Projects and engagements
Registers of Scotland
I worked a number of contracts with Registers of Scotland (RoS) from 2018 to 2023:
- From August 2018 to October 2022, I was consulting for the mapping team:
- I contributed to the implementation of new backend systems for the management of the cadastral map. The Digital Mapping System (DMS) initially used by RoS predates Y2K and has served the company well. In terms of interoperability and ease of integration, however, it fell short of what can be provided with modern stacks. I was part of the team aiming to replace this system with a host of front-end and backend systems more amenable to refreshed business processes;
- I helped bootstrap the Land Register Maintenance project aiming to replace the older Map Base Maintenance process (MBM). The MBM team has the herculean (and sisyphean) task of keeping the cadastral map up to date with the Ordnance Survey maps. A proportion of their workload can be automated: change detection, polygon snapping and map declutering can be dealt with modern GIS libraries and some bespoke algorithms. I had the pleasure to present the pilot project in a lightning talk at PyData Edinburgh (the slides are here).
- Since October 2022: I have been consulting for the data team, working on digital improvements:
- The data team has been assembling a data warehouse and is working to derisk a number of business processes, some of which provide RoS's data interface to the external world. I am trying to help with this effort.
Other works
The themes of the following personal projects overlap with those of my professional engagement and may be of interest to the readers of this page:
- mapping in Wales: open data, WikiData,
Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap mix up well. I produced a proof-of-concept
app combining the Welsh OSM map with Welsh Wikipedia content
demonstrating a possible such mix. This is not much to look at, but was a fun project that got me in touch with
interesting people, and seemed to be of interest to various actors in that field:
- the app was mentioned by the National Library of Wales in their blog: Decolonising Welsh Mapping;
- it was also mentioned in Data Orchard's blog: Building closer links between OpenStreetMap and Wikidata in Wales.