Day one of this year’s AGI GeoCommunity conference saw the geoweb track draw a sizeable, if varying, share of the delegate audience; some sessions were crammed tight and reduced to standing room only whilst others had a slightly less cozy but still enthusiastic crowd.
Showing that
Steven Feldman, the conference chair, started as he meant to continue, both the introductory plenaries were from people well known in the neogeography end of the geographic spectrum;
Peter Batty and
Andrew Turner.
Peter started talking about the
Geospatial Revolution and about how geo is now mainstream after starting off life as a disruptive technology. He touched on crowdsourcing, neogeography and how geospatial data is really just another data type.
Due to Steven Feldman’s over running welcome plenary, Andrew gave u
s a view on How Neogeography Killed GIS in record time; talking to an appreciative crowd on place, data, and how neogeographers see GIS professionals (answer: they don’t).
The geoweb track kicked off with Tim Warr, down on the programme as working for Microsoft, announcing “
I’m not working for Microsoft as of yesterday” and then promptly launched into a talk on
Cloud Computing and GIS; All Hype or Something Useful? and covered the
good cloud (accessibility, cost and speed), the
bad cloud (security, control and continuity) and the
realistic cloud where you don’t put all your clouds in one basket.
Terry spoke about
Using FluidDB for Storage and Location Aware Software Apps. If you haven’t come across
FluidDB before, think about it as a wiki database for the web, or as
Terry says “Why don’t our architectures let us work with information more flexibly?“; I strongly advise you look into this further and see what potential this platform has. WOEIDs were mentioned to a somewhat bemused audience but with a nice mention of my talk on this topic later today.
Tom took this one step further and gave a well received and insightful talk on the way Flickr are creating crowd sourced
neighbourhood definitions from geotagged photos, all tagged with WOEIDs naturally. Tom’s
Boundaries microsite shows just how powerful this can be, visualising and displaying neighbourhoods where no official definition exists, such as in London. Tom is a natural evangelist for this sort of data discovery process and caused some wry smiles when he added
“I’m not an employee of Flickr or Yahoo! They haven’t paid me to say this“.
I took part in the
Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy which I’ve blogged about earlier.
The day rounded off with a series of soapbox style
georants; 15 slides, 20 seconds per slide and with the presenters having
no control over the timing. Lots of themes were covered, some serious like Chris Osborne’s ITO World product pitch, some … interesting … like the Pitney Bowes boy’s geojokes, some semi disrespectful like my “
Neo this and
Paleo that … it’s all just
Geo” (which will end up on my
SlideShare account as soon as I find a net connection with some bandwidth) and some just rip roaringly hilarious like
Ian Painter‘s paeon to palegeography which featured
Martin Daly,
Ed Parsons, Darth Vader and Isaac Newton. All of which were received by an increasingly well lubricated crowd from the soapbox arena, also know as the bar.
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.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
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