The Linking Open Data dataset cloud by Fenng

Exciting news for UK data this week as the new UK data website, www.data.gov.uk, had its official launch. It’s been in beta for a while but is now fully functional and open for business, providing access to a range of datasets. Importantly, as well as the more traditional download of files in formats such as Comma Seperated Variable (csv) text files, the site promises to provide information in the form of Linked Data. This is a massive advance towards the semantic web with data freely available to be used and reused by all manner of web apps, promising virtually limitless potential; graphed, mapped, and mashed up in a myriad of ways.

This news follows hot on the heels of the consultation document on the future of Ordnance Survey data which promises to make more high quality map resources far more widely available. So in addition to having access to government data such as crime, education and health statistics, we will soon (assuming the consultation goes the way it ought to) have access to basemaps to plot it all on and administrative area boundaries to analyse by.

» Continue reading “heritage.data.gov.uk …?”

A talk given earlier this year at Strode College based largely on a talk given earlier this year at the IfA conference. The main aim was to show the students some of the ways in which technology is used in contemporary archaeological practice to help disseminate findings, with numerous examples from all over the place; credits to all those people and organisations mentioned. Topics covered included data standards, GIS, ontologies and terminology through to innovative uses of the web and so-called web2.0 services such as blogs, twitter, flickr and the like. Videos from the day are over on Vimeo. » Continue reading “Public Access through technology; Using archaeological computing to interact with wider audiences in new and engaging ways”

The Ordnance Survey released their equivalent to Googlemaps called OpenSpace a while back now and I’ve been experimenting with it. I love having access to the high quality maps produced by the OS, other offerings such as Googlemaps and OpenStreetMap are simply not a match for the cartographic output of the OS. Having said this, there is still much room for improvement on the technical side of things: Based on OpenLayers, the OS OpenSpace platform is far from easy to get to grips compared to eg the Googlemaps API with simple tasks such as adding GeoRSS feeds and KML layers proving rather tricky let alone including external base layers. And the help and support is rather poor with few examples and much of the forum activity on the part of the OS team being far from explanatory. But still, as we start to see editing tools capable of working with these Javascript APIs, things should improve; I for one am looking forward to this!

A while back i produced a series of panoramic images around the Avebury landscape as a means of presenting various views. These have languished in my archives for quite a while but some of them now have a new lease of life. They are showing their age a bit, having been created using photographs taken on an early Agfa digital camera using software that is no longer available, but are still quite interesting. My intention is to revisit some or all of these at some point but in the meantime, they are presented on my research pages. Unfortunately, not all of them could be migrated at the present time but I will have another look at the broken ones and hopefully get them posted sometime soon.

If you like these Avebury panoramas, do also check out Pete Glastonbury’s website where he has more from around Avebury also Stonehenge. » Continue reading “Avebury panoramas”