Andrew Ross at Ingres passed on this event invitation. This sounds great - and I think it's time to have such meetings in other locations... any takers?

I would like to announce a free ($0) geospatial event on June 2nd and 3rd in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This event hosted at the campus of Carleton University. It is an outreach event to showcase the best of open source geospatial software and give attendees the opportunity to listen to industry speakers.

The event is being organized by OSGeo, Ingres, and Carleton University. It is known as Geocamp2008 (also known as osbootcamp6). More information can be found at the osbootcamp web site under osbootcamp6. It can also be found under OSGeo's events calendar for June. This event takes place the day before the Geotec conference in Ottawa.

Geographic Business Solutions (GBS) doesn't want to compete with GPS players like Navman and Armada. The good news: they can offer up flexible, on-off solutions. The company took eight weeks to deliver a tracking system.

[It] allows Urgent Couriers' dispatchers to pinpoint the location of every courier on a map, zoom in on couriers and view all relevant job information. The allocation of jobs to each of the company's 85 contractors is also assisted by GPS ensuring that couriers closest to jobs are efficiently assigned to pick-ups, preventing the need for them to double back to jobs, and saving on time and fuel.
...
The new GPS system for Urgent Couriers is based on open source database PostgreSQL (with PostGIS) and an open source mapserver, UMN Mapserver. GBS built the interface and web functionality in Internet Explorer (7) and configured it to fit Urgent Couriers' dispatch system.

- m-net.com

For those who've not been following, Sun [corrected, originally said Oracle, oops] acquired MySQL, the folks behind the open source database, that among other things, supports spatial. Today word that IBM is part of a funding round for EnterpriseDB, one the big companies involved with PostgreSQL, another open source database. PostGIS adds spatial functionality to PostgreSQL.

via SlashdotI

"Oracle, Microsoft and open source look likely to fight it out for a GIS project to serve users in both the Justice Department and Te Puni Kokiri [New Zealand Government's principal adviser on the Crown's relationship with iwi, hapu and Maori]." The two groups are looking to work together on one set of requirements.

- Computerworld New Zealand

MapStudio OS is a Google open source project (LGPL license) that does what MapGuide Studio (an Autodesk products does, roughly). I thought the OS tool for this was going to be Web Studio from DM Solutions.

via a comment at SlashGeo

The Gotham Gazette's Wonkster reports the request from the site for crime data were denied by the city police force. NYC's ComStat (typo corrected per comment) program is widely praised, but the data unlike that from Chicago is not provided at the block level. The next step? A Freedom of Information Act request.

That post linked me to yet another interview with Adrian Holovaty, the fellow behind EveryBlock. Here he mentions one the open source mapping tools:

We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.

I know of Mapnik, but this forced me to finally confirm what I'd always suspected: the fellow behind it, Artem, was at Cadcorp with me back in the day. (Interview with Artem at Nestoria here.) The world is small my friend!

Also of note, an article by Paul Smith, EveryBlock's mapping guy, that explains the why and how of the solution.