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!”