[Aust-NZ] FOSS4G Day 3

[Brian Bishop]

Managed to survive the conference dinner tonight, held in the BC
Museum. Great venue and talked to 2 of the 3 NZers at the conference.
Apart from Tim Bowden and a couple of others, have not met many
Aussies at the conference. This indicates that the Australian public
are missing out on a lot of innovative concepts in spatial systems and
public participation. (Any Aussie at the conference with a different
view?)
Learnt last night that my colleague Liz, had travel problems and could
not make the conference. It would be really useful to be part of a
team covering the interesting presentations. For example tomorrow
morning, the first half hour session has 5 presentations, 3 of them
are my priority areas. Again I probably will miss the fun one.

An important question for me is, now that I have some understanding of
the components for a robust Spatial Data Infrastructure, where is the
glue to tie these components together. Proprietary tools like FME have
been suggested, however the team at Camptocamp demonstrated a toolset
that looks promising. Being Opensource, can start experimenting
straight away.

Openlayers is the talk of the web presentation clients, however
Mapbuilder and Ka-Map  are being used for some cool applications also.
Adding analysis muscle to the newer desktop clients is a theme, with
uDig, gzSIG and Qgis all featuring analysis extensions. Grass is still
there and gaining more of everything you would expect from a mature
high end GIS. Check out JGrass.org if you are interested in this area.
The Qgis team needs C++ programmers to help with bug squashing. This
is a great way for programmers to start helping with an opensource
project.

Goodnight and goodluck.
Brian