June 14th, 2010 by admin
It has been a busy few months, with stimulating projects underway for The Audit Commission, Regen South West, London Climate Change Partnership and The Environment Agency among others. And because these things only happen when you’re busy, we’ve also moved offices – which is itself opening up some intriguing opportunities.
We’re now well settled in a handsome listed building in Bath’s Walcot Street, but the intriguing part is what happens when you start talking to your new landlords and their other business partners. MASCo is a long-established architectural salvage company, and in recent years they’ve applied their experience of sensitive demolition and reclamation of historic building materials to wider sustainability consulting, also recruiting full-time sustainability consultant James Hurley.
We were introduced to MASCo by Bath-based architects and urban planners Nash Partnership, who use their renovation and regeneration experience to maintain the highest standards of sustainable design.
So both these organisations saw the [...] Continue Reading…
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June 7th, 2010 by admin
We’re currently recruiting to fill a post of GIS Analyst, full time, permanent, based in central Bath and available immediately. Please check you have the relevant skills and see below for details of how to apply. We can only accept applications from individuals currently eligible to work in the EU.
GIS analyst – central Bath – min £19k according to experience
Have you successfully completed a GIS degree or Masters course? Do you have analytical ability, strong visual sense and a client service ethos? We’re a small but fast-moving GIS company with a vacancy for a qualified GIS analyst to create maps and data layers, manage and analyse spatial data and deliver under pressure on varied client requirements.
No two tasks are the same, and there’s always scope to think laterally, add value, help build client relationships and contribute to the success of a close-knit, committed and informal team. On-job training and [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: Jobs
Posted in Recruitment | Comment On This »
February 11th, 2010 by admin
Vacant shops have been a tangible sign of recession – but now they are showing signs of recovery. The Local Data Company’s in-depth urban data, analysed by Geofutures and available via Town Centre Intelligence, suggests that the rate of vacancy growth has slowed considerably in Great Britain, with a few major centres seeing overall reductions.
It’s a great example of data made accessible and meaningful, no doubt the reason why so much of the UK’s media ran the story today. The Local Data Company have launched a report for the 2009 year end, Dawn of a Better Market, including a Geofutures retail vacancy rate contour map for Q4 2009, updating the one used by the FT looking at the first quarter of the year.
Side by side, the maps show a contraction in the area of highest vacancy rates in north east England and southern Scotland, though vacancies are still running [...] Continue Reading…
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November 4th, 2009 by admin
Mark Thurstain-Goodwin writes: I like this map. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it’s strangely beautiful – everything a great data visualisation should be.
The analysis takes the number of individual shop premises in the town centres surveyed every six months by The Local Data Company, then visualises these numbers in three dimensions over a map of London’s West End and surrounds.
(Note that a similar analysis could also be done for total floorspace, but this one is for the number of retail units – giving rise to interesting peaks like the one for Brixton in the right-hand foreground).
We can see the highest peaks around Oxford Street and Knightsbridge, with notable neighbours going East to the City, north to Camden and Islington and a clear mountain range along the length of the King’s Road. Through the semi-transparent data layer we see the importance of the road network to peak retail locations, even [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, mapping, town centres
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October 27th, 2009 by admin
An exciting new project is underway for Geofutures: working with the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we’re modelling and mapping residential heat demand for Regen SW, the renewable energy agency for the south-west of England.
The aim is region-wide insight into the potential for renewable and low-carbon heat generation and distribution, with outputs at sufficiently fine scales to allow users to identify individual buildings and groups of buildings which could benefit from heat distribution installations.
It’s set to be the most advanced heat mapping exercise undertaken in the UK to date, building on CSE’s proven expertise in modelling heat demand in London, Bristol and West Sussex, with the addition of Geofutures’ experience in using GIS to analyse fine-resolution data, as well as simply visualising results.
An important benefit of starting with data at building level is the ability to aggregate results upwards without losing accuracy, still maintaining the ability to drill down to [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, GIS, Sustainability
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October 7th, 2009 by admin
I can get enough of all that sporty-sounding business jargon. “Sweat your asset.” “We’re in the same ballpark.” “Let’s get on the fast track.” At the end of a meeting I feel like I’ve had a workout.
