The last two days have been spent at the AGI Conference in Stratford Upon Avon.
Its been a Neogeography and Web 2.0 dominated conference with a number of talks that while interesting have been worrying for their basic level of explanation – do people in the GIS industry really need to be told what KML or Web 2.0 is? Surely rather than a slightly ‘jack and jane’ view the emphasis should be on applications, techniques and experiences.
Perhaps it was just me but I found the general level of understanding disappointing. Or perhaps I just assume people in the GI industry should know this stuff as its at the heart of the GI revolution. Then again it could simply be a lack of coffee this morning and being too close to the subject. That said i did come away slightly saddened by it all…
Anyhow that aside there was an interesting talk on ‘The Ripening of Digital Globes – From Earth Viewing to Decision Support’ by Johannes Kebeck of Microsoft. In short there is a close tie up between ESRI and Virtual Earth with the main point being that Virtual Earth is merely a ‘viewer’ for information, all the tech stuff still needs a GIS behind the scenes. Of course this is mainly common sense, perhaps of more interesting was the comment that Microsoft are in the Virtual Earth game purely for the advertising revenue that if realized could surpass the income of the Windows operating system.
Of course perhaps that’s common sense as well, we know Microsoft and Google are not in the field for their shear love of geography. They have however changed the game and opened up the sharing of geographical information to the masses, which can only be a good thing…
See edparsons.com for a few more thoughts on the conference as well as the All Points Blog.
You can read our papers on Neogeography, Crowd Sourcing etc via our publications page.
Also note our session call for abstracts with regards the AAG conference on Concepts, Tools and Applications: The Rise of Neogeography