I joined Astun two and a half years ago and being a bit of a data geek (having led MapAction's Data Circle for a number of years pre-children), one of the things that attracted me to the position was Astun's track record in metadata and their solutions with the Environment Agency / Defra and the Scottish Government . What with the Geospatial Commission's excellent progress with Data Discoverability since their inception, this has become much more prominent of late.  We figured a webinar would be the best forum to showcase our learnings presented by our resident metadata expert, Jo Cook. "Attaining Metadata Nirvana with GeoNetwork and GEMINI 2.3" was our first ever webinar and we were chuffed that over fifty people from nearly forty organisations attended and remained engaged throughout. (It's amazing what the organiser control panel in GoToWebinar shows you!) The agenda covered: Guidance for editing a metadata record (GEMINI 2.3) What UK GEMINI 2.3 ...

QGIS 3.0 was released in February , and although it's labelled an 'early adopter' release, with the long term release (LTR) available in October, there's plenty in it to excite not just the early adopters, but the rest of us too. We've had a chance now to have a good look at it, kick the tyres a bit and see what everyone has to say about it, so here are our thoughts. There are a few big steps forward - for example 3D support and multiple map canvasses - and while many of the other changes are relatively minor on their own, put together they represent a major leap in usability and effectiveness. There's been work on consolidation, upgrades of core packages, efficiency and speed improvements, resulting in a slicker, easier to use and more tightly integrated application. You could say that the 'easier to use' bit is the best thing about QGIS 3.0 - and when you think about it, that's not a description that could be applied to most application upgrad...

A look back at FOSS4GUK 2018 Dan @ormsbydaniel1 The whole event was great and I'm really glad I managed to go.  One person I was chatting to during one of the coffee breaks told me they were just so struck by what a friendly event it was compared to conferences they had attended - and I couldn't agree more! For me though, that manifested itself in the open and transparent way that the speakers and delegates shared their knowledge and expertise, with a real willingness to help others.  It really brings it home that the thing that is as amazing as the technology aspect of FOSS, is the real community of people who are working on it and with it. In terms of talks and workshops (aside from all the fantastic Astun-led sessions 😊 which were great), other highlights for me were the sessions by Ross McDonald ( @mixedbredie ) and Tom Armitage ( @MapNav_Tom ), both of whom did great workshops and presentations around routing and cartographic visualisation; I used...

We've been exploring  Apache Zeppelin  as a way of providing a powerful and flexible analytical interface for  Geonetwork  and are pleased to announce beta integration with the Geonetwork login credentials. Astun use Geonetwork 3.2 as our metadata portal, supplying metadata to local authorities and government bodies, for both INSPIRE and Enterprise use. A question our customers often ask is which metadata records are the most popular? Our Enterprise customers also have more detailed requirements, such as discovering which metadata records have been started but not finished, how many have been published and so on. Geonetwork itself provides search and content statistics, but only to users with Administrative rights, and it's not always straightforward to extend these to include new search options. Enter Apache Zeppelin! From the blurb: Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables data-driven, interactive data analytics and collaborative documents with...

Portable GIS, the tool that Astun use for delivering training courses, has now been accepted as an official OSGeo Community Project. What’s Portable GIS? Portable GIS is a suite of open source GIS tools that can be run from a USB stick, directly in windows, without the need for installation or booting to a different operating system. It includes a full PostgreSQL database server, QGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, Python, and a whole series of other packages, all accessible from a lightweight control panel. Basically everything you need to run an open source GIS stack, but portable and ready-configured! It was developed originally as a personal project in 2008, and has matured into a popular tool for situations such as training and disaster recovery. @archaeogeek #portablegis the only way to get #qgis running on this machine thanks from drc > attempt at postcard pic.twitter.com/MXuquLEf9a — Ant Scott (@antscott) May 11, 2014 It’s also very useful as a tool for demon...

Astun are pleased to announce that we’ve released our implementation of the Gemini 2.2 metadata profile as an official plugin for Geonetwork 3.0.x and later versions, and that it’s now available at the official Geonetwork metadata profile site metadata101.org . So what does this mean? It means that you can use Gemini 2.2 as a metadata standard within Geonetwork for creating records that can be published to data.gov.uk or for your own use. Installation is easy, just follow the instructions at the repository, making sure you pick the branch that matches your Geonetwork installation. By creating a separate plugin for Gemini 2.2, it can be used alongside other profiles such as Medin, and Gemini 2.3 when it’s released. You can ensure your metadata is stored and validated against the correct profile, and that you see the correct dropdown lists and hints when you’re creating or editing records. We’ve made sure that the validation rules align with those used on data.gov.uk, so no m...