Yet here I am thinking about companies using geographic information science (GIS) and I can’t avoid those clichés. Our industry is certainly becoming more mature – maybe even mainstream – but talking to clients across every sector, it’s clear that many organisations could do much more with their data using GIS. Many could still take it to the max, as it were. Their data is just not feeling the burn.
So I’m going to take on the role of personal trainer (not an everyday experience) and explore why this is so, what most public, private and third sector enterprises are doing with GIS now, and how much more they can achieve.
It’s not generally a [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: data, GIS, technology
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September 23rd, 2009 by admin
I spent an interesting day in Stratford ahead of the AGI conference this week, at an Oracle Spatial special-interest group organised by the Oracle User Group. Oracle Spatial is the mapping and spatial analysis add-on to the main platform from the database giant.
Oracle occupies an interesting position in the GI world: at once a significant challenge to established GIS vendors, and also challenged themselves by online mapping and data platforms. Would Release 2 of Oracle 11g make clear how they will move forward, I wondered?
The new spatial features in Oracle 11gR2 are certainly impressive. New functionality includes more complex network analysis including hierarchical shortest path analysis and a travelling salesman algorithm. It all felt good to me, perhaps because it makes the database technology seem more, well, GIS-like.
Enhancing usability
Speakers touched on some intriguing ways Oracle databases are powering applications with enhanced usability. Olivier Bucaille from Autodesk advocated using wizards [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: databases, technology
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September 9th, 2009 by admin
As expected, the recent paper ‘Can Totnes and district feed itself?’ (see earlier posts) has started stirring things up. An intriguing response comes from Colin Tudge, a director of LandShare CIC (co-funders of the research) and leader of the Campaign for Real Farming.
Colin’s thesis is that the food security issue is a simple matter of feeding the population as far as practical from local sources, recognising that some trade between specialist production areas will always be necessary. He argues that we simply need macronutrients (energy foods and protein), mainly in the shape of grains, and micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – and that by growing lots of wheat and encouraging more urban horticulture we can feed ourselves. I’m brutally over-summarising, of course, but he is keen to keep things simple.
This desire for simplicity makes him question the value of analyses like the land use mapping Geofutures did for this [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: food security, mapping, Sustainability
Posted in Sustainability | 1 Comment »
August 6th, 2009 by admin
Our friends at The Local Data Company have been busy analysing the data in Town Centre Intelligence (TCI), the all-singing all-dancing urban information tool we helped them develop.
You couldn’t move for stories about retail vacancies derived from TCI data last week, and no wonder – our high streets have a gap-toothed look about them just now, and the information from TCI is really too good to ignore. See how the BBC covered the story here.
TCI allows easy (and statistically robust) comparisons between town centres – defined consistently across Great Britain by the government boundaries defined by a Geofutures methodology.
This reveals significant regional variations in the vacancy rate – southern towns and cities are still faring much better than their northern counterparts, where vacancy rates have doubled since mid-2008, while Wales and the West are performing better than average with only a 25% increase in the same period.
A similar pattern [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: clients, products, town centres
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July 23rd, 2009 by admin
Fresh off the Geofutures GIS mashup assembly line is an interactive version of the maps we produced for the ‘foodshed’ surrounding Totnes and its neighbouring towns in Devon. This is a static image – please link through to see the functioning mashup. (Note that currently a bug in Firefox 4.0 prevents the data layers being visible – if you encounter this please use an alternative up to date browser – thanks.)
These maps are the results of our food security analysis published together with the Transition Network this month – you’ll find details of our methodology and a link to the full report in our earlier post.
The analysis is based on Defra land classifications, a permaculture model and a ‘food zoning’ model based on perishability and labour intensity, which places fruit and vegetable growing areas closest to the town, followed outwards by cereals and other food crops, dairy and beef, and [...] Continue Reading…
Tags: food security, mapping, Sustainability
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