[Aust-NZ] Impressions of FOSS4G2007

[Simon O'Keefe]

Hi All,

I'm now settled back home in Australia after attending the FOSS4G2007
conference. Here's what I learnt.

By way of some background, I specialise in providing GIS consulting
services to Victorian (AU) municipalities, and my only experience so far
of open source geospatial software has been just using FWTools to do
some batch file conversions. So the conference was a real eye-opener for
me, seeing teams of dedicated developers producing and showing off some
surprisingly sophisticated products and solutions.

I went to FOSS4G2007 hoping to learn about the various tools I would
need in order to develop a web-based GIS that I could centrally manage
on behalf of my clients. What I didn't expect to find was a ready-to-use
application that worked the way I needed out of the box.

But I found exactly that in 'MapGuide Open Source', as demoed by the
City of Nanaimo (BC, Canada) at a 10-minute lunchtime demo on the first
day. I could have gone home there and then! But over the remainder of
the conference, I had the opportunity to see MapGuide in action in other
scenarios, chat to the MapGuide developers, and also to DM Solutions,
who are doing some nice add-on components to MapGuide and contributing
their work back to the core product. As well as getting a glimpse at the
technology behind the software on display, I also gained an appreciation
of open source business models, and what motivates companies to develop
in open source. I know that DM Solutions will be my first point of call
when I need help customising MapGuide.

Brian Bishop, from this mailing list, mentioned in his email from the
conference the Spatial Data Integrator product by CampToCamp. I think
it's worth repeating. It's basically a free and open source 'FME'. It
means my clients (or I) don't have to pay for a $5000 version of FME
each just to do scheduled data extraction tasks. (Currently I use
MapBasic scripts, but this looks a lot more robust.) I talked to one of
the developers, and he said they were due to release a new version about
now. There's not much information about this product on the web yet (in
English anyway), but I've added myself to their announcement mailing
list:
http://www.talend.com/campaign/campaign.php?id=191&src=C2cInitial_sep07

At the conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Brian Bishop and Tim
Bowden from this mailing list. Tim's repeated proclamation at the end of
the conference that 'GIS Is Dead' provided a few laughs. I think his
point was that geospatial information shouldn't be treated any
differently to other corporate information. I agree. Still, I'll
continue to use the term 'GIS' to describe the marketplace in which I
operate. An alternative term like 'The Market For Geospatial Products
And Services Left Wanting By Big Spatial And Non-Spatial Software
Vendors' seems like a bit of a mouthful to me.

So, I left the conference happy, knowing that I'm now armed with
everything I need to get moving on my web-based GIS project. But I also
discovered a real community and common understanding of what the world
should look like - one in which developers naturally share and build on
each other's work, benefiting everyone involved. Recurring themes of the
conference seemed to be OpenLayers, QGIS, PostGIS, Mapserver, MapGuide,
OSGeo, Google, and of course, ESRI bashing.

Will I go to next year's conference in South Africa? If I do, I'll
either be showing off my awesome new web-based municipal GIS (sorry
Tim), or desperately scouring the trade booths for help.

Cheers,

Simon



__________________________________
Simon O'Keefe
GIS & Mapping Specialist
Groundtruth Mapping Systems
mobile: 0409 413 890
office: 03 9017 6850
email: sok at groundtruth.com.au
web:   www.groundtruth.com.au
__________________________________