The Guardian reports:

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April…..Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today…In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data…

Is this too good to be true???  We will have to wait until April to see what this really means.

Perhaps this could be a renaissance for Ordnance Survey and massively increase it relevance to the economy and society?  It will be nice to be looking at more of the UK’s home-grown cartography on the web (rather than the bland cartography from Google and Microsoft).

A video of the announcement is here.

I am using prezi.com for the 1st time, so it is a bit of an adventure…  One issue I have found is you cannot change the tittle (hence “Cloud 1 Text”  arghhhh).

Thanks to John Fagan and Steven Feldman, this year there will be a live event blog on www.geocommunitylive.com which will be aggregating RSS feeds from other bloggers at the event.  It should be fun!

Now I need to finish my presentations…

The AGI Northern Group are organising a great event for November 10th in Harrogate called Where2.0 Now.

I really recommend going to this event, there is an excellent line-up of speakers:

• Chris Osborne - http://www.cloudsourced.com/

• Chris Parker - http://www.geovation.org.uk/

• Craig Moulding- http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/siteinfo/online-services/maps/index.jsp

• Dr Michael Sanderson – www.1spatial.com

• Dr. Andrew Hudson-Smith - http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/

• Dr. Richard Kingston - http://www.ppgis.manchester.ac.uk/

• Ed Parsons - http://www.edparsons.com/

• Gary Gale - http://www.vicchi.org/

• Harry Wood - http://www.harrywood.co.uk/blog/

• Jo Cook - http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/

• John Fagan – www.microsft.com / www.multimap.co.uk

• John McKerrell - http://blog.mapme.at/

• Prof. Henk Scholten - www.geodan.com

• Stuart Harrison - http://www.pezholio.co.uk/

• Tim Warr - http://blog.timwarr.net/

• Tim Waters - http://thinkwhere.wordpress.com/

More info on this event is here and here.

I hope to see you there!

Today I went on a trip back to my old stomping ground, Ordnance Survey, to present at CC:The Exchange Conference on web mapping APIs and innovation.  This time I used a bit of HTML and a series of demos (rather than the death by ppt experience).  It seemed to work out well, apart from Ordnance Survey’s Web Sense filter blocking a community news feed form Iran. 

As promised, to those that asked, here are my simple materials and links to all the examples. 

Soul Solutions have a great blog post on using Azure to store custom image tiles (i.e. with your own data) for overlay on Bing Maps.

A little bit of GIS in the cloud…  Neat…

My slides are here and:

The event is at at the Festspielhaus beside Lake Constance (as featured in the latest James Bond film), which is a cool venue:

At the moment they are setting up a strange broken feet set outside for the next opera:

The odd thing I have noticed at this event is that I am the only one using a laptop in the audience and as a result the WiFi is fast!  Perhaps everyone is a lot more polite than me…

Update

I was pleased to see I had at least 3 people using laptops during my presentation

It is not long until the next UK AGI conference.  In fact the call for papers is closing today (although I imagine it is still possible to submit slightly late…).  It would be great to see some more presentations from the world of web-mapping and light-weight GIS.

There has been a bit of re-branding, so it is now the “AGI’s GeoCommunity conference”.  “GIS” is just so 1990!

As John Fagan says on the Multimap blog:

Not many people are aware on how much the conference has changed in the last 3 years.  Historically it was based on a large Exhibition with a smaller conference format (Birmingham NEC and Earls Court days).  While it was a good format for those days, over the years it did not really deliver anything new or different each year and delegate numbers declined  as it was “same old same old”.  Under the leadership of the current Chairman Steve Feldman, is has been completely overhauled and now the focus is on the conference with a smaller exhibition.   Last year the conference attracted over 600 delegates who participated in more than 50 workshops, presentations and debates.  This year, the conference is taking a further step forward and will unite the traditional GIS industry with the Neogeography geo community with the help of Christopher Osborne the founder of the London based #Geomob meetup group.  You will also see a presence from Microsoft Virtual Earth and to top if of Andrew Turner, a well known Neogeography Evangelist will be the first plenary speaker.  The conference is a two day event in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and at £275 (Member) or £355 (non member) early bird prices which includes accommodation, it’s extremely good value for money.  However if you want to present a paper or workshop, you can get it even cheaper. 

See you there!

A lot of people have been asking me if it was possible to use VE imagery and maps directly in ArcGIS Server (as you already can in ArcMap).  Well the good news is now you can!  This approach incorporates the VE tiles directly (rather than using the ArcGIS JavaScript™ Extension for Microsoft Virtual Earth™)

See http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline/whats_new.html

Happy GISing!