From the 16th April to 18th April I attended GISRUK in a surprisingly sunny Glasgow. The started with a welcome from Jane Drummond followed by an interesting key-note talk from Mike Worboys , A Theoretician’s eye view of GIS Research. He talked about how GISRUK has developed there has been a dramatic fall in the proportion of papers that covered the theoretical side of GIS, with the focus now being on Application.
Talks from the first day that I particularly enjoyed focused on Spacebook, a system of delivering directions via audio as users encountered various way points on a route. William Mackaness talked about his research in comparing directions given using street names and direction given using landmarks.
Phil Bartie, who was a researcher on William Mackness’s paper delved deeper into the issue of Landmarks. Using images he looked at what people identified as landmarks and then analysed them semantically and spatially to distinguish related and unrelated features.
The following day saw me presenting a talk on some of the sensor infrastructure work we’ve done at Newcastle using HStore as a key-value based approach to storing heterogeneous data. Robin Lovelace’s talk round the merits of twitter data in research. Sparking some interesting debate about how research using twitter data uses data from the public so should benefit the public.
Thursday evening then featured the conference dinner followed by the Céilidh, an event that I was secretly dreading, dancer I am not. So was pleasantly surprised at how much fun the event was, as someone pointed out to me; it’s dancing but dancing with an algorithm.
Friday morning then featured my favorite talk of the conference with Paul Brindley talking about his Phd work on extracting the additional address information from addresse listed on the internet to map out neighborhoods. A simple idea but with fascinating results.
The conference was then wrapped up with a keynote from Professor Alias Abdul Rahman who gave an interesting overview on the state of 3D GIS work.
The event was a fun filled thought provoking and thoroughly interesting. Thanks must go to Jane Drummond for seamlessly organizing the event, even managing the weather. I would also like to thank William Mackness who brilliantly chaired my session.
Bring on Leeds 2015. Wonder what there version of Céilidh will be?
Neil – @neil_py_harris
