Slashgeo site closing

This is very very sad.  I loved being able to just check one rss feed and get an overview of geo stories.  I’m not a geospatial professional, and probably never will be, but as a developer and researcher working in the field, this was an invaluable resource for me, and one that I checked daily.

So long, and thanks.

Piping hot

So I made my first yahoo pipe! It collates sensor web search results and hits from del.icio.us tagged with sensor web. It still needs a bit of work – I’d like to fetch rss feeds from some of the geo-bloggers out there. Anyway, here is….. my Sensor Web Pipe.

Discovering concept mapping and other cool tools

We are now having regular research sessions, and our group this year is going to concentrate on sensor discovery. So we started by concept mapping what we understand by the term sensor discovery, and it was really interesting. Concept maps are a kind of richer mind map, and seem to be very useful for structuring ideas for research and for encouraging clear and creative thinking. We are using a software product called CmapTools to do the concept mapping, and their web site is fantastic. The tool seems to be really good, and very well set up for building collaborative concept maps. We shall be setting up a concept maps server on our development server to facilitate using this more.

I particularly liked this article on the theory underlying concept maps. It discusses some learning theory that I found really interesting, particularly some stuff about meaningful vs rote learning. Cognitive studies fascinate me, although I haven’t looked into it much – but I do think that many of us learn quite inefficiently, and that most conventional schooling systems and teacher training methods do nothing to facilitate really effective learning.

I’m also going to give Voo2do another bash. This is an online scheduling tool allowing you store tasks in projects and different context and presents quite a nice interface for managing your task lists.

W00t! The book is coming!

So our paper will appear in this book, soon.

Check it out: The Geospatial Web: How Geo-Browsers, Social Software and the Web 2,0 are Shaping the Network Society

What I did

This post is purely for my own selfish administrative reasons. We are shortly having a team meeting, and we all need to report on “What I did this year” :}. So here goes:

Started in June 2006

• Conceptualized and started the process of building the Corridor Sensor Web, a demo sensor web that is supposed to help showcase the OGC SWE services, and our work in integrating them into a working system.
  • Set up a partnership with Wavetrend, a company specializing in active RFID tags and readers. They are supplying us with temperature sensing tags and readers for the corridor at a reduced rate in return for being listed as our technology partners on whatever literature / publicity we produce.
  • This project was supposed to be completed last year, but we have now made it a student project, as I have other thing to work on. I have effectively stopped all involvement in the project and it is now worked on one day a week by a student.
• Nailed down how to install Tomcat on a gentoo linux machine, and how to install and deploy the 52North SWE services (specifically SOS, SAS, WNS) on it. Also worked on installing the software on Ubuntu boxes. Since the 52North services are tested on Windows, some of the installation steps didn’t work so well on the linux boxes, and I had to change some of their build scripts.
• Written a DBFeeder in the 52North framework, and in the process learned quite a lot about how the framework works.
• Assisted in setting up the “Nyenda Web” – a proof of concept sensor web for some engineers involved in transport services.
• Learned a lot about gentoo! – but not enough to run my PC like a pro .
• Written the Terra Cognita paper with a couple of colleagues – this has now been accepted as a book chapter for an upcoming book.
• Done nowhere near enough work mentoring our interns
• Been slightly involved in modelling our SA weather stations in Sensor ML
• Worked on the OXFramework, a desktop client by 52North for visualization of some of the OGC services
  • This was in the context of the AFIS 2 project – we are moving an existing national fire alerting system to be completely open-source and web service based
  • I have contributed some code into the main project to ensure that the web services are accessed in different threads and that the user experience is enhanced.
  • It’s been nice to use Java 1.5 – I haven’t really worked with java since 2004,so nice to update my skills a bit.
• For some months, I organised, ran and minuted our weekly team meetings. I’m quite good at this, but apparently shouldn’t be doing admin – so I had to stop.  Unfortunately, so too have the weekly meetings.

What I would like to do in the coming months:

• Kill the AFIS 2 system – get it working, demo it, bin the bugger. I’m bored silly with deploying web services.
• I’d like to work on getting the Google Maps demo working – again, this is a student project at the moment, and they are doing great stuff – this is a project to visualise where the fires have been and what the weather is across South Africa
• Review the possibilities available for GIS clients, desktop vs. browser etc. I’d like to make this a publication, even if it only ends up being an internal one – I doubt this kind of technology / literature review is of major interest to any international journals.
• Do a proper roadmap for the AFIS project
• Actually read some research papers!

I’ll edit this post a little later and link to all the relevant concepts – right now this is just a memory aid for me.