[OSGeo Africa] Feedback from FOSS4G Barcelona

[Frank Sokolic]

Hi all,

[apologies for the long post]


I've just returned from the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona and thought I'd share some thoughts on the conference for those who couldn't make it. There were a lot more delegates (~870) attending the conference this year than attended either Sydney 2009 or Cape Town 2008. If I remember correctly there were just less than 500 people at the Cape Town event. Europe had by far the most delegates (~470) with about 100 coming from Spain alone. I think that the organisers underestimated the number of people who would attend and many of the lecture rooms were filled to overflowing with people having to sit on the floor. Perhaps they based their projections on attendances at Cape Town &Sydney, which are both a long way from the centres of FOSS development in Europe and North America. There were also only 120 speaker slots available even though 360 abstracts were submitted, surely an early indication that large numbers would be attending the conference? Two thirds of the abstracts were rejected, many of them because there simply weren't enough slots in the programme.

Talks and tutorials were presented in 7 parallel sessions so it was sometimes difficult to choose which ones to miss as there were so many good presentations on offer. I tended to go for those covering map servers as that is where my current interest lies. Perhaps the most interesting session was the annual WMS shootout, which pitched different map servers against one other and compared their speeds. In the past this shootout had been dominated by GeoServer and MapServer but this year there were 9 projects participating (2010.foss4g.org/wms_benchmarking.php). MapServer won this shootout easily and was the fastest WMS on offer. I was surprised at this as I had expected GeoServer to be as fast if not faster. A reason for this is that the WMSs were tested using extremely large shape files (some of them also with DBF files of several Gb) and this resulted in many WMSs becoming disk-bound and not able to read everything from cache most of the time. The MapServer developers were able to update their code in time to overcome this problem and hence their clear speed advantage.

OpenLayers still seems to be the most popular means of placing interactive maps on web pages. However, there are a now a number of projects aimed at providing 'thick clients' where the web browser is given a lot of the functionality found in desktop GIS programs. GeoExt, MapFish and Geomajas are examples of these projects and there were interesting presentations on all three. Have a look at www.geoext.org, geomajas.org and trac.osgeo.org/fusion/ for more information.

With projects like OpenLayers, MapServer and GeoServer now being considered 'mature', there was a focus on speeding up the delivery of map tiles to the end user. TileCache and GeowebCache have been around for a while but there now good alternatives available. These include tile servers like MapProxy and TileSeeder. At one of the presentations a suggestion was made that future FOSS4G conferences should also include a Tile Server Shootout along the lines of the WMS Shootout described above.

On the desktop GIS side, I attended the Quantum GIS breakout session in which QGIS developers and users discussed current and future developments. We were shown a very interesting 3D extension currently under development and there was also much discussion about QGIS and SLD and how moving towards the use of SLD would be very desirable. Reprojection on the fly of raster datasets was also added to the QGIS wish list.

My overall impression of the conference is that the internet/web-based geoservices is still very much where a lot of development is taking place. Many of the presentations reflected this and there seemed to be less emphasis on desktop GISs. There was also much interest in mobile GIS, 3D rendering and data access. As Schuyler Erle said to developers in his plenary address, 'your software is useless [...dramatic pause...] without data!'

Because there were so many simultaneous presentations I could only attend about 15% of the talks on offer. My experience of the conference is surely quite different from other people so it would be great to get feedback from some of the other African delegates who attended the conference.

Frank.
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