[Buildingdata] Update on Edinburgh buildings, CAD software, etc

[Jo Walsh]

dear buildingdata,

Owe you all a quick status update about our progress in Edinburgh -
both great success and great failure.

Success: Met with the space managers (responsible for the planning, 
building and environmental data). They are lovely, friendly and 
open-minded, and very receptive to opening their data. In return EDINA 
folks could provide some online mapping expertise, do georeferencing.
Informatics folk have enough complementary data to link floor plans to 
people and publications, as well as energy use, room area data, all 
sorts of interestingness.

Failure: i've so far been unable to even *look at*, let alone 
understand, the AutoCAD .dwgs that the space managers sent us. So i have 
started a blog, documenting my struggles to work with the data and my 
thoughts about the struggles: http://cadventures.wordpress.com/ and am 
asking around for advice I can put on the blog, and strategies to try, 
from my friends in the open source GIS community.

In terms of the funded part of the project (Linked Data Focus) - we are 
running out of money just as it was starting to get interesting (as we 
started with bibliographic data, repository data, organisational data, 
and only worked our way around to building and planning data right at 
the end.)

I know, Southampton got all that way without formal support, only with 
local institutional support in terms of time, and Chris's energy.
We are building the case for that kind of institutional support - the 
head of IS & Library Services is supportive and is putting the case to 
some kind of Congress on the 23rd, a senior academic at Informatics has 
been buttering him up *and* working on some Linked Data.

I am on holiday this week, which is why I have time to get something 
done. We have about enough funds left to cover one to two days a week of 
me working on the Linked Data Focus project until the end of this year, 
but that's meant to be writing and talking (trying to digest what we 
have learned in order to help others not make the same mistakes, and 
persuade others to digest and write as well). The CAD problem is a very 
deep one - not just about proprietary formats but about the whole of 
free software culture and digital enclosure by inches.

Anyway, figured out enough that I can almost go on holiday, the sun is 
shining, so I am off up Arthur's Seat rather than incur a migraine.









-- 
Jo Walsh

Unlock places - http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/
phone: +44 (0)131 650 2973
skype: metazool