GeoGraphic

I gave a lecture to UCC MSc students today on the topic “GeoDemographics and GeoCoding: An Introduction to Sources and methods” My slide deck is below.

I’m pretty exited by my next speaking appointment, Ignite Dublin 8, which takes place in The Science Gallery on Pearse St in Dublin next Thursday 8th December. Each Ignite presentation is recorded and posted on YouTube afterwards, I’ll post mine when it’s online, I’m busy writing and re-writing it now.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignite concept, the idea is that each speaker has only 5 minutes and has 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds. This keeps things short and sweet and ensures a wide range of topics can be fitted into each Ignite session – there will be 18 speakers at Ignite Dublin 8, talking about things ranging from Archaeology to Robotics. And Maps, of course!

The GIS Ireland 2011 conference took place in Chartered Accountant’s House in Dublin on Wednesday 12th October.

I gave a presentation on ‘The Do’s and Don’ts of Irish Addressing’ and my slide deck is now online on SlideShare here:

I have been doing a lot of Address Geocoding at work lately.  This is the process of taking addresses and turning them into points on a map.  It’s a fairly simple task in most countries, but here in Ireland we don’t have a postal geography, or postcode system, which makes the task quite difficult.

My employer specialises in this kind of work and has built a number of systems to partly automate the task and verify the accuracy of the results.  It’s pretty impressive stuff and I hope to write about it in more detail in the near future.

Today I ran a public dataset of some interest through the system – the locations of the 84 properties auctioned at last week’s high profile sale in The Shelbourne.

An Excel spreadsheet of the data is available from here and a Google Map/Earth compatible .kml file can be downloaded from here.

Here’s the map, you can click on the pins to reveal underlying data, such as the reserve price and price achieved:

View Larger Map

As is always the case in dealing with Irish addresses, there may be some error in the precise location of these points.  If you want to know more about the process, or if you’re interested in visualising your address data I’d be delighted to hear from you.

As 2010 draws to a close, some imporant changes are happening around here. Firstly I have joined Gamma as their Senior GIS Consultant, so GeoGraphic as a trading entity is being shut down.

It was a very interesting couple of years. I worked with some great clients and on some very interesting projects, but I have a roof to keep over my family’s head and it just wasn’t paying the bills.

I fully intend to keep up with the blogging on here, with less focus on professional promotion and more on my thoughts of what’s going on in the wider geo-sphere. Of course these views will be my own and shouldn’t be interpreted as being those of my employer.

The first of the changes to this blog might be apparent to frequent readers – I’ve imported some posts from my (slightly less professionally focussed) Posterous site to here, you can see them in the From Posterous category tab.

I’m facing a steep but enjoyable learning curve over the next few weeks as I get to grips with new software platforms, databases, client requirements and workflows. But I hope to be back with an end-of-year round-up before the month is out.