Day 2 – AGI 2008 @ Stratford-Upon-Avon

So I survived the 80s party last night and enjoyed some great conversations and debates on Day 2.  As before here are some of the highlights for me…

Charles Kennelly – ESRI

Charles did a bit of a defence of ‘traditional’ GIS.  Although he stated that “Understanding mapping is at a historic high” he made the argument that “…understanding of GIS still lags behind”, saying that the neo-geographers are a “community that does not realise that this [GIS] is hard”.  Of course ESRI can solve these hard problems for you! 

He gave a demo of integration of GIS for Forestry into Outlook – a great idea as outlook is now the main tool many of us use on the desktop these days. 

Stuart Hayes – Defence Geographic Centre

Stuart’s presentation was really interesting.  I liked the idea of “forensic cartography” (i.e. reverse engineering a map to see how it was made with what data).  There were some interesting approaches to data extraction from imagery and LIDAR for areas with little mapping (e.g. Afghanistan).  The best quote was “Every officer now does to war with their own laptop, because they can’t take an MOD laptop out of the office these days”

Johannes Kebeck – Digital Globes

I just caught the end of Johannes’ presentation which generated a great deal of interest in Virtual Earth and the new features released last night.

Day 1 – AGI 2008 @ Stratford-Upon-Avon

I am a the AGI 2008 Conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK.  This is the annual conference for the UK based Association for Geographic Information.

These have been some highlights for me today…

Sean Phelan – Multimap founder

Sean did a great presentation on the history of Multimap and its sale to Microsoft.  The interesting piece of advice was “Understand the economics” or you are doomed.  Sean pointed out that there were very few economists in the GI industry, as compared to say the Telecom industry.  Out of the AGI audience of 600 today there were none!  We are doomed?

Geoff Zeiss – Autodesk

A great presentation on the value of truly 3D models.  My favourite bit was the thought:  “If you show something in 2D, you always have to explain it.  If you show something in 3D  people just get it”.  His example was explaining to a mayor about a new development.

Andrew Hudson-Smith – MapTube (UCL)

Andrew did my favourite presentation today.  It was great sideways look at the 3D modelling work they have done (the Virtual London Project) and MapTube.  The highlight for me was seeing 3D London models within an Xbox 360.  Cool!  My favourite quote was “The world wanted 3D three years ago.  Now Virtual Earth have done it”  And the phonetic tongue in cheek change from London to Phuket after some licensing issues…

Your GIS is Dead…

And I managed to do my “GIS Is Dead” presentation without getting lynched.  Phew…  My slides are on skydrive.