Public Transport GeoInformation Workshop, Paris

After a lovely sunny few days at IGN, Paris I am now back in London thinking about what will come next for PTI and cartography in the future... I'm looking forward to meeting up with some of the new contacts I've made so here's a little overview of what went on and what's planned next...

The Use and User Issues Commission concentrated this year on Public Transport GeoInformation and as I have been involved in PT mapping my whole career I found it a very informative workshop and gladly welcomed it. Access to mapping for the public has never been higher, and I expect that PT maps are a very large share of the market and yet we have no groups in the UK, or abroad that I'm aware of, that specialise in bringing the commissioners, creators and users of these maps together to collaborate and push the field forward.

Now, after this inaugural workshop I believe we have a better understanding of the wider issues, not just within our own sectors, like academia or commercial, but we can also see how we can use each others strengths to make PT mapping better for the user.

Many thanks to the organisers, BCS Council and Commission Vice President David Forrest, Chair - Corne van Elzakker and IGN/Cogit's Dr Catherine Domingues, as well as the event sponsors Steer Davies Gleave and COGIT.

It was a great success and well received by everyone I spoke to. Delegates arrived from as far away as Brazil, and the European attendance was high, ranging from Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, The Netherlands, UK and France to name a few.

As well as several presentation sessions and demo's over the two days delegates also carried out a user test to more or less success! We were instructed to visit several locations by PT and asked to record the planning and user decisions along the way, to facilitate a discussion on Paris signage and wayfinding facilities. Alex Pucher of University of Vienna is to collate the info and we hope that from the findings we can, as a group, identify some of the main issues in this area for users.

I look forward to seeing and assisting with the next steps in this process and I encourage anyone else with an interest in this area to help us gather this information so we can all learn from it and move the industry forward positively. Please check out the Commission's website where you will be able to see the outcomes of our work and contact us to find out more or participate.

BCS Symposium 2011 - The Power of the Image DAY 2

Day 2 talks now available on the BCS website at Presentations

The first session - Speciality Mapping helped to highlight the research being carried out by not only universities but our very own Ordnance Survey as well, into non-visual or vision deficiency in location based products.

The imaginative ways highlighted really gave us something to think about how our maps are perceived by these users, and how we can integrate our mapping with these researched methods to assist users, and open up location navigation to a wider audience.

Workshop sessions then followed including Cartographic Surgery with Global Mapping, Understanding INSPIRE with AGI and RSW Geomatics, Making Sense of Statistics on Maps with Giles Darkes,  Create your own 3D city model without sticky-back plastic with Autodesk, and a Visit to Macclesfield Silk Museum.
A great lunch was sponsored by some of our supporting corporate members including Autodesk, Bentley, Cadcorp, ESRI, Europa Technologies, Ordnance Survey, Victoria Litho, GISPro, Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson, STAR-APIC, Global Mapping, Newgrove Consultants and Steer Davies Gleave.

At 2pm the second talks session of the day started endeavouring to answer Where are we now?.
Both Europa Technologies and Steer Davies Gleave presented slides to provoke us in thinking about the new open data available and how we can use it to create cartographic products for our users. Encouraging more integration with media files and new technology was a key theme. Dr David Fairbairn, from ICA, then summarised how the ICA have developed commissions and workshops to carry out research work and indicated concrete results from the efforts of cartographers around the world in advancing the discipline.

A busy day of lectures and workshops was then concluded with The Helen Wallis lecture, this year given by Peter Barber (Head of British Library Map Collections, and curator of the British Library's fascinating exhibition Magnificent Maps) on The Map as Symbol.
From depictions on coins and medals right through to grand world maps in royal palaces, a map has appeared on objects from very early beginnings to act a status symbol - just take a look at the size of  Charles II's The Klencke Atlas opposite. Pictured here with Peter.

Curator of Magnificent Maps - Power, Propaganda and Art