First Drafted 2006-01-04. Last Revised 2006-05-19. Version 1.2.50

Blog

Andy Turner

This helps me organise information about what I do and may help others too.

2006-05-18

2006-05-17

2006-05-16

2006-05-15

2006-05-12

2006-05-11

2006-05-10

2006-05-09

2006-05-08

2006-05-05

2006-05-04

2006-05-03

2006-05-02

MscGIS and MaBSP Masters Dissertation Topics talks
  • Helen Anderson
    • Slight concern over reliance on MoSeS and original independent input...
  • ...
Need a project acronym or shortened name for Managing Uncertainty
http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/events/conferences/2006/
Documentation...
Who Really Runs Leeds?
  • Follows on from Blog entry on 2006-04-27
  • Triggered by a conversation with Paul Chatterton.
  • I am interested in:

    • mapping what has been
    • mapping what is
    • mapping Alternative Futures
    • providing a virtual resource centre for Leeds

    Although I have opinions and beliefs, I am interested in an objective reporting function.

2006-04-27

http://www.w3.org/2001/10/glance/doc/howto
Who Really Runs Leeds?
  • Paul Chatterton and Action Research in Collaboration
  • Follows on from Blog entry on 2006-04-13
  • Starting point for addrssing issues to do with our city Leeds
  • Pace of change in Leeds is rapid
    Who/what is driving this?
  • What are the benefits and who are they for?
    The many or the few?
  • How do we improve the representational and political situation?
  • How did the situation arise whereby many of the shops in Leeds are the same companies as those in other cities?
    What happens to the local operators?
  • How can we map and document power?
  • Stuart is going to take notes
  • Had a debate about recording a voice transcript. This is being done...
  • What do we want to find out?
  • Who owns Leeds?
  • Bradford Council Jamie is very interested in government...
    Chatham house rules!
    We live in a very central government organised society in the UK. The powers of local councils may change. Debate is to be openned after the local council elections by a central government white paper.
  • http://www.cfoi.org.uk/opengov.html
  • http://www.direct.gov.uk/
  • Leeds Vision
  • Leeds Initiative
    Consultation of a Vision for Leeds
  • Information Flows
    Think Tanks
    Who sets them up
  • What happened to Leeds Resource Centres?
    Let's have Virtual Resource Centres
    John Douglas Leeds Met
  • Brian £2 to join Leeds Coop Utilities Council Rates Building Societies Co-operative Society Democracy Councillers lost in the system... System failure?
  • Privatisation of social services is the next big money spinner...
  • Dangers of charities running social services...
  • Local elections are next week... Where are the campaigners? Is the situation in Italy more democratic? Is there more proportional representation. Why are the people so much more empassioned by politics?
  • Where do we go in the next 50 years? Is crisis looming
  • magic-sandwich.co.uk Kev Stone RSS talk We're playing with the big boys...
  • Bought a copy of the 1897 Leeds Coop Map from Brian Jackson with a verbal agreement that I was free to do with it what I want including a free reign for copying and further dissemination...
  • Resource Centres Virtual Resource Centre Community Centre Power Enquirey Report Set up of Democracy Hubs
  • Sabbotage and corruption are rife!
  • We've lost the dictaphone... It may never have worked...
  • CNet Bradford have funds for addressing Who runs Bradford and involving people and students in research about what is wanted...
  • Rachael Unsworth going to develop content on the Leeds Initiative
  • I mentioned that for web content there is a need to follow standards especially metadata.
  • Quick wins would be good, but are we embarking on a 50 year project?
  • Do we want to be practical or academic?
    What is action research?
  • www.leeds-susnet.org.uk Need to develop cross links between this and whorunsleeds website
  • opencity.org.uk
  • virtual-london.org.uk
  • The Museum of the Corporation
  • Who has an impact on Leeds?
  • We are powerless if we let ourselves be. Thanks Nelson Mandella who was free in his prison cell!
  • Focus on democratic deficits...
  • Focus on information deficits...
  • Project with my friends Joan, Martin others... Get them to meet the group...
  • Focus on generating systems understanding...
  • Develop a Google Earth type map attatched to wikipedia...

ASAP Lecturer discussions:

  • It really is a challenge for our management so that at the end of the day all three candidates want still to persue their careers at the University of Leeds. Clearly they are all appointable to the post. They each add something different and they should all be offered positions or at least plans drawn up so that in two years time they are working along side us.
  • The meeting after the presentations went well. I agreed with most of what was said. I hope that common sense prevails.
  • IMHO we want Alison to do this the GIS and Java teaching. We want Paul to take over some of the reigns from Phil and John. We want Kathryn for future-cities. All of them will fund themselves, so where is the problem?

ASAP Lecturer presentations:

These are all excellent people and the University of Leeds should seek to employ all three. Unfortunatley they are all competing for one post... It is a challenge to our management to handle this. If they can adapt to the situation and appoint all three today I will be very impressed. After round one Alison is favourite, but appointment committee and RAE strategy is wierd!

