AGI Conference 2007
I’ve spent the last couple of days in Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, and home to the AGI Conference 2007. It’s been interesting, the organisers clearly worked hard to get a varied agenda…the impact of Neogeography on old skool GI seems to have generated the most discussion.
Vanessa Lawrence delivered an engaging keynote speech and noted the impact of the recently published ‘Power of Information’ report authored by Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo. Apparently, on publication it went straight to Downing Street and was read cover to cover, as a consequence the OS will act on one of the report’s recommendations and release their web mapping API ‘OpenSpaces’ in time for Christmas. Good Stuff.
Chris Parker (Head of OS research labs) also gave an inviting talk and considered the inevitable tighter integration between social networking API’s (e.g. Facebook) and web mapping API’s. With this is mind, it was interesting to speak with Widr co-founder John Abbott. Widr is compiling a database of geocoded wireless networks and provides a free API that web developers can use to tailor content to the end users geographic location. With Internet TV gaining ever more momentum I think there is real opportunity for Widr. I suspect critical to the success of Widr will be building a community of users, and to this end they have an application for facebook in the pipeline.
Nick Black of ZXV Ltd presented a compelling pitch for OpenStreetmap, and flagged up an academic paper by Yale economist Yochai Benkler titled Coase’s Penguin. In the paper Benkler discusses the merits of the much in vogue ‘commons-based peer-production’ (crowdsourcing).
Did you attend?
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Alan
‘the organisers clearly worked hard to get a varied agenda’
As a member of the AGI team, and hence one of the organisers, I can endorse this comment. We did work hard and we did deliberately seek a wide agenda.
I am glad that you found the conference interesting. We are pleased at the way it went. The venue, the presentations, the debates, the networking – and the party. All generally went well. We will review the feedback and hopefully use the comments to help us deliver an even better conference in 2008.
Sep 21st, 2007
Sam
A definite improvement on the format of recent years I feel. Of particular interest was Andy Coote and Keith Wishart’s talk regarding quantifying the business case for GI services. As we heard, this isn’t always easy! An open and centralised resource able to provide a forum for the industry to publish useful case studies of good cost/benefit analysis as advocated by Andy and Keith could only be of wider benefit to the geocommunity.
Sep 24th, 2007
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