Wednesday 7 October 2009

Pushing OpenSource in a grant bid

Today I've been writing a section on a research grant (as well as fixing the prof's typos and spellong misteaks).  It's great to be able to put the following into a proposal:

"Software and accompanying documentation and training tools developed and released during the programme will be made available under an Open Source license. This will maximise its accessibility to users, especially those working in health institutions in developing countries. It also enables the project to accept improvements and fixes in the software from the wider community.


The project will also commit to using Free and Open Source software as widely as possible within the research team, so that software solutions are developed that do not have proprietary components as part of their architecture".


The computing infrastructure will include a database server (running PostGIS), a front-end (running Apache and serving maps via OpenLayers and maybe WFS/WMS services), and two compute engines churning out statistics with R. It'll be fun to put all these things together if we get the grant. I'm sure I'll blog the result when we get it.

Saturday 3 October 2009

Tools I Use

This is just a list of software I use for work. Is there some way I can make these keywords on the blog?

All good free and open source stuff. With these things I can build desktop applications, web maps, spatial data infrastructure and all that good stuff.

GeoIntroduction

Morning all. This is my new blog site for all things generally work-related.

I work in the School of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University within the 'CHICAS' group - Combining Health Information, Computation, and Statistics'. Basically a group of numerates doing data analysis of anything health or biomedicine related.

Most of my activity centres round geographic data, so here I'll be posting useful snippets, questions, comments, rants and opinions, which will not necessarily be those of my employer. I might also wander off into general computing and IT areas.