2006-04-26

Documentation...
ASAP meeting... Lots of documentation to do...
Impromptue meeting with Erling. He had an idea at coffee which I described using a whiteboard. I encouraged him to write it down and send me a link to the document. Hopefully he will do this...

Meeting Lindsay Banin

The definition of Tropical Forest is not majorly important to Lindsay's research as outlined yesterday, but it is interesting.

Things that will be worth thinking about are the life zones presented by Holdridge, Koppen and others - these are climate based POTENTIAL distribution maps rather than maps post-human-impact for example. Are you interested in looking at the accuracy of climate based models in predicting potential distribution, or the inaccuracy of these in light of deforestation or climate change etc?

Interested in the geographic uncertainty of definitions of Tropical Forest. Change over spatial and temporal resolution and scale... This is related to the uncertainty in the estimated parameters (data) used in classifications such as precipitation etc... Although we deal with fuzzy boundaries, there is a way of visualising change.

Lindsay plans to be using an expanded Rainfor database based on the current work of the EGC Research Cluster some of this is published and some unpublished.

I should read about Holdridge's life zones and how they came up with their maps of Tropical Forest.

2006-04-25

Went through the A-Z Doctorial Postgraduate Student pages. A lot of good work going on here. Some researchers in particular have developed excellent Web Content.
Documentation...
Encouraged Manuel Gloor to develop web content. Great his base page is now up and running...
Encouraged Gemma Hobson to collaborate. Pointed Gemma to the following URLs to some content of interest: http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/phd/maps/LeedsAndBradfordRoadAccidentDensity20m_g.jpg
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/lad/l_caac.gi
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/lad/lad_cluster_area_class.gif
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/lad/lad_cluster_area_classification.gif
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/ward/w_caac.gif
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/ward/ward_cluster_area_class.gif
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/migcom/maps/ward/ward_cluster_area_classification.gif
http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/publications/OpenshawTurner1999.html
href="http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/publications/Turner2000.html
Encouraged Lindsay Banin to collaborate. The initial definition of tropical forest areas she is using is based on rainfall estimates. I let Lindsay know that I am keen to collaborate with you in mapping the uncertainties in this.

2006-04-24

Responded to Library Survey
Develop Web Content...
  • New version of Home Page... Done
  • Re-organise Blog...
  • Syndicate RSS properly...
SCXML
NCRM workshops:

2006-04-21

Excellent and very pleasing Geog5060 feedback from Rupam, Sam and Alex You guys are great and remind me that I need to update the documentation... done! Some good blogging going on out there!
MoSeS documentation...
OGC Grid Collision proposal has been sent. Thanks to all, especially Chris.
Steven, Hao and Chongyang are all asking similar things about the geomorphometrics assignemnt for geog5060. I encouraged them to work together to save them some time.

2006-04-20

OWS-4
OGC Grid Collision... It's getting there...
Read through the NCeSS Research Board minutes from 2006-03-13 that Katy sent today. All seems to be in order... I wonder what took so long distributing these.
One of our students Alex was wanting Surpop data but the service was broken. We emailed MIMAS helpdesk...

2006-04-19

Level 1 Teaching and Personal Web Content has now been updated to DCMI and XHTML1.0-strict... Research next...
Chris's group have produced some metrics for an area up in Durham. They are thinking about identifying the channel and the flood plain and comparing with a flood risk map. Great!
Rodolfo got back about timings for the 50% Geomorphometrics coursework. I suggested to meet up and have a chat. There are many things that can be done. In meeting up we should find it easier to work out something of interest and something reasonable. It is difficult to judge peoples programming abilities and I am fairly new to the game of portioning work packages for which marks are to be awarded. Need to email Steve...
Erling popped in for a chat. He is interested in genography and had a good Easter in York learning about History. He thinks there is a gap in history from 500-700 AD. His web page is still rubbish! Alas, he said he is listening and may get at least the current details corrected...
Inkscape Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics Editor - This looks useful!

2006-04-18

google-sitemap_gen project home page - The sitemap_gen.py script analyzes your web server and generates one or more Sitemap files. These files are XML listings of content you make available on your web server. The files can then be directly submitted to Google... Seems very useful...
google-ajaxslt project home page - AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications. Because XSL-T uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath that can be used independently of XSL-T... Should give it a try asap... Also check out how they are doing RSS, looks right to me!...
Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds - This site describes a number of ways to encoding location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.
Refractions Research / Jody Garnets page capturing some ideas for Google "Summer of Code"
Google Earth KML 2.0 Document Version 1.001 - Last modified: Tue Apr 04 2006

2006-04-17

Google "Summer of Code"
Responded to Belinda's email about [MoSeS] Population modelling information and meeting to explain model and think about how to visualise progress...
Responded to Rodolfos email about geomorphometrics 50% coursework project. Need to email Steve about this...

