fact the taskforce (watch-out!) have just recently been visited by the ubiquitous Mr Parsons (think ex-OS Geo-Daddy, now Google Geo-Daddy).

Anyway despite the trite label the competition looks fun and hopefully yields results. I know that the NZ Geospatial Office tried this a year or so ago, but I’m not sure where the results got the NZ economy or society? If I remember correctly ProjectX won and did their own take on Oakland (sans coolness and crime)

‘Mashing’ up of data is IMO the bread and butter of GIS, however the ’2.0′ phenomena of the past few years has arguably succeeded in placing spatial data on the map (pardon the pun) over the traditional heavyweight GIS approach – no need to start a paleo-neo shit fight here (its boring get over it).

So get your masher out and show the taskforce (watch-out!!) what can be done with a good set of tools and a bunch of data.