This post is to honour Ada Lovelace Day in the context of geospatial issues.

First some introductory comments about this blog.

Thanks to those who commented on the first blog post - and apologies for the gap between that post and this one. This blog is for discussion of our meetings to help create a discussion around the many fascinating issues raised both for the benefit of those who can attend and also for those who could not. We hope it complements the resources on our website.

As I hope people appreciate all this is time consuming so I'd invite any SG member who'd like to write a blog about a BCS Geospatial or other relevant meeting they attend to send me contributions and I am happy to post them here in their name or anonymously if they prefer.

So to Ada Lovelace, an inspirational woman at the start of the computing industry. Whilst she came from a remarkable family, we shouldn't forget the culturally embedded views of women at that time - e.g. before they had the vote and when Mary Ann Evans had to publish as George Eliot.

My impression is that women are under-represented in geospatial and this is perhaps borne out by the fact that some countries have started initiatives such as "Women in Spatial".

Nevertheless we have some great examples here e.g. recently we had an inspiring talk on Open Source GIS from Jo Cook see http://geospatial.bcs.org/web/?q=osgeo-presentation.

And we should not forget that we now have the first woman Director General of Ordnance Survey in Vanessa Lawrence.

All this is encouraging however I feel two further points need to be made...

First, the research does demonstrate that there are gender differences in wayfinding ability - see for example here.

NB: this appears just to be the case - please don't shoot the messenger!

There are wayfinding programmes in major cities e.g. the Legible London programme, whose aim is to find a design for wayfinding which works for women as well as men and this is based around features such as "egocentric mapping" (as opposed to "exocentric mapping") and use of 3D representations of buildings (an interesting potential application for CityGML). Anyone who goes shopping in Oxford Street in London can see examples of these maps around Bond Street tube station. You can also see them in Bristol.

Second, slightly less serious point, is what is the impact of post-modernism and gender studies on events such as Ada Lovelace Day? Now that geospatial information is uniquitous - one one's phone, in one's tweets, on SatNav, on the web (social networking and general) - this is becoming a pressing issue.

However, this appears to be a relatively under-researched issue - surely the world is missing a PhD thesis here!

Our most recent meeting was on "Geospatial Aspects of Mobile Social Networking - Killer App or a Blind Alley?". This was a fascinating discussion however the "conclusion" was that the killer app has yet to be found - perhaps gender theory can assist, in all seriousness who knows?

In conclusion, this is a great day to remember a pioneering woman who was ahead of her time. Let's hope her time has now come.