2006-04-13

Registered an interest with Paul about Who Really Runs Leeds? Should be interesting. Here are some brief answers to the questions set out:
I'm interested about who comes, who expresses interest in this event. More than anything else, I'm interested in how the information is mapped.
We all really know that batman runs leeds!
Data Documentation Initiative http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/dtd/index.html http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/ddi-alliance/ddi/dtd/Version2-1.dtd

2006-04-12

2006-04-11

Chased Andy Evans about OGC membership agreement...
Steven Pickering dropped by to get an outline of the US mainland as some text file. Nice to do a bit of GIS work... We talked and I learned some of what Steven is up to. I encouraged him to set up a web home page to map out his virtual organisation and information flows. I think he will. I'm going to email a URL to this entry to remind him... Great Steven has emailed back and Dr Steven Pickering's Home Page is under active development :)
While Steven was here we emaied David Meredith as I wanted to know how to logon to the NGS portal... David got back to me and copied in Xiao and Xiabo (I think these are guys that were at the NCeSS training school recently and are who Rob Allan suggested I contact to develop our sakai portal... Great, I'll do a bit of investigation and email back...
A google search for gridshib turnerd up this shibgrid-bof list from which I found this interesting article: "Shibbolzing" Zope might email Paul...
Chris is around... Need to develop GIS Grid Collision proposal...
Had a look at Upcoming OGC Events . Put OGC TC/PC Meetings 26th-30th June 2006 Edinburgh in my calendar.

2006-04-10

Paul came by and set me up properly for using SRB on the testbed. We chatted about a few things and showed each other some tricks on Web content development and delivery - standards and tools :)
Chanced upon the Semantic Grid Community Portal ... How to aggregate the RSS I wonder... The RSS dosen't validate currently, but not to worry...
I'm interested in European Science Foundation (ESF)/ Inventing Europe: Technology and the Making of Europe, 1850 to the Present . This interest is from an e-Infrastructure and e-framework perspective, in particular developments since the advent of the World Wide Web. Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is contributing to the invention of Europe as an e-Research collaboration with a world-wide mission. If such a collaborative contemporary information technology focus ties in with your interests - please let me know, and maybe we can harness resources to organise a detailed response... I propose that the centre of gravity or core area of such a response be 1. Building Europe through Infrastructures from the following list:
  1. Building Europe through Infrastructures: examines how Europe was shaped by transnational infrastructures - the material links within and between nation states (and regions) including canals, rivers, railroads, highways, energy, media, communication, and information networks.
  2. Constructing European Ways of Knowing: examines the ways in which Europe became articulated through efforts at bringing knowledge and practices together on a European scale. These efforts range from informal networks to formal large-scale European projects.
  3. Consuming Europe: explores how a range of social actors-including businesspeople, the state, professionals, consumer groups and consumers-proposed, developed, and reworked material artefacts for specific local, regional, and national contexts. At times these efforts defied and at other times reinforced prevailing trends toward European markets, statist arrangements, use patterns, and identities.
  4. Europe in the Global World: explores the making of Europe through colonial, ex-colonial, trans-Atlantic, and other global exchanges. By "provincialising" Europe, the non-teleological nature of the processes studied will become clearer.
The deadline for outline proposals is 31 May 2006.
Chanced upon the Semantic Grid Community Portal ... How to aggregate the RSS I wonder... The RSS dosen't validate currently, but not to worry...
Once upon a time there was a MoSeS meeting when I shared a dream of the future where one day by routine we could link individual census records and helath data by name and address and that Grid Computing would allow it to be done safely and securely. I was informed this was a pipe dream, or at least there was some scoffing and the words "... it'll never happen ... they'll never allow it ... oh no no ... " began to ring... On page 68 of Ethnicity and health in Scotland: can we fill the information gap? A demonstration project focusing on coronary heart disease and linkage of census and health records is a diagram showing exaclty what can be done... It seems it has been done... I have not read the report in detail yet, but I will give it some attention in the not too distant future... The conclusions are certainly encouraging...
Added some information about the JISC OGC Grid collision proposal to the NERC GRIDGIS Working group wiki ... Also had a look, but seems like no activity from others. I wonder what is happening to the EPSRC Responsive Proposal ...
Read OGC Grid collision proposal... Done... Develop some additions and email thoughts...
GEMEDA had a quick look and emailed Paul and Mark to spark off some emails. Paul was communicating with Pascal last week. It seems GEMEDA is moving away from grid enabling CAS and focusing on SARs...
Had a skim of the NCeSS Service Delivery Board Minutes from March . The NCeSS website is to be revamped and a content management system (CMS) may be used. Good, IMHO the website is very important and should be developed well and given suffient resources. I want it to be standards compliant and like a portal, more ReDReSSlike. A CMS is a good idea. I wonder what software will be used... lenya, plone, sakai, something else... Mark has already asked me to be responsible for developing MoSeS content. This is good as I can move it from it's current location...
Browsed the Grid Engineering Group report to NCeSS Service Delivery Board . Great NCeSS are incorporating portal technology into the website based on uPortal . Nothing on the test site publicly available yet.

