So the dust has finally settled on another GIS Ireland conference. I missed a few talks due to other commitments, but overall I was very impressed with the running of the conference this year. Attendance was only slightly down on last year, which is an excellent achievement in the current economic climate and despite the close proximity of a free event with a similar target audience in September. Hearty congratulations to all involved in running the show, well done.

Congratulations are also due to Gary Delaney of Loc8 Code for winning GIS project of the year. I had a couple of interesting discussions about Loc8 with Gary on the day, and the accolade is richly deserved. The Irish Environmental Protection Agency were awarded Best GIS Organisation, and Brendan Cunningham brought down the house with an excellent presentation on using FME to predict football results. You can see a video of Brendans prize-winning presentation on his blog here

I do have a couple of minor quibbles with the event, and would hope to see some attempts to address these next year. Firstly I thought that there were too many parallel sessions in the afternoon. With up to five talks happening simultaneously, some were inevitably poorly attended, which can be dispiriting to say the least. I would prefer to see no more than three parallel sessions. Perhaps the parallelisation could be extended to the morning of the conference, which would mean the diversity of the event could be preserved. This leads me on to the second quibble: INSPIRE. We know that it is vitally important, and we know that it is fraught with issues, but for many in the audience it is not an interesting, or inspiring, topic. If there was an INSPIRE track in the morning, with other talks running alongside then there would have been less need to run so many parallel sessions in the afternoon.

I would also like to see some focus on GIS 2.0 / neogeography / whatever it’s calling itself this week. At the recent AGI Geocommunity Conference in the UK they ran a one day free (un)conference before the main event, called the W3Gconf which was a great success by all accounts. The conference wrap-up can be seen here. I know that the Irish Geo community is a lot smaller than the UK’s but I am hoping to knock a few heads together over the coming months, with a view to running something similar (but probably on a much smaller scale) at GIS Ireland 2011 next year. If this is something that interests you please get in touch with me, either in comments below, or by email.