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| Not a bad turnout... |
Yesterday AGI Scotland hosted Future Cities the first of the Geo Big 5
events series and I'm pleased to say that we've got off to a flying start.
Delegate turnout was at pre recession levels, the speakers were fantastic and the
venue was pretty spectacular (thanks to Glasgow City Council for that one).
Both streams had a really solid line up of presentations and the panel debate
in the afternoon was really well received (those can be tricky to pull off).
I spent the day room monitoring in the best practice stream so I will
be getting one of my colleagues to write a summary of that soon. In the
meantime this’ll be a brief round up of the sessions I saw which included some
great pieces of innovation.
The event opened with some very encouraging comments from the head of
Glasgow City Council, showing that the local authority has really understood
the power of GI to improve services for the citizen. However I will let my
colleague cover this more within the context of the future cities stream.
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| The Main Room/Palace |
The morning best practice stream opened with a presentation from the
Forestry Commission Scotland on releasing a Scotland wide dataset on native
woodland. This was quite an ambitious project in scope with the whole of
Scotland surveyed over a period of about six years (some areas surveyed in
greater detail based on aerial imagery). After collecting this huge dataset the
team then overcame a number of challenges to provide this as open public data easily
accessible to non GI users.
This was followed by a very nice presentation/demonstration from Paul
Clarke of Esri on designing the future city. This showed City Engine being used
on a range of projects as well as a general view on what future cities may look
like. Paul also echoed the councillor’s comments about when talking about
future cities it is what we are doing today that will define how they look and
work.
The following presentation on the use of GI to support the Commonwealth
Games in Glasgow gave a very practical demonstration of the challenges a modern
city faces and the tools we have to overcome them.
After lunch the best practice stream kicked off with a really
interesting project from Ross McDonald and Angus Council. They had successfully
evolved their geospatial offering from a truly Byzantine collection of
different platforms, datasets and file types into a much more open focused and
integrated set up. This has allowed them to free up powerful but expensive
proprietary software for users who most need it whilst spreading the power of
spatial much wider across the organisation. Their mantra appropriately is ‘spatial
isn’t special, its core’.
A presentation by ERM showcasing the use of GI for environmental and
social management of major projects was up next. A particularly interesting
feature of this solution is that it is accessible via the web and allows users
(such as local residents) to comment on features of a project.
Last but not least Scottish Water and Kemeling Consulting presented on
an asset visualisation project they have been working on. This project allows
much better visualisation of sections of the Scottish Water network allowing
the double benefit of improved repair efficiency and also improved transparency
with local communities as to why work is being undertaken. The project has so
far informed around £1 million worth of repair work.
An overall theme coming out of this stream, particularly the afternoon
sessions was that the next step for cementing the role of spatial is to be able
to articulate hard financial savings from projects such as these. All the users
know there was benefit and the challenge is to be able to express this
financially, something that is particularly crucial as the use of spacial spreads
into the private sector.
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