2006-04-07

SCIENCE CONSULTATION: Your help needed
Replied to research support to let them know: IMHO the key is a full implementation of fully qualified Dublin Core and the development of Semantic Web Content across the board to: understand our information flows and operations; enhance collaboration and efficiency. Team work and respect at every level across administrative boundaries...
Really should push to get my own web content in order... Echoed this reponse to Kirsty Finn who is working on a consultation exercise on the future needs for research into research methods and methodology for NCRM (ESRC).
Bumped into David Appleyard and discussed his training and role as web content developer. It seems David needs to have a meeting with Mike Crabtree his line manager to detail a training and development plan. For some parts of David's work he can feed from some of the research going on in the School of Geography, particularly MoSeS. IMHO David needs to be drawn into a development cycle for updating the schools web content. A move to XML and in particular XHTML2.0 will be of great benefit. I am fairly confident that this can be done without those viewing the current content being aware of the underlying changes. This should prevent major disputes over the presentation style of information content. I am learning a lot about how to develop the next generation standard web content and would like to pass on what I have learned so that we all benefit... I'll email this entry to both Mike and David now... It'll be up to David to chase this up... Done!
Long IRC with Belinda. Here are the logs .
Web content development at http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/ coming along... trying to move to qualified Dublin Core... First things first Andy Turner's Web Content @ School of Geography, University of Leeds RDF XML ...
Mike Crabtree popped along with an update on the linux server he is setting up for MoSeS. Mike will need to know the root password, but is giving MoSeS access to this level. Initially the server will allow connections from machines within the University of Leeds. Routes through the firewall will be opened on an as needed basis. Root will maintain an XML file detialing configuration on the base install. MoSeS will be responsible for backing this up along with any content. 2.5G P4 1.5G RAM, very useful resource. Mike will let us know when it will be ready - hopefully early next week. I will email the team now so they know what is going on... Done!
Trying to get postgres configured so as to run through Belinda's Toy Model code... Done... Got Belinda's code running in NetBeans... Time to give Eclipse a run...
Great! Chris Higgins got back with a draft proposal on OGC Grid Collision. Need to read this in detail and organise with Terry et al at NCeSS to provide second draft version to Chris by COB on 2006-04-13.

2006-04-06

Some of this looks interesting and relevant. I see some of our NCeSS colleagues are in the programme: Research Methods Festival Programme . I quite fancy a trip to Oxford 17th-21st July and have emailed Belinda, Paul and Mark... Belinda had planned to go anyway...
Developed Andy Turner's xhtml1.0-strict Home Page @ School of Geography, University of Leeds and made it my default home page...
Had a quick look at OSSIM which is being integrated with uDIG for raster support...
Trying to get postgres configured so as to run through Belinda's Toy Model code... Done... Got Belinda's code running in NetBeans... Time to give Eclipse a run... Wow, Eclipse is great! I'm converted... I wonder if I will revert to NetBeans...
Great! Chris Higgins got back hopefully a draft proposal on OGC Grid Collision should be distributed before next week. Must remember to keep everyone in the loop. Not sure about anyone other than Mark from the School of Geography at Leeds. Awaiting some response from these folk...

2006-04-05

Could do with linking information about white rose grid talk I gave last week...
Great, Vinny came along and installed postgres. Unfortunately Belinda's code did not work work first time. Needed to get beanutils, but that was simple. Emailing Paul and Belinda to work out next step... Done... Awaiting reply... Oh, discovered I was being over optimistic. Netbeans failed to notice the change in jars and the lack of a class to extend until I modified my code... Oh well, I'm sure we can fix this soon...
Code... Getting there... Nearly seprerated communal establishment (CE) populations... Code is getting a bit messy though... Many improvements can be made... Perhaps biggest improvement is to select only CE residents from ISAR to populate CEs. This can possible be done from reltohr=-9. It best done with a newly ordered AGE0RELTOHRSAR... Great! I seem to have ironed out the bugs and have the population creation program running in a way. There are several ways forward from this point... Next I am to re-integrate the other optimisations... I think this is done... Having to revert to use ToyModel version 0.1 though :(...
10:30-10:45 Impromptue meeting with Martin about population modelling... He will check his email about the meeting next week.

2006-04-04

Found another excellent Java resource: http://java-source.net/ Maybe I should write a Java web page...
Meeting Paul at 3:30... Another good meeting, we are learning a lot from each other I think... It does seem like I should move to Eclipse from NetBeans sooner rather than later... We are a little concerned that Belinda's MoSeS code platform currently relies on postgres. Why not Apache Derby I wonder... Perhaps the easiest way is for me to get IT to install postgres on my machine then dig into Belinda's java...
Meeting with Phil and any others, Martin etc that want to learn about the population modelling and how the information about the process is disseminated... Scheduled for 10:30Am Wednesday 12th. (No network in East Building then!) I'll email belinda and let her know its happening... Done!
Code...
Registered for Spatially Embedded Complex Systems Engineering (SECSE) Twiki account... Plan to set up collaboration to look at Geographically Weighted Statistics and the network formation of relationships from the UK Human Population modelling from 2001 to 2031 as part of MoSeS.
Replied to Mark's workflow email attaching a GEON architecture description I scraped from the GEON portal (it was presented at AllHands2005). An important function of GEON seems to be to act as a data repository. I wonder: 1) How does Kepler compare to jBPM ? Kepler and GEON Documentation seems fairly poor and I found little mention of standards which is worrying. Despite this, the GEON portal may offer something we can build on, or an architecture we can use. In NCeSS there is at least one expert on workflow (Edoardo Pignotti) There are also portal experts (Tobias Shiebeck, Rob Allan, Rob Crouchley et al.). I think we should try to use this expertise. To try to pull on this we should conduct our conversation on the NCeSS forum? There might be added benefits of this, openning the discussion up even wider.

