Welcome.

This is my somewhat neglected home on the net. You've probably stumbled across it because you were curious about my email address, or knew me once and wonder what I am up to these days.

As a tradition, I lose all my archives in a disk crash every few years. So it goes. Database-backed stuff rots away the quickest, so frot.org is now just a few flat files webarchived from what used to be a much bigger website. Which once used to say things like "I've just found this wonderful new thing called the wiki", or "I don't like the looks of these banner adverts. What terrible things will happen to the web when it is commercialised?".

I started one of these throwaway blogs, the nice kind that you write email to and then forget about. That's a better place to look if you want to find out what I'm up to these days. But in short:

I'm working at EDINA, an academic data centre hosted at the University of Edinburgh. I'm managing some web services collectively called Unlock, that help non-GIS-experts do interesting things with the geographic information hidden in their archives. I'm trying to blog a bit about Unlock, too.

In summer 2009 I stood down from the board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation after 3 years. I got into this after co-authoring Mapping Hacks. Amazingly, I am now getting negative royalties from physical sales of this book.

I got involved with the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004 and have been on its board for the last few years. It has been wonderful to see OKF's recent influx of energy, support and acceptance.

For a couple of years I was supported by Terradue to work on combining an RDF/Linked Data approach with INSPIRE standards for geographic information. Some prototyping, some writing, some still visible as duetopia.

I did a lot of freelance research under the optimistic banner of "software art". I was part of a wonderful scene centred on the old Limehouse Town Hall in east London. Free networks, community currencies, psychogeography, a self-organising university.

I did a conference talk in 2003 called Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web, which set me off down this long road. Goodness knows, the circle seems to be closing, and I may be able to do something new in the foreseeable future.

I made a wonderful little boy. He is stubborn and stoic and sweet, and his presence in my life has slowed me down a lot, which is a Good Thing. He has a devoted stay-at-home dad; I am lucky.

Here follow a few bits and pieces of quite random writing, rescued from old versions of this website.

Translations of Borges' El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan - in various states of incompleteness.
Was is Tausch? - a game of sharing without measuring.
Semantic City, a lecture at the Architecture Association School in 2005.
On why Thorstein Veblen's theory of fashion economics explains so much.
Screws, Software and Standards

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