[OSM-talk] Trip Report: BCS geospatial special interest group first meet

[SteveC]

I'm still a bit confuddled as to what 'geospatial' actually means, but
the SIG of the BCS
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Computer_Society)
had their first meeting last night at BCS HQ off the Strand in London.
The SIG chair, someone from the RGS
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Geographical_Society)
and someone from the AGI (Association for Geographic
Information) both spoke about what geospatial was (everything :-) and
why joining all the organisations was a good idea, and frankly it seems
you'll meet a lot of inteersting people of you do.

Ed Parsons was the main attraction and he spoke about the OS in the next
few years and where it's going. Overview of the OS, pictures of GPS
units and aircraft similiar to the talk at the society of cartographers.
Noted the shift in the OS from licenseing to 1st tier people (like
people making maps from their data - A-Z, AA maps etc) to tertiary where
tomtom buy data from teleatlas who buy it from the OS. Community data,
bottom up ways of maintenance / aquiring data as the future. Showed the
picture of the IoW data we put up on Sunday morning (!) and subsequently
a bit of the IoW in OS data which Laurence had actually mapped the day
before. Laurence was there and said as such to me, Ed noticed and told
the audience :-)

Showed a mockup video of someone walking down a street asking a computer
for information about buildings / features around them, used voice
recognition, gps, db of places and info, synthesised voice. Computer
also prompted interesting artefacts. All needs to be in your iPod
basically, as Ben keeps saying.

BCS formal business of electing a board for the SIG then wine and
nibbles.

Next meeting is 22nd June in London again, worth going based on what I
saw. There's no group website and no event on the 22nd in their
calandar I can find... Laurence?

have fun,

SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/