2006-04-03

Code...
Belinda made a good MoSeS toy Model code release on BSCW. I need to get postres and hibernate installed on my Pc to use it... having trouble with this... Paul offered to help me out if I've not figured this out before tomorrow...
Excellent meeting with Paul about MoSeS. Great that he can now focus more energy on the project! We covered so much ground in the meeting it is too much to blog now especially since I need to get on with coding...
Chris Higgins communicated again about JISC OGC collision. All fairly confidential really, so not going to throw notes up here yet. Chris will hopefully email Rob Proctor, Mark Birkin and myself later today.
Great, Cecilia got back to me. Hopefully her colleague will get back to me once she returns from holiday. Raj Bhopal has done some interesting work linking census and health data (using name and address data)? Does this report that detial it?

2006-03-31

Dived deep into XML again... There is so much to learn and so much application needed... Perhaps work through some examples then go home...
Chatted with Rob Lewis from the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Cecilia MacIntyre Head of Demography, General Register Office for Scotland about NCeSS and MoSeS over lunch. Both are on the UPTAP Advisory Committee. Rob is very keen for links to be made with regard dissemination beyond the academic community. Cecilia talked metadata and fortunetly we both managed not to get indigestion or too worked up. The quality of metdata in Social Science data and government is improving. However UK population census metadata is in the pre XML pre DCMI dark ages. Interestingly Cecilia knows of a project that used name and address information to link ethnicity from the census with a health database. Fantastic! I want to know more. Justin Keen and the other MoSeS big wigs will be suprised, they did not think such a thing could be done. I will email Cecilia now, I should caveate that the standard of this page is 1999, not 2006...;) Wow, sending Cecilia an email was tricky... Now I understand why she was worried about spam, they have clearly been having problems. Let's hope the webmaster comes up trumps...
UPTAP is running late... But running well. Oli's presentation was fantastic. Virtual and not interactive, but will hopefully initiate a lot of collaboration. For MoSeS we are particualrly keen to set up collaboration with Oliver to develop a model of the UK population from 2001 to 2031. This is a brief entry to stimulate this. I will email Oli in due course... After the presentation some guy looking at the southern part of the NE region was interested in the relationships with housing build and demand. He reckoned that there was evidence showing that the southern part of the NE region was relatively self-contained with regard commuting and migration. I made a point that to the audience that the MoSeS Node of NCeSS was developing a UK human population model for 2001 to 2031 to showcase eScience tools for modelling and simulation. I made the point that the remit of e-Social Science is much broader than simply looking at this. I hope to organise further collaboration will Oli. To kick this off, I will email and link to this entry. Roona Simpson made a point that Living apart together is not captured in any of the data Oli was planning to use. Some other guy reckoned the work of John Haskey was relevant in this. I think Oli is moving in the right direction to help us understand more of the complexities of things like extra household family relationships by looking within the household at individuals relationships.
Release MoSeS code... Done. I'll email Paul and Belinda... Done... On to Oli's talk now then...
Went over to say pass on my farewells to Luke who is off to work in a library down south. Popped into reception to check post and had a conversation with Jan about modelling and carbon neutrality and information management. Jan is our receptionist that is using software to track the whereabouts of School of Geography staff. She knows about my blog now. Am I expecting too much of my colleagues to map their whereabouts, information and energy flows? Probably... Ho hum, back to code release :)
Release of MoSeS code interupted by desire to go to Oliver Duke-Williams' talk at UPTAP...
I am chomping at the bit... Really want to get using the new webserver Mike is setting up for developing our MoSeS portal. First things first, I need to cut a new release of MoSeS code for Paul. After that I should get back to the nightmare that is modelling the UK human population from 2001 to 2031 based initially on UK Population Census data... First I will deal with communal establishments populations and data creation using the Individual SAR. Next I will write the loaders for the Household SAR... We need to start handling the look up files for Super Output Areas too... Ugh!
Kevin Porteous from Leeds University Catering and Conference Service knocked on my door looking for David Appleyard and the Graphics Unit. He is wanting a map so for a Piano competition held at leeds. We talked briefly about Google Earth and Google Maps. Google Map View of LS2 9JT I'll email Kevin who doesn't have a Web Home Page (poor Kevin). His email box is full! Ah well... Hopefully he will get what he wants from the graphics unit and David will move us into 2006 with a bang and start mapping using google or something similar...

