OSG 05 - Beyond Abutters

Kevin Flanders showed off the latest updates to his MapServer implementations (Maps Online) for small towns (and states) in (and beyond) New England. His theme: “it’s not about abutters lists anymore.” Instead, “it’s about access.” By that he means making the available data accessible to those who need it (residents and others) via a simple interface, and then enabling different players in the community (real estate agents, chambers of commerce) to use that same data. “It’s time to share these maps.”

OSG 05 Lightning Talks

This is a great idea - give some of the key project leaders five minutes to spew forth on a topic of their choice. Some used it to speak of their works in progress. Allan Doyle described EOGEO, a non-profit aimed at supporting NGOs with open source geospatial software. Daniel Morissette and a colleague updated attendees on maptools.org and Ka-Map two of DM Solutions offerings to the open source world, Norman Vine demoed an open source ArcGlobe-type app, osgPlanet built on OSSIM. Frank Warmerdam shared the going’s on with GDAL and OGR. One highlight: the use of SWIG (a tool for making generic wrappers that allow support for multiple languages to use key libraries) on GDAL. There was an overview of newly release uDIG 1.0 from Refractions Research, Tyler Mitchell speaking about why he wrote his just released Web Mapping book, and Sean Gilles speaking to MapScript and asking for help.

The coolest five minute talk was from Schuyler Erle, one of the co-authors of Mapping Hacks. He decided not to speak about the book, nor about the Locative Media Toolkit (among other things, a way of linking photos to locations on maps) but rather argued why we need a distributed WMS cache for data. Recall that NASA World Wind is an open source version of a “Keyhole-like” flythroughs using satellite imagery. The demand on it has been intense, prompting Skyler to offer that the answer is a distributed peer to peer cache to pull the data from a single server and distribute it. Eventually, he suggests the original WMS need not even be on the NET! “Now,” he concluded, “we just have to do it!”

OSG 05 Keynote

The keynote was from one of the key GRASS developers, Markus Neteler. He made it clear that he’s a geographer first and still not a programmer. The history and functionality of the program is quite rich and it runs on many, many platforms. The big news for the end-user community is the use of QGIS, the new open source darling of the desktop, as a “front end” to GRASS. One big challenge in open source GIS is creating pretty output. GRASS has always had powerful, but challenging to use layout tools and postscript support. Now that’s accessible via QGIS.

The new interfaces make GRASS ready for everyday use for the non-professional. It supports the most platforms of perhaps any GIS. The downloadable install CDs make the software easy to install, too. The vector engine was just rewritten, he suggests that it may be time to update the raster engine, too.

OSG 05 Commercial Perspectives

Three commercial vendors stepped up to explore how open source fits into their world. Representatives from IONIC, ER Mapper and Local Matters walked through their experiences. One quote from Perry Ellis of Local Matters, the founders of MapQuest, “Google did something that MapQuest should have done five years agoЕ”

OSG 05 DemoFest!

The Open Source Geospatial Conference began yesterday with a series of sold-out half day workshops and an EOGEO meeting. The buzz of energy was high as I joined the “demo fest” in the afternoon. Pods of people clustered around attendees and vendors showing of their apps.

Among the few I had a chance to see where Brent Wood’s (of NIWA, New Zealand’s leading provider of atmospheric and aquatic science and associated commercial services.) solution for getting some of his country’s public data out into the public. As a “hobby” he converted the data from its proprietary format to shape files and shows if of with open source QGIS. The data is available or NZ$2,500 with a very open license. Some vendors convert it and then package it with their proprietary software and offer that as a product. He’s taken a different tactic, making the data available and noting the availability of free open source software. The work does at his real job is equally interesting. He uses visualization tools to explore fisheries and other marine data. He uses GMT to reveal where fish are caught across the year. The locations actually move closer and further from shore as revealed by an animation of slides linked together. Wood also sees the power of 3D, commenting that GIS doesn’t have 3D, it has surfaces. So, he needed to find a better solution. He found OpenDX (open data explorer) a product open sourced by IBM.  It’s ability to elegantly display many variables, including location, is quite impressive. He notes that once all the stakeholders see the actual data, they hold less tightly to their agendas and can get work done.

Todd Brennigmeyer of SAIC was showing of a MapServer app which delivers architectural archeological data of Western Greece stored in PostGIS. It’s a sort of research project for SIAC based on work he began while doing his dissertation about Greece. Most impressive was a redlining capability that allowed direct creation of points, lines and polygons into the PostGIS database.  As he put it, “customers are looking for low cost ways to manage and use their data.”

Jeremy Morley of University College London offered his work on ICEDS (Integrated CEOS [Committee for Earth Observing Systems] European Data Server), a MapServer-based solution that delivers Landsat and SRTM data via Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS). It grew out of a CEOS initiative. The site is slick but it offers not just pointers to the software on which its based, but also a “recipe” for building one’s own portal. Morley notes that severing up the data via WMS is just a start, he’s looking forward to wider use of WCS, which delivers not just pictures of the data, but the data itself, allowing for service chaining and other advanced Web services type uses.