[OSGeo-Discuss] GeoWeb 2008 trip report

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Last week, GeoWeb 2008 (www.geowebconference.org) was held in the lovely
city of Vancouver, BC.  Three notable OSGeo-related events occurred
there...


First, the BC Chapter of OSGeo met for an evening at the offices of
Sierra Systems, high up overlooking the bay.  After much pizza was
consumed, there were two talks.  The first was about wikieducator.org (I
didn't catch the presenter's name): they're receptive to contributed
content from OSGeo-type folks.  The second was by Martin Kyle, about
computer security threats and, perhaps, what could be envisioned for
geo-specific security-related issues.  Thanks to Martin for hosting.


Second, a 1-hour panel session on Open Source Servers was held, hosted
by yours truly with able panelists Paul Ramsey, Justin Deoliveira, and
Bob Bray.  Paul presented a now-infamous set of MapServer slides.  The
attendance was good, and we had some good questions and discussions.  My
thanks again to Paul, Justin, and Bob for participating.


Third, we awarded two prizes for the Student Competition.  The
competition required use of open source software for the projects; OSGeo
was one of the sponsors and as such I was one of the judges.  First
prize went to Tobias Fleischmann (Paris Lodron University Salzburg,
Germany) for "Web Processing Service for Moving Objects Analysis", which
was built using deegree.  Second prize went to Tran Tho Ha and Nguyen
Thi Thanh Thuy (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) for "e-Collaboration for
DGPS/GPS data distribution and receiver device evaluation", which used
PostGIS, MapScript, and OpenLayers.  Congratulations to both winners!


Finally, just for kicks, I'll offer the following bits of geotrivia I
collected during the conference:

  * "A GPS with a bullet hole in it is a paperweight.  A paper map with
a bullet hole
     in it is a paper map with a bullet hole in it."  (attributed to the
US Marine Corps)

  * Tobler's First Law of Geography: "Nearby things are more similar
than distant things."

  * new term I learned: "city furniture" - refers to features of the
urban landscape such
    as park benches, bus shelters, street lamps, etc

  * "The amount of metadata needed for a piece of data varies with the
'social distance'
    from me to my data consumer."  (Michael Goodchild)

  * For Amazon's web services, 85% use the REST API and 15% use the SOAP
API.  (quoted
    by Satish S. of ESRI)

  * On the Vancouver transit system today, 100 of 144 bus routes are
under detours, due
    to 2010 Olympics work.  (Peter Ladner, Vancouver deputy mayor)

  * 30% of all 911 calls are not associated with a street address.
(Talbot Brooks)


-mpg