Dublin Geomatics

This power point is quite good fun.

IMDIS2010

A member of my team recently attended the International Conference on Marine Data and Information Systems, IMDIS2010. Lucky chap. I just get to read the website after the event . There were a large number of presentations. I flicked through a couple such as

• Rolling Deck to Responsitory
• Archive and access of global water level data by NOAA
  
• SeaDataNet talked of the cooperative European nature of their work. I noted the comment that 'the marine community must be more active in OGC'. With any data exchange the devil really is in the detail.
• Sextant, the French Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure.
• The Chair's summaries are worth reading, esp if you don't have time to trawl through all the session papers. Session 1, 2 and 3 are the most useful summaries.

The list of abstracts has not only abstracts of the presentations but also posters - both 'normal' and electronic (that's a new one on me - what's an electronic poster?).

Lots to learn. Quality, compatibility and access to data are the standard reoccuring themes.

Happy 50th Tomorrow

Lasers are celebrating their half century. May 16th sees the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser (not to be confused with the maser which was developed earlier). It has been involved with at least 6 Nobel Prizes. Check out this website for lots of info on the laser. Our lives would be so much the poorer without it. It's not just surveying (which as you'd expect I have a vested interest in) but everything included CDs, barcode scanners, fibre optics and the lot.

Mind you, now I've mentioned laser and surveying, check out the Nottingham Caves.

Ocean Warming

My team alerted me to this. Apparently the RN records they have used came from them. Ah, fame at last .

Actually the more I learn about my job the more I realise I don't know. I'm a surveyor. I measure things. But the oceans are far more volatile than I ever cared to realise - with salinity, sound velocity, temperature, turbidity etc. It's not just about depth. It's about all the environmental factors that impact you - that' s what counts.

I figure that I'll perhaps know what I'm talking about when I'm 80. But I wouldn't put money on it.

Go Glider Go

An endurance record has been set. A seaglider 144 has covered over 5500km in 292 days. I don't know much about marine gliders but it looks pretty good going in my eyes. Their tag line is "half a knot on half a watt".

Not so good going is the slick in the Mexican Gulf. The GeoEye-1 satellite shows the oil streaks very clearly on this image.

More from Jerry Brotton

Am enjoying the BBC4s Maps programme. Jerry Brotton is easy to listen to and the programmes, although not terribly pacey, are informative. This BBC article gives you an essence of the series.

And if I had lots of spare time I could also pick up another BBC4 series; this one on the Beauty of Maps. However I think I've missed some of this on iPlayer so I'll wait for it to come around again.