Education

AGI Geocommunity 2008 — Day 1 and 1/2

There were several interesting presentations on Day 1 and Day 2 of the event and interesting people who I ran into into walking the halls including Mike Turnill, manager server technologies, EMEA for ORACLE. We discussed several implementations of ORACLE technologies across Europe. Turnill explained the ongoing shift toward ORACLE 11g for many organisations and how people are increasing demand for higher performance from server technologies was being central to most installations - speed and security. Integration was a common theme in most of the applications he spoke about.

Andy Wells of Infoterra-Global described that the new lidar data for London that is being offered with 12 points per metre. The company now offers data for 8 cities in the UK at 4 points per metre with central being districts having 8 point per metre data. Wells also explained the shift in the company growth to include more services, capitalising on the wealth of data held within the organisation - 100 Terabytes of data online.

Muki Haklay, Senior Lecturer in GIS at University College London spoke on the topic 'Usability and GIS - and why your boss should buy you a bigger monitor'. He won a Best Paper Award for his presentation which indicated the factors contributing to best and worst use of space on the desktop. But the take-home point pointed to the fact that computer monitors usually have 96 dpi resolution whereas print is 1200 dpi or so. Thus, to achieve higher usable space meant going larger - monitor wise. In fact, a few years ago I can remember reading papers that indicated dual monitors resulted in 20% increases in efficiency.

Charlie Pattinson, head of resources and information, Environment Agency, UK gave a keynote address which summarised that organisation's activities. Using the recent 2007 flooding incident in the UK he pointed out the need for quick mapping due to the severity of the flooding and values at risk. "We often do not have lots of time to have meetings and to design products and services, but must work to produce final output within 24-48 hours in many cases," he said. Pattinson showed a map that identifed the flooding problem in the future, one where most of the country will likely be impacted. "The problem is going to get worse, not better."

'GIS Beyond Barriers' was the title of a keynote presentation by Charles Kennelly, CTO of ESRI(UK). "Most of the traditional barriers are gone," he said. "The barriers now are often related to the fact that we are only scratching the surface". He see's the need to turn our attention toward more potential. "GIS must be relevant and accessible."

Stuart Haynes, director of the Defence Geographic Centre who provide maps "from the Prime MInister to the soldier". He described the two major doctrines within the agency including a) Comprehensive - involving terrorism and intelligence and b) Effects Based Operations - which basically provide all the information related to entering a situation along with exit strategies once leaving.  Haynes showed pictures of Prince Harry sitting before computers full of maps in the Middle East recently.

Richard Kaufholz, a GIS specialist with Infotech Europe presented on the topic of 'Measuring ROI within Organisations'  and provided an outline of recent research from a operation and a table of savings which ran into the hundreds of GBP."Estimating business change processes requires business people be involved," he said.

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