Unfortunately with two events in one week and the awards write up this
review has been pushed back a little bit. Still I think the last Showcase event
of the year is definitely worthy of the last review of the year.
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| Setting Up |
The latest showcase event saw the AGI team travelling down to the
SWALEC Stadium in Cardiff (which had very helpful staff and top notch cakes).
Arriving bright and early after a very sensible pub dinner the night before we
were soon set up alongside the 14 sponsors and ready for the delegates to
arrive. The conference was well attended with the majority of delegates coming
in a flurry of last minute booking (apparently this is normal for the Cymru
event but is rather unnerving when you’re new).
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| And so it begins... |
Anyway the conference soon got underway with opening statements from
the AGI Cymru chair and keynotes from Ordnance Survey and Natural Resources
Wales (NRW). Vanessa’s talk on building a geographic partnership with Wales was
particularly interesting given the relatively recent change in the GI landscape
in Wales resulting from the creation of NRW. Dr Roberts from NRW own talk was
an interesting look at how evidence is used within an ecosystem approach to
natural resource management.
After the break I was forced to flip a coin to choose between the two
streams as both contained talks I was really keen to see. Anyway it came up
tails and I duly trotted up the stairs to stream two. Stream two started with a
presentation on ‘Delivering High
Performance Open Source Based Spatial Data Infrastructures’ which was a client case study example.
Unusually for a client case study however this was quite frank about the
limitations and lessons learnt from the project which helped to make it
interesting. Following this was a very speedy and succinct update on INSPIRE in
Wales provided by Bill Oates. Finally the stream ended with ‘New
Technologies for Visualizing Data in the Coastal Zone’ presented by Nicholas
Holden. This presentation consisted of a passionate case for 3D and improved visualisation
followed by a comprehensive demonstration of the capabilities of the technology
including a seamless 3D dataset of all of SW England.
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| Sponsor Chat |
After lunch (which as
mentioned above was very tasty) we had the lightening talks. Unfortunately the
audience started to thin after lunch; possibly due to travel times, it being
December or a perception that the lightening talks were not as valuable. If it
was for the third reason then people missed out, limiting people to six minutes
really brings out the best in the presenter and we saw six great talks
including two very different takes on good cartography tips. This was a really
good format for waking people up after lunch and could perhaps be used as a bit
of a morning icebreaker in the future. This was followed up by a discussion
session on the challenges facing GI which I will not report in detail here as
it will form the basis of a rant (ahem) informed observation on next week’s
blog, not about the session but about one of the issues raised.
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| Discussion Time |
The event ended with the afternoon plenary on the FishMap Mon project.
This is an ambitious project gathering both quantitative environmental data on
the seabed ecosystem and qualitative data on the activities of recreational and
commercial fishermen around Anglesey. All this data has been overlaid to create
a map of fishing type and intensity compared to the vulnerability of the sea
bed ecosystem. The resulting data allows for better understanding and management
of fishing activity in the region.
This brought the event and indeed the 2013 Showcase series to a close.
Fear not we will be back in 2014 with another programme of events (bigger and
better). In the meantime keep an eye on the AGI website for SIG events,
Geodrinks and more.
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