Development of Spatial Grids and...

The Association for Geographic Information Geocom2017 gathered at the Geographical Society in London late last October. Its Lightning Talks showcased new ideas and businesses. I was invited there to challenge attendees "to think about the development of spatial grids and the structure of spatial data models". The presentation itself and thank-you letter were followed by a short report in GIS Professional scanned here:

AGI #GeoCom16 twitter report

[Update: LinkedIn Pulse post inspired by this: A non-anthropomorphic robotic future]

The AGI’s Annual Conference was held at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS IBG) in London yesterday. Here is a report by way of my twitter feeds, most recent ones first, from #GeoCom16:

Big data and maps reloaded

Social media really work! +Vicky Gallardo posted on Google+ that the map is not the territory, with a wonderful big data map by Ben Allen of Denton TX (near where I used to live). That prompted a post by the same title on my companion map blog. The distinction between data and maps has long kept me up at night (see my blog tagline), and many others to judging by exhibits and media only in London (near where I live now).

Of business and blogging

A few months ago I signed up for Area 51 Satck Exchange for GIS, and it has impressive statistics indeed. Soon after, however, short holidays then family emergencies and continuing oilelefant meant that I hardly participated at all. Nor have I blogged much this month, and that situation will continue... And I missed today's AGI w3g!

The Joy of (con)Text

It's a common geo-rant (thanks AGI'09) that metadata cause alternatively boredom or angst among geo-geeks - why? because we know our data, our professional audience does too, but our wider audience does not. In other words, if we don't write metadata, no-one else will understand the context later on. I found a clear example, when I mapped Captain Cook's ships logs a while ago, and posted on ArcGIS Online beta:

Geocommunity2009

I followed UK's premier GIS meeting hosted this week by AGI in Stratford-upon-Avon UK, on its excellent website and twitter (#geocom and other attendees). You can read there that the debate over FOSS vs. COTS is morphing into GIS vs. neo-geography. But I found the following to be very a-propos for petroleum: Yahoo!Geo Technologies' Gary Gale explains in his blog the importance of a global geographic ontology - that is identifying not only by location, but also by metadata and by topology.