SORT – Geo-spatial as an organising principle

James Reid from EDINA (presentation available at http://prezi.com/n8ui3umrjxfh/survive-or-thrive/)

Digimap has just had its 10th birthday – a practical exemplar of the efficacy of shared services.

Geo-spatial information has had huge and rapid takeup over recent years. What are the drivers behind this?

  • Grass roots – hacker driven, web 2.0 type approach – informal
  • Top down, governance heavy, standards driven – formal

Technology drivers – increasingly we all have GPS devices (even if we don’t know it)

What is Geospatial? Can be direct – aerial photography, mpas, etc. Also indirect – e.g. location information on Flickr

80% of all organisation information is geographic.

James talking about ‘Unlock‘ (http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/) – a range of tools – e.g. Indirect georeferencing can happen through different routes – places names, parish names, coordinates, postcodes – Unlock allows these to be transparent by translating from one to another. Buidling an infrastructure for geospatial services (think I got that right)

Inspire – European Directive to improve the sharing of geospatial information, and make more accessible to the public – now part of UK law – http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

Inspire applies to universities, and covers aspects such as discovery and licensing as well as just making data available. Inspire covers a wide range of data – especially if you look at Annex III – likely to impact on Universities (looks from the roadmap at http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/44 that this means December 2013 is a date to look at for Annex III)

Things we need to be looking at (from industry ‘Foresight’ study):

  • Augmented reality – forecast to become mainstream in next 5 years
  • Cartography and visualisation – to make sense of the vast amounts of geodata
  • Global
  • Satellite imagery
  • Semantic web
  • Software: Rise of Open Source, realtime 3D, browser as primary UI

Also political and environmental drivers …

Many drivers not specific to Geospatial

Inspire is a ‘stick’ although also a ‘carrot’.

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