AGI 2009 Geocommunity Conference - Mainstream? Not yet.

A good AGI GeoCommunity conference for sure with some thought provoking presentations.  There were lots of familar faces and it was good to catch up over a beer or two.  I was wondering who would be there this year and what the community would consider the burning questions of the age to be...

It wasn't as I had expected.  Steven Feldman, the conference chair, opened the first day with a solid introduction, explaining that the central theme would be 'What' people are doing with GIS, and hoping that over the next year we would be considering more 'Why' questions.  This year's conference would not really consider the 'How' as GIS has now merged with the mainstream, and so presumably then, implementation problems are a thing of the past.  At least that is how I heard it and I must admit that this sentiment does not ring true to me. Not yet.

In my own travels as a Geospatial Solution Architect I haven't noticed GIS implementation challenges lessen very much - sure some of the standards are beginning to take hold but the problem areas of real multi-user concurrent data editing, application interoperability, data integration, data licensing, and GIS within enterprise architecture are still very much significant challenges.  I would have loved to see an implementation stream cover progress in these areas.

The conference was not organised along the lines of the AGI Special Interest Groups which perhaps in itself indicates that we may need to review the topic areas and roles of the SIGs to ensure that they remain relevant to the community. As someone that feels that technical developments are of great interest I enjoyed the Geoweb stream which addressed some relevant (or potentially relevant) technical developments, principally in the area of mashups.  I would love to hear more about developments in data storage, server based services (and issues of scalability and availability), systems and data integration - technical issues relevant to enterprise deployment of GIS capabilities.

The AGI Northern Group has organised a follow up conference (Where2.0Now?) in Harrogate on 10th November on the subject of Web2.0 and disruptive technologies.  The AGI Technical SIG is also in the process of organising a conference for early next year on the subject of Mobile GIS.  I look forward to both of these events and to hear more of the technical developments effecting our industry.

GIS as a member of the mainstream?  Based upon the content and attendance of this conference we can't possibly argue that GIS is mainstream yet.  Sure, many more people use spatial data and technologies daily in the form of SatNav and online web maps but the IT mainstream was not at the conference.  There were no stands from the mainstream IT players such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, FileNet, Google, Informatica, Accenture, Logica, Dell, Sun, Embarcodero, Adobe, etc, etc. in the small exhibit hall.  When we start to see these vendors and integrators showing up in numbers then we will know that GIS has arrived.  I am not so sure what we will all do after that though!

Thanks to the conference organizers.

1Spatial and Snowflake Conferences

In the past couple of weeks I managed to squeeze in the Snowflake GeoxChange conference in Edinburgh and the 1Spatial conference at Stansted. Both conferences turned out to be very good so chairman Peter Woodsford must be doing something right.

Interestingly the INSPIRE initiative featured heavily in both of them, the reason being that this European Spatial Data Infrastructure is an ideal driver for both companies. As public bodies across Europe will be mandated to catalogue and share vast amounts of spatial information in the near future, there will likely be the need to quantify data qualities so enable potential users to assess fitness for purpose (and at the very least not sue the provider); 1Spatial are positioning themselves nicely to provide the ability to do just that.

The company is actively involved in an OGC initiative to define data quality assurance measures for spatial metadata to enable data quality attributes to be reported consistently and its Radius Studio tool provides a means to profile spatial data to divine business rules, report conformance with them, and perform actions to improve data consistency. This looks like a nice niche that will enable data custodians to provide clearer descriptions of their data and assist potential users determine the extent to which it might meet their needs. I think that as practitioners get their head around this concept of spatial data quality auditing there is considerable scope for profiling and improving all those datasets that have come into digital existence in the last 15 years.

Snowflake's tools also look well set to support INSPIRE driven initiatives by enabling the encoding and decoding of spatial data packets in GML format. Given this government's preference for XML centric data exchange standards and even the emergence of Dutch legislation that goes as far as to enshrine GML into law (it's true but unfortunately for some strange reason the GeoXchange presentation that describes this is password protected); Snowflake's tools may have a bright future if they can plug into message backbones to enable the transport of spatial data within the new SDIs.

Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

I attended The Open Group's conference is Glasgow last week and was rather surprised to find that geospatial issues didn't really feature. Given how common geospatial is (i.e. it is of interest to many departments within many organizations); how useful the geospatial dimension is to data integration analysis; and how difficult it still is to provide access to geospatial data and functionality - I had expected it to be a well worn theme but that was not the case last week.

I think this is an exciting time as the discipline of Enterprise Architecture is maturing at the same time as GIS technologies are reaching a point where they can contribute core capabilities to the software infrastructure.

I did provide a brief overview of what geospatial is and how it might fit as a set of enterprise capabilities and the ideas were pretty well received. So on the strength of that I've set up this blog to log my thoughts and ideas on the subject - and just hope that I have some!