[OSGeo-Discuss] report OSGeo track at GWF 2013

Fri May 17 01:08:22 PDT 2013

Paul,

thanks so much for your tremendous efforts in this regard and spreading the word of OsGeo!

Best regards,
Bart

-- 
Bart van den Eijnden
OSGIS - http://osgis.nl

On May 17, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Paul van Genuchten <paul.vangenuchten at geocat.net> wrote:

> Hi list at the 2013 edition of Geospatial World Forum held in Rotterdam 13-16 may 2013 OSGeo cohosted a seminar on Open Source (http://geospatialworldforum.org/2013/open_pr.htm). This document shortly describes the key points raised in each presentation.
>  
> Chair/Organiser: Paul van Genuchten - GeoCat/OSGeo.nl - NL
>  
> Just vd Broecke - OSGeo.nl board - NL
> Just gave an introduction to 'Open', touching on open data, open standards, open source and open communities. Also he pointed out the parts of the software value chain where Open Source companies generally make their earnings, since the usual business case of selling licenses does not apply here.
>  
> Marjan Bevelander - Dutch Provinces - NL
> Marjan presented on the open source strategy by the cooperating Dutch regional governments. She explained this on two recent projects, the implementation of Inspire Directive and the revitalization of Flamingo Geo CMS.
>  
> Mark Vloermans - Flamingo Geo CMS Community - NL
> Mark then continued with his efforts to put a vivid community in place to support the Flamingo Geo CMS. He claimed a system as user friendly as this, is very important for the Open Source Sector, since the sector has a very technical feel.
>  
> Chris van Lith - B3Partners - NL
> As one of the partners responsible for implementing Flamingo Geo CMS, Chris continued with the design motivation of the CMS platform behind Flamingo Geo CMS. Recent developments around their former Flash based Viewer led him to claim that any GIS framework should prepare for the inevitable: Any component of a product can get outdated. In that case you'd need to be productive with a new component asap, by limiting the dependencies between components and have         components interact using Open Standards. For example OpenLayers, now basis of many map viewing frameworks, will soon be replaced by either OpenLayers 3, Leaflet, D3 or ...
>  
> Simone Giannecchini - GeoSolutions - IT
> Simone introduced us to the world of enterprise support on open source geospatial infrastructures. You'll get the best support from the people actually involved in the projects, in his case geotools, geoserver, geonetwork. Stay away from forks and vampires, in the end they are no better than proprietary software.
>  
> Arnulf Christl – Metaspatial - DE
> Arnulf set up his presentation around Open Data. Types of open data where explained (Community driven, Government Data, Proprietary Data in a Freemium Model (open content?)), types of data licenses (ODBL, Gov Open Data, CCO) and options these open data licenses offer to SME to create new business opportunities. As an example he showed us a map based on Open Street Map and Ordinate Survey data printed on a piece of water resistant cloth.
> http://metaspatial.net/conferences/gwf2013_opendata.html
>  
> Andrew Ross - Eclipse Foundation Inc - CA
> Andrew pointed our attention to the importance of having a foundation to manage an open source software project as it gets bigger. Some existing foundations exist where one can register a project. The Eclipse foundation recently started a locationtech workinggroup for geospatial initiatives.
>  
> Paolo Cavallini – Faunalia - IT
> Paolo notified us on some recent developments in QGIS. His first inventarization learned that over 50% of the participants in the room have used QGis at some time. Recent developments include a QGIS server implementation (WMS,WFS,WFS-t), a central repository with plugin's, a templated client plot (which can also be used in server implementation), labels based on expressions.
>  
> Jorge Samuel Mendes de Jesus - ISRIC World Soil Information - NL
> ISRIC operates a global database with soil profiles under GEOSS. The infrastructure for storing, converting, managing and accessing the profiles is based mainly on Open Source products like Geoserver, pyWPS, Geonetwork, PostGIS and Django. ISRIC has many temporary international students and they seem to replicate the ISRIC architecture at their home institutes.
>  
> Oliver Morris & Alex Rushfort - Neftex Inc - UK
> Neftex provides geological data services to the mining industry. They operate a geological world model ranging back to 600m bc. They use an Open Source stack to deliver the frequently updated data to their customers. The stack contains PostGis, Geoserver and a WebMapper based on OpenLayers/GeoEXT/GXP. Compared to their former platforms open source facilitated them to do advanced spatial representations (like display in a polar projection) without the interface getting complicated and without substantial loss of performance.
>  
> Discussion
> With only a few minutes left we discussed how open source components can operate together with proprietary products in any SDI. It appears to be actually the other way around, you won't find any SDI that does not contain open source components, being it Linux, Apache, GDAL, Mapserver, PostGIS, QGIS, R and/or Leaflet/Openlayers. Another question from the public stated that many standards registered at OGC/ISO are actually not that 'open', and would not really fit in today's track. However it's like open data and open source, you have many degrees of 'open'. There is no yes-no answer to that. For sure ISO standards require a fee to download and to vote for an OGC standard, you have to be a full member. However the idea behind the standards is to open up the products involved to facilitate interoperability, which fits very nicely in the 'open' strategy.
>  
> Conclusion
> We had a wide range of presentations today, however some keywords where repeated through all presentations. OGC standards like WMS/WFS/CSW, Open Data and components like GDAL, OpenLayers, Geonetwork, Geoserver provide enough collectivity to share experiences. It stroke me that in many presentations it was mentioned that local organizations which before wouldn't want to work together, actually start cooperating these days, mayor initiatives like GEOSS and Inspire seem to be a main trigger in that process. With an  attendance ranging from 25 to 50 the seminar was quite well visited (considering the 8! parallel tracks), and the exposure as 'conference partner' was quite high. However the investments were also quite substantial (mainly due to all speakers needing to pay a considerable entrance fee). Next year the forum will be held in Geneva (may 2014), anybody interested in taking the lead for this one?
>  
> 
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