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October 18, 2005
Conference Week
The first of two events I'm attending this week was Irlogi's GIS Ireland 05 which was on today in Croke Park.
If I was to take a single thing from the event it would be that these are indeed very interesting times for the GI industry.
Mike Goodchild of UCSB, who is one of the founding fathers of GIS and the author of a number of seminal works in the field gave a fascinating brief intro to Google Earth.
Key points: Google Earth does some things better than desktop GIS, and there are more people hacking away using the Google Earth API than there are staff working at the major GIS software vendors.
Antoin O'Lachtnain gave a presentation on Postcodes, including best practice and a look at how they do things elsewhere. He was preaching to the converted I think, as most people there would be well aware of the benefits of such a system.
Another highlight for me was the presentation on the generation of 'Small Areas' for statistical reporting by Stewart Fotheringham of the National Centre for Geocomputation in NUI Maynooth (under whose sponsorship Mike Goodchild is spending 8 months here) This was good old fashioned inspiring spatial analysis of the Stan Openshaw variety. Almost rekindled a desire in me to return to PhD-dom (almost, then I remembered the mortgage, creche fees, shopping bill...)
Now here's hoping that Thursday's event is as good
Posted by Richard at October 18, 2005 08:34 PM