Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I've been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I'd been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?

Held in the hidden conference centre that nestles unassumingly under the Chartered Accountants of Ireland's offices, GIS Ireland ticked all the boxes. The conference team had obviously worked hard to ensure that there was a wide range of topics being discussed and managed to avoid the "same people, same talks, same topics" trap that some conferences fall into. The coffee was hot and plentiful and the wifi (almost) stayed up and running all the time.

The starting point for the talk I have was an article called Today's Mapping Industry Really Does Need To Please All People, All The Time, which I'd written for GPS Business News in September. As there was an article length limit, I couldn't go into the detail I think this topic merited, but a conference talk is a different beast. This is what that article morphed into. This is B2*.

One of the great things about the combination of maps, geo, location and London is that roughly once a month there's some kind of meetup happening in the city on these themes. One of the longer running players in this space is the Geospatial Specialist Group of the British Computer Society which is being relaunched and reinvigorated as the Location Information SG. Earlier this week I gave a talk, but what to talk about?

It didn't take too long to come up with a suitable theme. In my current day job, consulting with open data specialists Lokku, I come across the benefits and the challenges in using open data on almost a daily basis. One of the earliest lessons is that nothing is simple and nothing is straightforwards when you bring licensing into a field and open data is no exception.

My morning's reading today has been dominated by a map image that the UK's Environment Agency released on December 6th that, to quote the Tweet, shows "the extent of potential flooding of London if the Thames Barrier wasn't in place". If you know London at all, it's certainly an arresting image but like so many times when I encounter a map, I want to interact with it, move it, see whether where I live in London would have been impacted. So I started investigating.

Some background context is probably in order. On December 5th. the UK's Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the East Coast of England. A combination of a storm in the Atlantic to the north of Scotland, low atmospheric pressure and high tides were all combining to push a massive swell of water through the narrows of English Channel, in effect squeezing the water through the Dover Strait. As the North Sea and English Channel are relatively shallow, the sea would back up and had the potential to flood large areas of the East Coast of England as well as the areas surrounding the tidal stretch of the River Thames and that means London and possibly even where I live in Teddington, which marks the upper limit of the tidal Thames. Thankfully for those of us who live West of Woolwich, the Thames Barrier exists to protect London from such flooding, though I'm sure this is less of a comfort to those people who live to the East of the barrier.

In January of this year I made a hopeful prediction that 2013 would be the year of the tangible map.

This hope was prompted by the maps I saw at one of London's geomob meetups in November of 2012, where I saw and, importantly for a tangible map, touched Anna Butler's London wall map and a prototype of David Overton's SplashMap.

The hopeful prediction was made as a result of literally getting my hands on one of Anna's London maps and it's a treasured possession, though still sadly needing a suitable frame before it can take pride of place on a wall at home.

But what of SplashMaps? In November 2012 the project was on Kickstarter and I was one of the investors in this most tangible of maps. In December 2012 Splashmaps met their funding targets and went into production and today, through the letterbox came my own, tangible, foldable, scrunchable and almost indestructible SplashMap of my local neighbourhood.

Yesterday, Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Last week's 10,00 ton and 55 feet's worth of meteor that exploded over and hit the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals made several thoughts go through my mind. In this order.

1. I feel for the 1200 people who were hurt and injured
2. Thank goodness it didn't happen where I live
3. With all the asteroids and smaller pieces of rock zooming over our head, this has got to have happened before, hasn't it?

Although I can't find the originator of the saying that there's no delete button for the internet, it's a saying that's very true. If you put something up on a web site, be it a photo, some text or perhaps a file of geographic data there's a very good chance that someone else has a copy, even if you subsequently take the original down. It's a sort of digital whack-a-mole.

This is all too apparent in the story of Yahoo's GeoPlanet Data download. When I was part of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team, we released a public download of the Yahoo! WOEID data set, under the CC BY 3.0 license, in 2009 at Where 2.0. More about that license in a moment.

As Yahoo! continues to undergo change under the leadership of Marissa Meyer, the current data file and all earlier versions were taken offline. Visit the GeoPlanet Data page on Yahoo's Developer Network site and instead of a set of download links, you see "We are currently making the data non-downloadable while we determine a better way to surface the data as a part of the service.".

There's a problem with today's crop of location based mobile services, commonly referred to as LBMS; those little apps which sit on our smartphones and allow us to geotag status updates or photos, find relevant local place information or check-in at a place.

The problem isn't one of privacy or tracking. Nor is the problem one of an LBMS dying and going away. The problem isn't whether I can get a good location fix or whether the results I get are accurate or not. The problem isn't even of the value of the data we, the customer, put into a service and whether we can get it back again.

Looking back at the conference talks I gave and the posts I wrote in 2012, two themes are evident.

The first theme is that while there's some utterly gorgeous digital maps being produced these days, such as Stamen's Watercolor, the vast majority of digital maps can't really be classified as art. Despite the ability to style our own maps with relative ease, such as with Carto and MapBox's TileMill, today's maps tend towards the data rich, factual end of the map spectrum. Compare and contrast a regular digital map, on your phone, on your tablet or on a web site in your laptop's browser with a map such as Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici and you'll see what I mean (and if you don't browse the Norman. B. Leventhal Map Center's Flickr stream you really should).