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

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry