We are less then a week away from the next GeoRabble Melbourne. Thanks to our sponsor AAM Group we are pleased to announce the following GeoRabblers who have volunteered their time to share their fantastic GeoStories.

Georgina Race – Coronelli’s Globes: A view of the world

In the 17th century Vicenzo Coronelli’s made globes depicting the earth for Louis XIV and other royalty of the day. Georgina will take a look at the history of these famous globes and what they represented. She will review how effective were they for geographic representation and perspective and whether there are similar questions which can be asked of spatial information today.

Georgina is a spatial analyst specialising in water, coastal and environmental studies.  She attended the International Cartography Conference in Paris in 2011 where her interest in the globes was sparked during a cocktail party in their presence.

Chris Scott – Free your GIS: A journey in open source

There are many myths around Open Source GIS and their usefulness to business. Chris will explain the fallacy of these many myths while also showing us the how Open Source can be of value within the GIS environment.

Chris has been involved with GIS  for 10 years, with interests in Spatial databases, Open Source technology & Web Mapping.

Lynnette Terrett – Destination Spatial, Skilling a Spatial Industry Workforce for the future

What is Destination Spatial and why does it exist. Lynn will provide a background of this initiative why it is important to the ongoing health and future of our industry.

Lynn is a strategic spatial technology consultant working across many Asset, Environmental, Disease, Weeds, Pest & Disaster Recovery Management projects for government and public sector. Her current passion is promoting Destination Spatial to ensure Australia grows the educational pathways to train and skill up the Geospatial workforce of tomorrow

David Parkinson – Identifying a mosquito in a crowd – a challenge.

The Eliminate Dengue research program is an international not-for-profit collaboration led from Monash University. The program is developing a natural approach to control the spread of dengue based on. The challenge is to introduce the Wolbachia bacteria into wild populations of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in dengue transmission areas.

David, like all geography graduates, has managed to be  employed in many roles – but in 17 years has never been “just a Geographer”.

Chris Pettit – The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN)

AURIN is a $20 Million initiative funded by the Australian Government’s Super Science scheme. It is tasked with providing built environment and urban researchers, designers and planners with e-infrastructure to facilitate access to a distributed network of aggregated datasets and information services. Chris will provide a background on the initiative and where it is up to.

Chris is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne who has a passion for all things spatial. In his free time he is also the Chair of the Victorian Region SSSI and of the IPRS working group on Geographical Visualization and Virtual Reality.

Steve Bennett – Open Street Map Cycle Hack

Steve is a  software engineer, project manager, business analyst, technical writer, system administrator, technical analyst, project administrator and opinionateur in the Australian e-Research sector. He currently works at the Victorian e-Research Strategic Initiative, implementing data management systems for researchers.

If you haven’t registered yet to listen to these fantastic speakers and the opportunity to network with your fellow GeoRabblers then do so now at http://georabble-melb.eventbrite.com

Thanks to our sponsor Omnilink, following are the speakers for the next Sydney GeoRabble.

Llew Cain – Are we 2D living in a 6D Future? A shed perspective.

Micromine, Surpac, Datamine, 3D Geomodeller, Vulcan, GoCAD, VRML, X3D, GIS, Vertical Mapper, Discover 3D, Target, Revit, BIM, ProjectWise, iModels, 3D PDF, Infrastructure Designer, CityEngine, WebGL, HTML5. Is it topology, clash detection or geodesign? Multi dimensional design has always been around in the mining industry, and more recently growing in engineering and architecture, what are the implications for GIS people? Is there is a paradigm shift just around the corner. Will the average GIS operator still be relevant in a future where analysis, understanding and communication are done in true 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D space? While taking a moment in the shed to ponder the big questions a comforting realisation is achieved. Or is it?

Matthew Smith – Fires near Me mobile app

Fires near Me was an experiment. An experiment first in whether the public had a taste for this type of information delivered through a mobile device. The information was short and to the point — much like a focused sound bite in modern mainstream media. Indentifying the audience correctly allows content, app and map interaction, and information presentation to be tailored more precisely, giving greater user satisfaction.

Mobile app interaction with available networks, back-end data servers, and onboard functions (e.g. GPS) needs careful design in order to develop a useable architecture. Architecture for a non-finite — and mostly uncontrollable — user base must be fundamental to the app design.

Developers of mobile apps — certainly in 2010 — were less experienced in application development than is the case for other, enterprise application development. This requires more involvement in the design phase and closer management of the development and support phases.

Executive support tends to come after success with a launched product, rather than before a research and development project, and also needs careful management.

Jody Garnett – Business Intelligence and Mapping (with cartoons and demo)

A quick look at business intelligence industry: who they are, their perspective on life, and why they are investing in mapping technologies. Illustrated (cartoons) with a demo of smashing maps into the open source BIRT project.

Stephen Lead – Esri’s 100-lines-or-less competition

In our industry we’re used to overblown and over-complicated mapping portals, which aim to solve every possible problem which could apply to every possible user.

In a refreshing twist, Esri launched a contest to design the exact opposite – a focussed mapping application built using a maximum of 100 lines of JavaScript code. Some of the entries were very simple, while some were extremely clever.

This talk will cover the best entries in the competition, plus some brief behind-the-scenes of the data scraping exercise in my own entry, which was a visualisation of the climate of Australia, using data obtained from 1,500 BOM weather stations.

Mark Warton – Mobile apps for the Easter Show

Building an geospatial type App for one of Australia’s largest Events should not be too hard? Right? Let me take you on a quick journey of the challenges of building an App in a short time frame, for a  large event where spatial content is only being confirmed just days before the event.

Narelle Irvine – Mapping Kosciuszko Huts

Narelle has been involved for many years with the Kosciuszko Huts Association – a group that maintains the old cattlemen’s huts scattered throughout the park. When a webmap  showing the huts became desirable, Narelle volunteered. She embarked on a self-education program to understand and use open source mapping tools.

Chris Broadfoot – Tracking with the Google Maps Android API