Mapping Hacks

This past week, I had the distinct honor of giving a keynote presentation
for the Kartrevolusjonen (’map revolution’) track at SOFTWARE
2006, Norway’s premier IT conference, held annually in Oslo. The mapping
track is a new one for the conference this year, which, I think, reflects the
way in which mapping and GIS have started to creep into many different facets
of computing technology. The day after the conference, I had the opportunity to
give the same presentation to students from Gunnar Misund’s Project OneMap at Østfold University College in Halden.

The talk, entitled The Democratization of Cartography, seemed to be
fairly well received, so I thought I’d share the slides from the presentation here, in case
anyone was interested. I also want to publically thank Dr. Misund, as well as
David Skogan, and the rest of the conference program committee for inviting me
out to speak.

As an aside, the slide in the talk about the Norwegian Red Cross Mountain
Rescue team losing its digital maps due to commercialization moves by the
national mapping agency is taken mostly from this
news story from NRK. (Thanks, BTW, to Petter Reinholdtsen for locating that
citation, and for translating it, to boot.) Rumor has it that Statens Kartverk
subsequently heard about this through the news media, and made special
arrangements with the Red Cross to provide them with the needed maps of remote
areas. However, that doesn’t help anyone else in Norway who might need those
maps, or other maps like them, so I think the basic point still stands.

Posted in talks |

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