GeoCommunity ’09 – Bridging the Gap between the GIS and Neogeo Worlds?

Posted on 7th September 2009 by Gary

It’s probably an oversimplification of a complex issue but geographic conferences or events can be somewhat polarised towards one of two extremes. On the one hand you have the solid, slightly reassuring and established GIS world whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community. These two worlds don’t always co-exist particularly well and each can be equally distrustful of the other. Where 2.0 in the US tries valiantly to get these two worlds to talk to one another and to share a stage but it doesn’t always work well; the GIS community brandish their desktop GIS system while the neogeo hackers point to their PHP based web mashups.

But this year in Stratford-upon-Avon something brave, intriguing and altogether worthwhile is happening; both communities are being represented at the AGI’s GeoCommunity ’09 conference, which takes place in a little over two and half weeks time. Yes, there’s GIS practitioners and yes, there’s neogeo developers but there’s also speakers covering all points inbetween; just take a look at the PDF of programme for this year. Even the tag line for the conference, Realising the Value of Place, places emphasis on the meeting of the geo-worlds.
AGI GeoCommunity ’09 – ‘Realising the Value of Place’
September 23rd – 24th 2009, Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK
True, the big names and the big players of the overall geo community are well represented; Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Ordnance Survey and I’m fortunate enough to be representing Yahoo! Geo Technologies on the second day but take a closer look. John McKerrell of mapme.at is speaking, so’s Andy Allan on OpenCycleMap, Tom Taylor is talking about neighbourhood boundaries and Terry Jones will be making us all location aware by using FluidDB, plus keynotes from Andrew Turner and from Peter Batty.
This is a staggering and diverse cross section of the entire geo-community and Steven Feldman, this year’s conference chair and Chris Osborne, from London’s #geomob, is behind the geoweb track of sessions, deserve recognition for being able to bring this all together; you can find out more at Steven’s and  Chris’s respective blogs.
It’s going to be a geo-tastic conference and I’m looking forward to seeing the usual geo-suspects as well as meeting new friends and colleagues; see you all there.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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One Response to GeoCommunity ’09 – Bridging the Gap between the GIS and Neogeo Worlds?

  1. Christopher Osborne says:
    September 7, 2009 at 2:15 PM

    “whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community.”

    you have captured our essence perfectly