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...

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...