[postgis-users] ESRI and the Inspire Portal

[Juan Pedro Pérez Alcántara]

Hello all,

I'm new to the list, so I don't know if you discuss here general GIS
news like this one. If not, please forgive me and I will not make it
again :)

News reach me that the EUROSTAT, the central statistical agency of the
European Union, has granted a contract for building the web portal of
Inspire, the main European Commission geomatics and geographical data
initiative, aimed at the setting of all kind of standards european-wide,
to Terra GmbH, a business linked to ESRI Geoinformatik GmbH, ESRI dealer
for Germany. The link:

http://www.esri.com/news/releases/09_1qtr/european_commission.html

Don't get me wrong: I'm not an anti-ESRI zealot, being forced myself to
deal, or even interoperate (ouch!), with ESRI technology in many
projects. But I'm a convinced europeist (maybe too romantic or
idealist!), and Inspire is doing a lot of good in providing those
standards to all the involved governments to enhance interoperativity
and such. So imagine how disappointed I am. I though the people at
EUROSTAT should promote OS as a basic government goal, and that they
will be courageous enough to do the proper thing when facing
technologies choices.

Too many times I have a hard time trying to defend OSGeo technologies
against governmental agents that still seems OS as unreliable for many
tasks. Imagine my additional difficulties from now on when they heard
about this! It's a very bad example for many people that already where
confronting OS deployments at governmental level. (Not all is that bad,
obviously, here, in Andalusia, south Spain, is a very active and
committed team in the government promoting and deploying OS solutions,
but in the geomatics Desktop and even SDI scene there is still too much
resistance).

By the way, is there any document or site, aside from the ones in
Refractions, committed to explain case studies in the deployment of
PostGIS and other OS solutions?

Thanks for your attention,

Juan Pedro Pérez Alcántara