Welcome to new friends

[Update: read here my  new occupation following this]

A fond farewell to two old friends explained my transition to open source platforms. As announced in LinkedIn You can get Andrew out of the geo... (... but you can't get the geo out of Andrew) "Terry Jackson pulled me back in to the publishing business as a data wrangler". What does that mean?

Arctic wrap-up as a story-map

Update 1: Story Map of same Northwest Passage: maps and words
Update 2: video of same Arctic Sea Ice Summer 1979–2018
Update 3: follow on story map on onshore aspects: Fire & Ice — Arctic past & future climes

Update 4: lovely Scott Polar Research Institute entrance foyer frescoes of same at the bottom

Following my previous posts on geo-awareness and transitioning platforms, I repost here this story map that wraps together the story for the Arctic region on Esri platform. You will find at its end a link to the course that cover both poles on Esri and QGIS as complete exercises in polar mapping.

GIS education & awareness

[Update: another way to make it all more accessible, is to wrap-up the Arctic data as a story-map.]

There is a patent need to better explain all things geospatial to us as geo professionals as well as to the public addressed here.

"Qui peut le plus, peut le moins" or "Horses for courses"

These quips mean that, while we may have great tools for complex workflows, such as Mapping Well Data I'll present as AAPG Visiting Geoscientist in Hungary next month, sometimes it's better to pare it down to its simplest form, such as for a friend "looking to map addresses to [a French geographic subdivision]".

Andrew's GIS Platforms reloaded

A GIS group discussion prompted me to update this list of selected desktop & web platforms by delivery and cost - note that it excludes commercially serviced FOSS, as well as web & mobile apps - and the usual caveats apply, see details on last page.

A tale of two cities, or Bauhaus for maps

I attended two shows back-to-back in London yesterday. Esri(UK) Annual Conference was daytime at the QE2 Centre in Westminster a stone's throw from the Parliament. London Geomob was that evening in Shoreditch, the swanky London digital hub where Ordnance Survey just opened the Geovation Hub.

If the 20 min tube ride in between might have been through a wormhole, such was the contrast, both meetups strove to do the same thing, substituting maps for arts as the Bauhaus movement: "founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together".

The power of context, Part II

In preparation for tomorrow's TEDxOilSpill meet-up in Cambridge UK, let me highlight two among the many, many postings on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (I also wrote about here and here).

Show me the money

That was my response to Peter Batty's call for comment on his GITA panel this week:

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.