Category Archives: Blog Posts

GISRUK 2021: Online II

We had a great GISRUK conference this year. We were online again (as we were in 2020), because of Covid-19, with Scott Orford at Cardiff University hosting, we had a really smooth running online conference. There was a very strong field of submissions, with 24 short papers and 43 long papers being presented, with a… Read More »

Online teaching: More reflections

This blog post is the next in the series on running training sessions during the pandemic. As a recent Rasters Revealed conference there was a great session on running training courses during the pandemic and I thought I would share my experiences. This builds on my previous posts about teaching online and CPD. Since March I… Read More »

PDR and the Pandemic

Our Professional Development Record (PDR) hours—CPD in the UK—are a key part of the surveying and geospatial professions. Previously PDR would have involved a mixture of in-person training, in-person conferences and self-study training materials. With the Covid-19 restrictions on meeting other people face-to-face, meetings are no longer possible, at least in the short term. Online… Read More »

EU-US Privacy Shield: “Shields Failing”

Working with geospatial data in the areas I do mean I have to keep up-to-date with the rules and regulations surrounding use of data. There has been an interesting development recently with the EU – US Privacy Shield framework which (until recent) underpinned many data transfers outside of the EU (including for my freelance work).… Read More »

GISRUK2020: A brave new world

Online conferences are everywhere now – and everything now has online as a prefix. The GISRUK 2020 conference was no exception, and originally scheduled for 21th – 24th April, it was postponed and moved online, to 21st to 23rd July. GISRUK is the largest annual GIS research conference, bringing together academics, researchers and students, as… Read More »

Using QGIS on AWS WorkSpaces

Amazon WorkSpaces are essentially a managed virtual machine (they use the term Desktop-as-a-Service). You can choose Windows or Linux, and they appear to be doing a free offer at the moment. AWS (Amazon Web Services) are a great tool, and very powerful and flexible, but sometimes a bit intimidating. Their help is very good, and… Read More »

The Power of Geospatial Data

Written for the South West Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications and posted at https://sa.catapult.org.uk/south-west/uncategorized/blog-the-power-of-geospatial-data/ .  We use geospatial data every day in our lives, and our work lives are no exception. Any delivery company will use geospatial data to work out which order to deliver packages in, emergency services use a specialised type of sat nav to get to their callouts and many large companies use… Read More »