Events

22nd May 2018 | QEII Centre, Westminster, London

The UK’s premier GIS event is fast approaching
Bringing together over 2,500 GIS enthusiasts, from a wide range of industries, to share knowledge and expertise at a sensational event you won’t want to miss!

Places are already going fast – so register free today to ensure your participation!

Visit the event website to register your place today and please mention that you heard about it from the SLA.

To register your interest visit the esri website.

Business success today requires precise knowledge about who and where customers are. Geography exposes insights about sales, competition, customer behavior and operations. Using Location Intelligence, companies can bring disparate data into one place and use location as a common reference to unlock insights about their business.

Join Esri and our partners as we share how business leaders in Retail, Real Estate, Retail Banking and Consumer Goods are using location and geography to drive success. Whether it’s by applying demographic, lifestyle and economic data to understand a location, or using maps and geospatial analysis to visualize IoT data, The Science of Where™ is how businesses understand why things happen where they do.

Hear from PWC, Belron, Pirelli, Knight Frank and many others how location solutions are used as part of their business decision making.

Places are already going fast – so register free today to ensure your participation!

You are invited to attend this Chinese New Year event, being run by GEOLYTIX, one of our two main sponsors.

• Date: Tuesday 6th February
• Time: 3pm
• Venue:The Royal Geographical Society – Kensington Gore, Kensington, London SW7 2AR

“Join us for location/network planning presentations with an international theme, networking and drinks.

If nothing else, you will get to see, up close, this magnificent 17th Century Chinese map of the world.”

To book, please email Sarah Hitchcock

University of Oxford – 1st December 2017 @ 10:00 am – 4:30 pm

The course will cover an introduction to R, how to load and manage spatial data and how to create maps using R and RStudio. We will show you appropriate ways of using classifications for choropleth maps, using loops in R to create multiple maps and some basic spatial analysis.

We will be using RStudio to work with the R environment. By the end of the course you will be able to load data into R, represent it effectively and be able to prepare an output quality map.

This course is ideal for anyone who wishes to use spatial data in their role. This includes academics, commercial users, government & other public sector researchers who have data with some spatial information (e.g. address, postcode, etc.) which they wish to show on a map. This course is also suitable for those who wish to have an overview of what spatial data can be used for. No previous experience of spatial data is required.

No experience of spatial data, GIS or scripting required. Some basic experience of using Google Earth / Maps would be beneficial.

Please note this course can be taken as a one-day course, or can also be taken in conjunction with another one-day course on 20 November 2017.

For further information or to register for the Oxford course please visit our website.

University of Liverpool – 21st November 2017 @ 10:00 am – 4:30 pm

The course will cover an introduction to R, how to load and manage spatial data and how to create maps using R and RStudio. We will show you appropriate ways of using classifications for choropleth maps, using loops in R to create multiple maps and some basic spatial analysis.

We will be using RStudio to work with the R environment. By the end of the course you will be able to load data into R, represent it effectively and be able to prepare an output quality map.

This course is ideal for anyone who wishes to use spatial data in their role. This includes academics, commercial users, government & other public sector researchers who have data with some spatial information (e.g. address, postcode, etc.) which they wish to show on a map. This course is also suitable for those who wish to have an overview of what spatial data can be used for. No previous experience of spatial data is required.

No experience of spatial data, GIS or scripting required. Some basic experience of using Google Earth / Maps would be beneficial.

Please note this course can be taken as a one-day course, or can also be taken in conjunction with another one-day course on 20 November 2017.

For further information or to register for the Liverpool course please visit our website.

• Host: Marks & Spencer
• Address: 5 Merchant Square, London, W2 1AS
• Nearest tube: Edgware Road
• Date: TUESDAY 21st November
• Time: 6pm for 6.30pm start; 8.00pm networking
• Networking afterwards at The Lockhourse, 3 Merchant Square

Introduction

This October meeting will explore a number of international perspectives affecting location analysts. Despite Brexit, overseas retail interest in the UK remains high. We consider the locational implications of inward retail investment, looking both at the luxury retail sector and at home improvement/DIY. We also take the chance of reviewing innovations in European data sources relevant to analysts, courtesy of Geolytix. Three speakers will present their perspectives on this topic and the session will conclude with the SLA’s annual best student dissertation awards.

Download presentations

1. “Forecasting for New Brand Entry”
   by Kerry Smith, Network Planning Manager, Bunnings
2. “The Geography of luxury retail & opportunity markets for 2018”
   by Marie Hickey, Savills
3. “Global data to support location analysis”
   by Blair Freebairn, Chief Executive Officer, GEOLYTIX

Speakers include:

1. Investment activity & the global luxury sector: Marie Hickey, Director of Retail & Hospitality Research, Savills (http://www.savills.co.uk/blog/author/33494/Marie-Hickey)
2. Forecasting for new brand entry: Kerry Smith, Network Planning Manager at Bunnings, UK (https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithkerry1/)
3. Global data to support location analysis, Blair Freebairn, Chief Executive Officer, GEOLYTIX (https://geolytix.net/?team)

SLA Student Awards

We will also take the opportunity of awarding this year’s SLA Student Awards at the meeting. This is an opportunity to reward graduate students as well as final year undergraduate students who have achieved excellence in the broad field of location analysis. The awards are open to students registered at UK Universities in the 2016/17 academic year and undertaking dissertations or extended projects involving location analysis.

You can read more here: https://thesla.org/the-sla-awards-2017/

SLA is sponsored by CACI and GEOLYTIX. We are grateful to them and to Marks & Spencer for providing the venue for this meeting.

Email info@thesla.org to register your interest.

Speakers’ Biographies

Marie Hickey, Director of Retail & Hospitality Research, Savills

Marie Hickey is a Director of Savills Commercial Research specialising in Central London retail and UK Hospitality sectors. She has a special interest in understanding retailing brands, wider global drivers and consumer trends in order to gain insight into the evolving retail and hotel landscape.

Kerry Smith, Network Planning Manager at Bunnings, UK

Kerry Smith has been Network Planning Manager for Bunnings UK since October 2016, where she has been building a team and developing the tools and processes required to lead the property strategy for Bunnings as they look to adapt and expand the original Homebase network across the UK and Ireland market. Before Bunnings, Kerry has held Property and Customer Insight roles at Sainsburys, Argos and Coles Group, Australia.

Blair Freebairn, Chief Executive Officer, GEOLYTIX

Blair has built gravity models for 10 of the 15 largest retailers the last 20 years. Previously head of analytics at MapInfo UK, in September 2011 he took the plunge, and set up his own business focused on helping businesses solve problems where location matters – GEOLYTIX was born.

Email info@thesla.org to register your interest.

University of Liverpool – 20th November 2017 @ 10:00 am – 4:30 pm

This course will introduce spatial data and show you how to import and display spatial data with the free open source GIS program QGIS. We will also show you how to create choropleth maps and explain appropriate methods of visualising spatial data. We will also cover some basic spatial data analysis (e.g. calculating rates).

This course is ideal for anyone who wishes to use spatial data in their role. This includes academics, commercial users, government & other public sector researchers who have data with some spatial information (e.g. address, postcode, etc.) which they wish to show on a map. This course is also suitable for those who wish to have an overview of what spatial data can be used for. No previous experience of spatial data is required.
No previous experience of GIS or QGIS is required, but some experience of using spatial data will be beneficial.

Please note this course can be taken as a one-day course, or can also be taken in conjunction with another one-day course on 21 November 2017 (Liverpool) or 1 December 2017 (Oxford).

For further information or to register for this course please use the link for our CDRC Training and Capacity building website.