[Dutch] [OSGeo-Discuss] report OSGeo track at GWF 2013

Do mei 23 00:34:27 PDT 2013

Hi Paul, 

Dank voor deze impressie.

Was er voor je gevoel een beetje integratie tussen deze open source track en
de rest van het GWF-event. 

Of waren we een "Gallisch dorpje"   ;-)

Groet, 

Gert-Jan

Van: discuss-bounces op lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces op lists.osgeo.org] Namens Paul van Genuchten
Verzonden: vrijdag 17 mei 2013 9:52
Aan: discuss op lists.osgeo.org; 'dutch'
Onderwerp: [OSGeo-Discuss] report OSGeo track at GWF 2013

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component of a product can get outdated.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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