The Society for Location Analysis

     
 

The Society for Location Analysis

The Future Forum 2010 - Mapping Futures

Date: Tuesday 19th October 2010
Venue: Phoenix Centre, London WC1
Map: Download a map here
Time: 09:30 for a 10:00 start. Finishing at 16:00.
Agenda: Click here for a detailed Agenda
More detail: Click here for details speaker's synopsis and biographies

The Theme of this year's Forum was 'Mapping Futures' and we have a variety of presentations addressing different aspects of mapping and location-based targeting.

Agenda

Thanks to all those who attended this year. It proved to be yet another fascinating forum!

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Here's the line-up, speakers synopsis and biographies

"Harvesting the Crowd: Enhancing our spatial and temporal understanding of cities through crowd sourcing and data mining"
Richard Milton, Researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL)

You can download Richard's presentation here

Synopsis

In this presentation, we show how our initial concept of the "Tweet-o-meter", which counts Twitter posts for individual cities, can be extended to create new geographies. By collecting Twitter data over a weekend and data-mining the geographic locations and content of these "tweets", we can build new geographic maps of cities which we can then compare to traditional geographies e.g. road and rail networks, to show how cities function in both a spatial and temporal context. In addition to this, we have developed an online geographic survey tool, called "SurveyMapper", which enables anyone to create a new survey. This provides us with crowd-sourced information on a number of topics from transport and congestion charging to anti-social behaviour and green space in London. By using our MapTube website we can display the results of these surveys in real-time on Google Maps. With the current moves towards more open and accessible Government data (http://data.london.gov.uk and http://data.gov.uk), a lot of high quality information is now available. By using our online mapping infrastructure we show how our MapTube web site can combine these new sources of data to produce scientific visualisations and incorporate real-time crowd-sourced information from surveys.

Biography

Richard Milton is a Research Fellow in CASA where he works on the Generative eSocial Science (Genesis) project which follows on from the GeoVUE project on Geographic Urban Environments. He is also the developer of the MapTube website for sharing geographic data on the web and is involved with the SurveyMapper website. While at CASA he has released the ‘GMapCreator’ software for creating thematic Google Maps and the ‘Image Cutter’ for publishing large photos on the web. Previously, he worked on the Equator project where he used GPS tracked sensors to make fine-scale maps of carbon monoxide around the local area. He has a BEng in Information Systems Engineering from Imperial College.

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"The role of locational data in 2011 Census and national statistics"
Andy Tait, Geography and GIS Policy, ONS Geography

You can download Andy's presentation here

Synopsis

Andy will discuss the importance of accurate location information to the 2011 Census in particular, and to the production of statistics in general. He will give a progress update on plans for Census day - 27th March 2011, the compilation of a national address register, and on how the UK’s key statistical geographies (Output Areas and Super Output Areas) will be maintained using the 2011 Census data to take account of population changes since 2001.

He will describe how ONS provides postcode based products to support national statistics and ensure that these statistics are geographically consistent and comparable.

Finally he will discuss how the OS Open Data initiative will improve access to the data and standardise its use.

Biography

Andy Tait joined the then Office for Population Censuses and Surveys a long time ago, as a programmer and systems analyst. He has since worked on many statistical projects as an analyst and project manager. Most recently, Andy has project managed the development of ONS’s modernised corporate GIS and GI data repository, the GRI. Since 2008 Andy has been responsible for GIS and Geography Policy in ONS.

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Location-based Targeting – A Survey of the Technologies, Opportunities and Risks
Peter Furness, Director, Peter Furness Limited

You can download Peter's presentation here

Synopsis

Through the application of electronic tracking and geo-referencing methods, our digital footprints now have a spatial dimension. The monitoring of people and things in space and time has opened up many exciting possibilities for service delivery and marketing. This presentation will survey the enabling technologies and explore the opportunities and risks of location-based targeting.

  • The technologies - including GPS, mobile phone tracking, WiFi triangulation, in-store surveillance, RFID tagging and ‘The Internet of Things’.
  • The opportunities:
    • Tracking people on the move – vehicle telematics and pay-as-you-drive services.
    • Representing people, places and things in time and space through the use of virtual worlds and advanced data visualisation.
    • Exploiting ‘augmented reality’.
    • Retailing – tracking the customer journey in-store.
    • For social media - location-based social networking.
  • The risks - protecting data and privacy in order to win public acceptance and meet regulatory constraints.

