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OSM Slides At AGI North.

Yesterday for the AGI Northern Group I talked about OpenStreetMap, with a focus on how to use, contribute. About the tools, services and people that surround the project. There were two talks, an OSM talk and a MapAction talk. We had a good turn out.

It touched upon the new Ordnance Survey OpenData and it’s impact on OSM, and how we may change the way map in the UK, and then I talked about Haiti too – how what we did “changed disaster response forever” – but only briefly as Anne-Marie Frankland from MapAction gave a great presentation about her work in Haiti, she was one of the first to deploy to the area. Really astonishing and inspiring work they did over there. Hope to be able to see those slides later.

In case you were wondering, MapAction send volunteers out at the very early days of a crisis to provide mapping support and services to responders. During Haiti they produced maps, installed data on GPS devices, trained search and rescue teams how to use them, produced search and rescue sector maps, locational awareness maps, helped identify locations for camps, and a whole host of other things, with not much sleep.

My slides can be found here: http://geothings.net/presentations/osm_agi_north_april2010.ppt

and also at slideshare.net and below

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Where2Now Conference – 10th Nov. Harrogate

Make a date for your diaries, 10th November is the Where2Now Conference in Harrogate. It’s being run by the AGI North Group. It will be well worth going to. There’s loads of excellent speakers and geo-luminaries (from such places as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft / Bing, Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap etc) lined up:

Keep your eyes peeled for ticket info. In the meantime there’s a linkedIn events page.

I’ll also be speaking: about Open Historical Maps & the MapWarper project and it’s application to the New York Public Library – here are some slides about it for a taster.

The AGI North Group runs free monthly presentations across the North. I’ve blogged about some here (Service & Suppliers), here (NHS Health & DMA) and here (OSM).  Last week we were rewarded with an excellent presentation by Dr. Alun Junes about UKMap – the product that seeks to beat Ordnance Survey’s hold on the country.

AGI North Facebook group and the main group pages within the AGI website.

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GI Market in the UK

It’s going down the pan, the experts say, the market is shrinking but it really is the time for LBS! At a recent meeting of the newly formed AGI North Special Interest Group, in Leeds, Andy Wells from Inforterra spoke about the Service and  Suppliers SIG, and focused on the report they commisioned on the UK Geographic Industry.

The full report by Andy Coote costs membership of the AGI + the group, but the summary was published (possibly here?). Some highlights from the talk:

  • External drivers: Recession – cost reduction. Regulation. Enterprise computing. GI awareness – “google maps paradigm”
  • Tech drivers: Web2.0, sas, oss, crowdsource, ubiqitous
  • Commercial sector: land & property: huge area. But, halt in construction work. expect 50% less income. Insurance: more use for risk management (assoc. with climate change). Transport, tied in with fuel and logistics
  • Central govt: lack of direction. defence ok for operational stuff. uncertainty re: INSPIRE & transformational govt.
  • Local govt: Market is very tough. Reoganisations. No e-govt monies left. Problem with software licenses using only a fraction of capabilities.
  • LBS: GROWTH. Pointers = teleatlast, navtaq. Future, 3D real worlds in games. Venture capitalists entering mkt.

Growth preditctions:

  • Government: 0-5 %
  • Utilities: 5-10%
  • Commercial: 10-15%
  • Consumer (LBS): >100%

The service and systems group also served to fufil some other roles, market assessment, informal networking, sharing of tendering processes, and the aim to grow geographic capacity as a whole. They are collating a vendor neutral database of case studies of the use of GI, which should be of benefit to all.