2006-03-30

I want to go to this: FOSS4G2006 12-15th September in Switzerland. My plan is to present on the Grids software I have developed and to see how to open its development in the future and integrate it with other products. I have submitted an abstract and developed a page about my involvement in FOSS4G2006 . Abstract submitted . Status of the abstract
BBC Health News
Securing Good Care for Older People: Taking a long-term view (Derek Wanless report) Justin Keen has his head in it. Thanks for the link Justin. Thanks Sarah Smith for the pointer.
UPTAP Conference at the School of Geography. So very relevant to MoSeS... Lot's of collaboration to be had... Network network... Unfortunately no information found online at present about the event!
UPTAP Adding to the carbon neutrality debate...
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Home Page The future seems to be XHTML2.0. Are there any browsers that handle it?
NCeSS Sustainability Working Party Need to refer back to this. Has Terry put any documentation on the Intranet yet? If so it is not where I was expecting it...
Want a new version of this Blog that sends RSS feeds. Need an associated RDF document. Want to start aggregating feeds... this could be tricky to do well... Let's start with one thing aggregating into one place... Hmmm... Still need to shutdown this pc...
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Home Page The future seems to be XHTML2.0. Are there any browsers that handle it?
XForms 1.0 (Second Edition) Recommendation now out. Had a look at the examples...
RSS Viewer Does it help? Need some way of aggregating and pushing data into files...
XML News Feeds in RSS 2.0 Format
Nice artical on the difference between Spacial and Spatial. 3D lets have it!!! One of those things I read a while back, but thought I'd link it in now as I have to restart my PC.
Geongrid Looks like it's taking off. Mark Birkin pointed me to this for MoSeS reckoning it will be useful. I am awaiting authorization to be a portal user...
Nice artical on the difference between Spacial and Spatial. 3D lets have it!!!

2006-03-29

Let's look at the last NCeSS Service Deliver Board Minutes... Seems there not available yet, but the preparatory material gives me a good idea as to what it was all about.

foaf I've registered so to speek. Here is the RDF . Thanks Pete Edwards for pointing me to this and for being my friend.

Blimey, how time flies! It's not that I've been doing nothing (I've not being doing nothing), I've just been sufferring from a lack of organisation since returning from a weeks hoilday to Ireland. Ireland was a fantastic break I was ready for it so I though, but my return to work was chaotic and I did not know what to do first. This was as much a systems failure than anything else. More and more I find that while I do not implement Dublin Core Metadata Institute recommendations the more work I have. Eeek it could all grind to a halt!

So, I'm still trying to use this blog to drive my information management... Let me track back... What have I done since my last entry:

2006-03-03

I realise my blog has been way to formal (boring and not really conversational). Also it has not been nearly colourful enough or contained nearly enough interesting material.

I've just checked out Jody Garnett's Blog . He is a bit of a hero that develops cool stuff and keeps us informed about all sorts of goings on in open geospatial stuff. So, Jody pointed us to this OGC Web Services Demo . I'd like to iterate that if you have 15 minutes spare this is well worth consuming.

I think I'm going to drop standard English as it's too long winded...

Time to figure out RSS. Should probably use software once figured out how works. How to test if works...

2006-03-03

NCeSS Node Jamboree

2006-02-27 to 2006-03-02

NCeSS Training School

2006-02-24

Post Graduate Study Assistants Meeting With Victoria Robinson and Diane Collett
Meeting with Sarah Gawthorpe

2006-02-23

WUN GIS Seminar
Derek Karssenberg presented on "Spatio-temporal modeling in GIS".
ASAP Research Cluster Meeting
Purnima Sangle Sangle1 P.S., George S.M. (2005) Alternate Neural Network Models as Supervised Classifiers for Satellite Data. In Journal of Environmental Informatics Online ISSN 1684-8799 / Print ISSN 1726-2135 Paper 05JEI00058, 6(2) 2005, Pages 80-92. 36.5 metre x 36.5 metre
Nanlin Jin RELU Interview

2006-02-20

Post Graduate Study Assistants Meeting With Victoria Robinson

2006-02-08

ASAP Cluster meeting

2006-02-01 to 2006-02-02

4th NERC Grid GIS Working Group
- Good meeting. NeSC is a good place to meet! Make sure you address your actions and claim expenses!

