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March 25, 2009
GIS Field Skills week: your chance to join in
GIS Field Skills week in the Lake District
April 24th- May 1st 2009
Content
This one week GIS field skills course is a part of the Geographic Information Technologies and Applications module taught by the giCentre to Masters level students. It is a residential field course based at Coniston in the English Lake District National Park which emphasises the development of practical GIS skills by participants. The learning is structured around the following three projects:
Project 1: Rural and village geodemographics (led by Jonathan Raper)
Relates digital geodemographic profiles to local field observations using mobile GIS tools based on ESRI ArcPad GIS (Coniston village area).
Project 2: Assessment of terrain model accuracy and fidelity (led by David Mountain)
Comparison of terrain models from various sources and scales with field observations and measurements. Exploration of scale dependencies and limitations of terrain model characterisation using Landserf GIS (Coniston fells area).
Project 3: Remote Sensing, groundtruthing and environmental modelling (led by Jason Dykes)
Processing of remotely sensed images, assessment of landcover classification quality and environmental modelling for land resources assessment using PixelEx remote sensing software (Coniston fells area).
Each project is concluded with a presentation to lecturers and other students showing the results of the fieldwork with detailed discussion and feedback on the outcomes.
Advantages of participation
At the end of the Masterclass, the take-away advantages for attendees will include:
Who should attend?
There is space on this field course for 5 additional participants who are looking to enhance their GIS skills and to develop their understanding of geographic information science methods in practice. It is suitable for those with a basic understanding of GIS to develop their skills with hands-on experience and intensive tuition from the teaching staff. The Masterclasses will be eligible for continuing professional development credit, though the work will not be assessed unless participants want to opt in to module study by registering for the full module. It will be possible to upgrade attendance on the field course to module study by completion of additional self-study practical GIS tasks at extra cost, to be completed by May 11th 2009. Registered module students have access to City University labs, software and staff to complete this work, including the module learning materials on the City Virtual Learning Environment 'CitySpace', which is accessible on and off-site.
Who teaches the courses?
These one-day courses are led by giCentre staff Professor Jonathan Raper, Dr David Mountain and Dr Jason Dykes. The field course will be a mixture of lectures, demonstrations, practical work and seminars and will offer all participants hands-on experience with GIS. Participants will receive digital and paper copies of the course materials.
Pricing and registration
£395 per person half board for the field course. Upgrade to module study for an extra £100 for a total of £495.
Places on the Masterclasses can be booked through Mark Firman on 020 7040 8435 or via email on mfirman@soi.city.ac.uk.
Enquiries about the Masterclass can be made to Professor Jonathan Raper on 020 7040 8415 or by email to raper@soi.city.ac.uk.
Posted by raper at 10:36 AM
March 18, 2009
Next generation of LBS growth will come from geoweb feeds
Location Based Services continue to develop commercially despite the Credit Crunch. Why? The trite answer is that LBS offer users exceptional value to users... the 800 'location' applications in the iPhone App Store would be one piece of evidence for that. There is also continued innovation in LBS that is bringing new solutions to the market, for example, lastminute.com's NRU augmented reality application on Android. However, I think there is another current and compelling force that is driving LBS... one that has not been sufficiently acknowledged... and that is the explosion of data sources for LBS. The rapid growth of availability of data sources for LBS is re-balancing the early technical development of LBS, complementing the early concentration on software functionality.
Relatively few of the early commercial LBS were data-rich, with location-based social networking, mobile search and mobile gaming being examples of services that generated their own data. Those LBS that were based on data were not new services, but mobilisations of existing applications, notably navigation systems like satnav. There have been some distinguished exceptions to this rule like Viewranger, Zillow and Camineo (full disclosure: City University is a shareholder in Camineo). However, these innovative services have all had to build their own platforms like Where and Spime have done in order to launch services with data.
However, new data rich LBS are now emerging rapidly due to the availability of new location-enhanced platforms like Android and iPhone, and upgrades to the established mobile platforms like the forthcoming Windows Mobile Silverlight platform with a new location interface. We are also seeing new location-enhanced browsers like Mozilla's Fennec for mobile which will be able to read device location and access web feeds based on GeoRSS and mapping services like Google Maps.
The reason that geoweb feeds will become a major driver for LBS growth is because it will lower the bar for the syndication of geospatial content, and there are a huge number of potential providers who are ready to open access to their data in this way if the audience shows an appetite for the content. We can expect to see newspapers, transport providers and government agencies all developing location-based access to their content in this way: see London Transport's web feeds, for example. As we see geoweb feeds launched by major organisations we are likely to see 'network-effect growth', where the low cost of setting up the feeds and easy access through the mobile browser means both supply and demand grow at compound rates. So: just when you think LBS is growing as fast as it can do and the credit crunch might slow it down, the latent potential of data previously too expensive to mobilise might well emerge to power even faster growth.
Jonathan Raper
Posted by raper at 11:37 AM