Mapping Hacks

A couple of weeks ago i greatly enjoyed attending and presenting at the Public Access to Maps/Data session of the Society of Cartographers‘ summer school.

Richard Fairhurst gave a particularly moving talk about how Waterscape had moved from a 2million pound, proprietary GIS package to a free, Flash-based one written in his free time, which actually worked better.

Ed Parsons from the Ordnance Survey spoke, roughly, on the subject of how the OS’s policy of charging users for access to public information, was justified in order to recoup the massive expenditure that the OS have made on viably unnecessary, easily outsourceable techno-toys.

Roger Longhorn, the policy expert, mentioned recent development-oriented efforts which are aiming at the encouragement of open access to geodata. Steve Coast spoke on the encouraging progress with OpenStreetmap and the new challenges faced in the recent past and future. Peter Cridland from Barnet council GIS showed off their new, more public facing autodesk based geodata access applications.

Slides from the conference are available. It was good to be among a small crowd all sharing a lot of principles. I banged on about the Open Geodata Manifesto, which almost 400 people have now signed on to support.

Posted in data |

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