2006-01-30

Reading

In preperation for the next MASS meeting I read Pontius R.G. (Jr), Huffaker D., Denman K. (2004) Useful techniques of validation for spatially explicit land-change models. Ecological Modelling, Volume 179, Issue 4, Pages 445-461.
Section 1.2 Paragraph 5:
Useful definition of noise and over training/calibrating a model based on a sample.
Section 1.3 Paragraph 2:
"...it is helpful to use a validation technique that: (a) budgets the sources of error, (b) compares the model to a Null model, (c) compares the model to a Random model, (d) performs the analysis at multiple scales." and "It is important to compare the model to both a Null model and a Random model in order to assess the additional predictive power, if any, that the model provides. Scale is important to consider during any comparison of maps, because results can be sensitive to scale and certain patterns may be evident at only certain scales (Kok et al., 2001 and Quattrochi and Goodchild, 1997)."
Section 2.2:
The neural network modelling of MEDALUS III , and MedAction relates to this. In predicting the quantity of land types, the models were calibrated on the baseline (existing data) and then a prediction was made using the same cut-off and neural network parameters. However, for the population modelling a linear interpolation of NIDI's forecasts was used to constrain the results. A model that predicts the locations of something implicitly predicting the number of locations or amount of that thing.
Section 2.5: Considering scale issues is good. The details of aggregation in the paper does not mention the many different aggregations that can result. The different aggregations of this type are illustrated in Figure 1 of Turner (2000) . It would be less biased to consider all possible aggregations and at each level of aggregation. Some average could then be used. However, aggregating in this way is inherently biased due to the unsymmetrical nature of squares. What is less biased in principle is drawing values into a statistic based on circular regions. Doing this brings up questions of whether distance weighting should be applied. Usually some kind of distance weighting is desirable and often it is a monotonic function with further away values being weighted less. More complex non-monotonic weighting can be applied by subtracting some such weighting. It is the distance weightings that ramp up monotonically to some maximum and then back down again monotonically that focus on a particular scale. Such weightings are useful for studying distributions of plant species and human settlement. In the case of comparing if two surfaces of distribution are similar various Geographically Weighted Statistics (GWS) may be of interest. Turner (2006) provides more details on raster based GWS.
Section 2.6:
"The Null Resolution is the resolution at which the accuracy of the predictive model matches the accuracy of the Null model."
Section 4.3: The bias of masking
"Whatever the statistical criterion, it is dangerous to mask out parts of the study area during the validation phase. Results of statistical analysis can be extremely sensitive to any procedure that ignores parts of the study area." This is why I deceided against masking non-road areas in PhD studies of the distribution of Road Accidents.
References
Kok K., Farrow A., Veldkamp T.A. and Verberg, P., 2001. A method and application of multi-scale validation in spatial land use models. Agr. Ecosyst. Environ. 85 1-3, pp. 223-238.
Quattrochi D.A., Goodchild M.F., (Eds.), 1997. Scale in Remote Sensing and GIS. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.
Turner A.G.D. (2006) Raster Based Geographically Weighted Statistics for Studying the Spatial Change of Incidence Distributions Over Time: An Application to Stats 19 Personal Injury Road Accident Data, PhD Working Paper.
Turner A.G.D. (2000) Density Data Generation for Spatial Data Mining Applications. Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on GeoComputation, England, September.

2006-01-26

Browsed High Performance Computing for Statistical Inference . - Worth checking out/ attending...

Drafted a . proposal for a Regional Information Sharing Grid GIS Project: Yorkshire from the Air - It is now up to Robin to feedback...

2006-01-25

Wrote a definition of geomorphometrics : Terrain surface geometry measures . Metrics for geomorphology . - Link more details on this research interest.

Attended the River Basin Processes and Management Research Cluster meeting where Alona Armstrong and Lee Brown outlined their research.

2006-01-16

Had a look at Unidata NetCDF Java Library Home Page . - Well worth looking at integrating with Grids for GeoTools

Wrote a definition of e-Social Science : Social Science using Grid Computing . A subset of e-Science . - e-Social Science is also what I am trying to do albeit from a computational geography angle.

Browsed around the following Wikipedia pages: Social Science , Portal .

2006-01-18

Browsed around The Institute for Fiscal Studies Web Site and had a close look at The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing - I was pointed to this by my colleague Justin Keen who works with me on The MoSeS Project .

Browsed around the following Wikipedia pages: Anarchy , Anarchism , Government , State , Law , Lawlessness . - There are multiple meanings of many terms, but it seems that the terms anarchy and anarchism are well defined and it seems a misusage of the term anarchy when disorganisation, chaos or lawlessness is meant. However it does get used in that way. This was related to a conversation with my colleagues Stuart Hodkinson and Paul Chatterton

2006-01-13

Skim read Armstrong M.P., Cowles M.K., Wang S. (2005) Using a Computational Grid for Geographic Information Analysis: A Reconnaissance. Pages 355-375 . In The Professional Geographer Vol. 57 Issue 3 Page 339-494 . - Looks good! Read this in more detail...

Browsed contents of Accident Analysis & Prevention Volume 37, Issue 4, pages 591-806 . - Much here to come back to, but didn't spot any maps!

Skim read Hewson P.J. (2005) Epidemiology of child pedestrian casualty rates: Can we assume spatial independence? Pages 651-659 . In Accident Analysis & Prevention Volume 37, Issue 4, pages 591-806 . - More relevant to Richard Thompson ( David Clarke's PhD student).

Skim read Hewson P.J. (2005) A statistical profile of road accidents during cross-flow turns. Pages 721-730 . In Accident Analysis & Prevention Volume 37, Issue 4, pages 591-806 . - Read this in more detail. Reply to David Clarke's email.

2006-01-12

Wrote a definition of humanosphere : The space-time region that humans influence . - Not sure if I've ever seen the word before, but think it a useful term!

