"They call me the cleaner"

[Update: a mirror article on LinkedIn Pulse expands on historic and business background]

I refer to the character Victor played by Jen Reno in Luc Besson's 1990 film "Nikita".

To teach or not to teach, that is the question

With apologies to The Bard, whilst the internet in general and YouTube in particular are great tools - I use them here and on YouTube myself - there is the danger of posting educational videos uncritically.

"Data and Maps: a simpler Workflow"

[Note: this complements Part III of A Day in the Life of...  ongoing blog post series here]

Simple Feature or Full Feature Specification for OGC?

The issue of how to write-to and read-from geographic databases has been around for quite some time. Esri shapefiles were a runaway success partly because of their open specification. As we moved onto spatial databases, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) offered the simple feature specification (SFS) that all the players could read to or write from. This came in especially handy for consuming web mapping services (those and many other specifications have grown since). But it gets trickier when it comes to reading from and writing to spatial databases generically. By that I mean not from the native application but from others', like with shape files.

"The proof of the pudding is in the making"

The FOSS4G conference early this month in Barcelona raised a host of issues as usual. One picked up by James Fee and Jo Cook's blogs among others, is the role of SpatialLite in particular and exchange file formats in general? My main takeway is Jim's point, that while file exchange formats are important, efforts should be focused on internet exchange formats. We all agree that it's usage eventually that will dictate future formats, rather than vendors or standards bodies...

A tale of two approaches, part II

Things have moved since my previous post: even though ESRI doesn't want to be geodesign, that is high on their agenda in their business partner conference this week. And since where 2.0 among many others hail location services as the next big thing, it's no surprise Wired quotes Jack Dangermond as pushing handhelds for onsite design as I imagine it:

2D or not 2D, part deux

There's a comprehesive move toward fairly generic realtime 3D, beyond the many, many traditional implementations. Satish Pai said at a Schlumberger Forum over five years ago that video gaming consoles would drive 3D visualisation in petroleum. Steve Ballmer recently asked at Microsoft's Global Energy Forum if X-Box might be the next console (below)? Google Earth uses movie industry techniques to speed up visualisation. And military techniques used in seismic visualisation were presented at FindingPetroleum's seminar Advances in Geophysics & Sub-surface Description this week.

Gathering clouds over the horizon...

... intermittent sunshine and showers predicted tomorrow. No this is not a meteo prediction, but a metaphor for opportunities and confusion that cloud computing creates. I see it as a pressure-release valve, where the constant demand to deliver more for less is pushing both sectors, for-profit and not-for-profit.