No such thing as a free lunch

To great press and technocrati fanfare, the UK Ordnance Survey freed up its data... somewhat! This was promptly announced on mapperz and Ernest Maples blogs. And commented on as far away as the US west coast by Ed Parsons and Geoff Zeiss currently in America - does location matter?

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.

Another take on climate change

[ 2021 update: full twitter thread why "plume push" theory may be flawed

  2010 update: See follow-on Part II here ]

If the 8.8 magnitude Chilean quake may have shortened days by an infenitisimal amount late last month, it highlights the lesser-know fact that the earth wobbles on it axis, and that mass plate-tectonic movements are the result as well as the cause of earth tremors along plate boundaries below (may need to install Google Earth plug-in as indicated).

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.

The stunning beauty of maps

Current affairs bring such beauty on the web in the form of maps! The exhilerating is what makes the news, and that can be both joyful and sad.

Rebranding Conferences - Part II

The Finding Petroleum (FP) January Conference at Inmarsat in London was the first topic on rebranding conferences. Yesterday's Forum on collaborative technologies at the Geological Society, London was a second type of offering. According to FP founder David Bamford, forums are:

Standards & Metadata - Part VII

Facebook/twitter diary excerpt from an information manager:

Vast majority of information is not held on computers but in people's heads
If Information is Communication, then what is Metadata?
Monday E&P IM mantra: METADATA. METADATA. METADATA
Data, data everywhere. Hidden. [...] High value. Low awareness
Would like to take a broom to the data management techniques used

Web 2.0 in action

The recent announcement of data.gov.uk under none other than Tim Berners-Lee is a great step towards freeing UK data to the public - I won't reiterate the arguments going back and forth between for-free (tax-paid) and for-fee (cost recovery) - and such availability has raised eyebrows even in the land of the free - namely, how useful is it to the end-user ranging from guv contractor, thru spatial business to end-users, perhaps in decreasing order of patience &/or savvy?

Rebranding conferences

Last week I presented at the PPDM London User Group Meeting, and the week prior at Finding Petroleum's (FP) January Conference.