Biography

Peter runs his own business specialising in the fields of decision analytics, modelling and data mining. A mathematician by background, Peter has been closely involved with the development and application of new analytical techniques in marketing and customer value management. He conducts research into data mining methods and tools, seeking out ways to increase the benefits that his clients can get from data-driven approaches. You can contact Paul by email: furnesspm@aol.com, phone:+44 1737 814711 or find out more on his website: www.peterfurness.co.uk.

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Data, data, everywhere. But can you find it?
Tom Probert, Desktop Product Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Pitney Bowes Business Insight

You can download Tom's presentation here

Synopsis

Does your organisation have lots of spatial and mapping data? Are your users able to easily find what they need? Has time ever been wasted trying to find the right data but you know it is somewhere on your network? (Or on somebody's hard disk?) Have you ever found two different departments separately created or purchased the same data twice? Do you spend lots of time and effort on trying to maintain organised data structures for all of your data? Is your data spread around?

This talk will be about some of the principles and requirements behind good spatial data management. In particular this will include the use of deploying a catalog of all of your data to help everyone in an organisation be able to understand what data is available to them, what the data is appropriate to be used for, who owns the data and more. This catalog can consist of your own internal datasets and external sources that you might also use.

Biography

Tom Probert has been in the Location Intelligence business for 17 years. He started with MapInfo Corp which has since been acquired by Pitney Bowes. Tom has held a variety of roles in his time with the company, including training customers on MapInfo Products working both in the U.S.A and the U.K. He is currently the Desktop Product Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He is American but don't hold that against him as he has lived in U.K. for nearly 10 years now. He still has an accent, though.

Speaker panel session

All our speakers will join the Committee members on the stage to take questions from the audience. We look forward to lots of questions and heated debate.

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Making a new bed for Hampshire’s public services: Using an insight-led approach to plan the future shape of customer access
Steve Scholey, Hampshire partnership and Steve Rose, Birmingham City Council

You can download Steve's presentation here

Synopsis

Hampshire County Council’s Chief Executive, Andrew Smith, has recently been asked by the new government’s Secretary of State to lead a Capital and Asset Pathfinder initiative to pilot a customer-centric and place-based approach to asset management and capital investment, and is keen that Hampshire’s pilot project, one of 11 nationally, is ambitious and relevant to the future.

Hampshire’s Customer Insight Partnership, supported by the IDeA and CLG, has since early 2009 established a set of tools and implemented a range of projects towards the development of an insight-led approach across partner authorities. Ongoing work to develop a flexible framework for mapping customer demand, intended to support channel-shift and customer access planning projects at both a county and local level, now fulfils a central workstream of the Capital and Asset Pathfinder project.

Biography

Steve Scholey has for the last eighteen months been working with a partnership of local authorities across Hampshire to develop a customer-led approach to designing and delivering services. Previously, he headed up the site research unit at a UK-based global DIY retailer before spending several years working with clients as diverse as Tesco.com, Weight Watchers UK and National Air Traffic Services on location planning, customer access and GIS-based data visualisation projects.

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"But what about the customer?" - Using customer insight to change how we deliver public services
Steve Rose, Birmingham City Council

You can download Steve's presentation here

Synopsis

Birmingham City Council as part of its Customer First Business Transformation Programme is changing the way it interacts with and handles its customers; we've remembered they are important! This presentation will illustrate some key lessons as we have travelled along this journey, with particular focus on the use of geodemographics in championing a customer focused approach to service design. An example being the Birmingham Segmentation which is a bespoke adaptation of the Mosaic geodemographic classification to better describe and cluster the diverse melting pot that is the population of Birmingham. Practical examples will be drawn upon to demonstrate how Customer Insight is helping to target and tailor service delivery in a partnership environment. In describing the how's and why's of our approach we will shed light on some of the pitfalls and challenges that we have faced in asking ourselves......”but what about the customer?”

Biography

Steve Rose is the Head of Customer Knowledge at Birmingham City Council. He graduated from University of Leeds in 1998 after reading Geography. In the private sector Steve has worked with Great Universal Stores, Avon Cosmetics UK and Mott MacDonald. In the public sector Steve has worked with West Midlands Police, the Gambling Commission and in is current role with Birmingham City Council. His remit sees him lead a customer insight transformation programme to deliver £24m of benefit to the City Council through the use of customer insight and building insight capacity. Current areas of interest include targeted communications, logistics, information sharing and behaviour change. Steve also chairs the Local and Community Intelligence (LACI) Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership programme for the West Midlands and is a member of the Local Government Improvement and Development Customer Insight Forum.

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