Read Moss, Scott and Edmonds, Bruce (2005). 'Towards Good Social Science'. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 8(4) - I agree with most of this. Another important aim for scientific simulation is for results to be easily replicable, not merely theoretically replicable. If there is some randomness implicit then this needs explicit capturing in provenance when a simulation is run so that the simulation can be run again to perform exactly the same. There are many benefits of doing this, and it is in some ways more important than making the source code of the program that performed the simulation available although I would argue that this is important too!

2006-01-11

Browsed JASSS Volume 8, Issue 4 October, 2005 - Lots here to come back to!

Attended the Biosystems Reading Group - Discussion based on the following papers:

- How can simulation using Agent Based Models be made more scientific?

Attended the Ecology and Global Change Research Cluster meeting. A seminar given by Richard Law on Spatial Patterns and Inferences about Dynamics in Plant Communities - Illustrated an example of torus type distance weighting being useful. Interesting notions of pair and multiple densities. Often it is interesting when things appear in two's! Illustrated the Janzen-Connell hypothesis as described in Hyatt l.A., Rosenberg M.S., Howard T.G., Bole G., Fang W., Anastasia J., Brown K., Grella R., Hinman K., Kurdziel J.P. Gurevitch J., (2003) The distance dependence prediction of the Janzen-Connell hypothesis: a meta-analysis. OIKOS 103: 590-602. Described the use of inhomogenous K-function (as described here and here ) for work on cancer epidemiology by Diggle P.J. and colleagues. - All the talk of kernels, scales and distance was refreshing. To encourage further collaboration I emailed Richard and pointed him to work on GAM/K

2006-01-10

Browsed from http://geobloggers.blogspot.com/ - Useful set of links.

2006-01-09

Edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flush - Adding links for hydrology and runoff.

2006-01-06

Read Reitsma F., Albrecht J. (2005) Implementing a new data model for simulating process. International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 19, No. 10, November, pages 1073-1090. - Focuses on storing system state at each time step of a dynamic model. The method is prototyped with a watershed runoff simulation. Emailed the reference to The Multi Agent Systems and Simulation Research Interest Group and Brian Irvine .

Read Rushton G. (2004) Book Review of Spatial Epidemiology: Methods and Applications (2001) Edited by P. Elliot, J. Wakefield, N. Best, and D. Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-851532-4. International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September, pages 627-629. . - Elaboration the need for provenance data without actually calling it that. This is a useful reference for MoSeS work.

2006-01-05

Read Albani M., Klinkenberg B., Andison D.W., Kimmins J.P. (2004) The choice of window size in approximating topographic surfaces from Digital Elevation Models. International Journal of Geographical Informaiton Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September, pages 577-593. DOI: 10.1080/13658810410001701987 - "Presents a general analytical method to estimate the propagation of elevation errors to the principal derived topographic variables (slope, aspect and surface curvatures) as calculated with the quadratic approximation method with variable evaluation window size of Wood (1996). It expands the work of Florinsky (1998b) to incorporate evaluation windows of sizes larger than 3x3, and considers spatially correlated elevation error." (Taken form the conclusion) Like the paper a lot! It has an excellent conclusion and is well referenced. Much of the referenced work should be looked at for GEOG5060 and Geomorphometrics work. Paper should be on the reading list for the GEOG5060 students. As should: Wood, J. D. (1996) The geomorphological characterisation of Digital Elevation Models. PhD thesis, University of Leicester.

Read Shortridge A.M. (2004) Geometric variability of raster cell class assignment. In International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol. 18, No. 6, September, pages 539-558. DOI: 10.1080/13658810410001702012 - Reports a set of experiments concerning square celled rasterisation of vector data and variability of changing cell resolution and origin. The focus is on classified area data. I liked this paper! The rasterisations being considered were square celled, but the paper did not discuss rasters with a triangular/hexagonal cell structure. In relation to this, there was no discussion of rotational variance and the alignment of the cells on axes. It was especially pleasing to see the work of Steve Carver and Chris Brunsden referenced.

Browsed The CeLSIUS Website - That of the support team for academic users of the Office for National Statistics' Longitudinal Study The LS is something we are looking to use for MoSeS.

Read Rogerson, P. A. (2001) Monitoring point patterns for the development of space-time clusters. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (A), 164, pp. 87 - 96. - Adaption of cumulative sum methods for use with Knox's space-time statistic and application to Burkitt's lymphoma in Uganda. Contains a useful description and equations for a local version of the Knox test for space-time interactions. From the description this method is similar to that of GAMK-T of Stan Openshaw et al , which should have been referenced. It may be worth contacting the author and using this method in your PhD.

2006-01-04

Browsed Applied Geography Volume 26, Issue 1 (January 2006) and Volume 25 (2005).

Skim read Atkinson D.M., Deadman P., Dudycha D., Traynor S (2005) Multi-criteria evaluation and least cost path analysis for an arctic all-weather road. - Looks good and has no reference to my colleague Steve Carver's work, so I pointed him to it.

Skim read Rocchini D., Di Rita A. (2005) Relief effects on aerial photos geometric correction. - Looks good and related to some work my colleague Erling Dalen is doing, so I pointed him to it.

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