Friday, January 30. 2009

Wired Profiles TOPP's (OpenGeo's) Angel

You may not know the name Mark Gorton, but he's the guy with the money that funded GeoServer and some of the other open source goodies available for geospatial analysis. In 1999 he founded The Open Planning Project, TOPP, the geospatial division of which now has been renamed OpenGeo. The article highlights how the money from one community driven effort (P2P data sharing company LimeWire) allowed him to pursue a dream of open tools for urban planning.

One quotes stood out for me:

"It [open access to geodata] didn't really exist before [GeoServer]. Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri [sic]. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." - Gorton

He is one of the visionaries who are helping morph GIS for these times.

- Wired Epicenter Blog

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source at 09:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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