[Aust-NZ] Update on who is doing what with FOSS4G in AustNZ [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Jody Garnett]

HI Bruce

I am not sure what I am doing with foss4g software in the region - we have been a bit quiet around these parts have we not? I am glad the Spatial at Gov conference went well; it would be good to hear a few more accounts on what went on.

As for me - projects:

WIth the GeoServer project I am simply marking time; reviewing proposals as they come through and looking forward to getting work in the area. You asked a year or so ago about geoserver joining the osgeo foundation; a step we did take (and have entered incubation); however progress has been non existent; as there is little to motivate volunteers in this area. There have been all manner of interesting proposals being accepted for GeoServer; the most exciting for me is the resurrection of the configuration backed by a database design (the original goal of GeoServer 2.0 from an internals point of view is to back the configuration on to a database for ease of managing a cluster of computers). There have also been a vast number of improvements in rendering; and even some progress towards rendering complex features.

With GeoTools I am just back from a very successful workshop at foss4g and am really happy with the usability improvements made to facilitate that workshop. Personally I am taking the wps client module under my wing as a volunteer in an effort to track what is going on with the standard and encourage adoption. I found the adoption of the CAT standard to be held back by the lack of a client library (something I was never able to obtain funding for) and I would like to ensure that the WPS adoption is not stagnated in a similar fashion. The GeoTools project is actually running at a good rate with plenty of funded development; smooth procedures allowing the development teams to collaborate - a real pleasure to be involved. From the Australian perspective plenty of local involvement thanks to Ben and co. Indeed they are slowly whittling the feature model into a sharp point. However some of the older work is now being sent out to pasture; including the interesting crowdsourcing work done by landgate some years back.

With uDig I have not managed to catch up to what has been a very active community. The project recently switch over to GIT; which has facilitated the contribution of a number of interesting plugins (in the area of fancy style dialogs, support for more tile server standards etc..). At the foss4g conference I met several teams which were working productively but being very quiet about it. Indeed they had all kinds of amazing things working; most interestingly to the development community was they use of Tycho (a maven 3 build system for Eclipse RCP applications).

Beyond individual projects - industry-wise I have taken an interest in the state of play for the web processing service standard (not strictly open source on this one; more focused on seeing that the standard makes sense and that there is interoperability between different implementations). I was taken aback by the level of excitement and passion at this years foss4g conference; and am thinking of organising a wps shoot out next year's conference.

Other than that I have been talking to developers in the Brisbane area; and have found that nobody was aware of the Aust-NZ email list; so some local advocacy is needed. Not sure if I will work on that or projects :-)

Jody

On 12/10/2010, at 7:20 AM, Bruce Bannerman wrote:

> Following on from the Spatial at Gov conference and the number of projects that
> mentioned that they were using and or investigating FOSS4G software, I
> thought that it would be good to do another round up on who is doing what
> with FOSS4G in our region.
> 
> This will give each of us a set of contacts to organisations who are doing
> similar things to us so that we can follow up and bounce ideas off each
> other.
> 
> 
> So what are you doing with Open Source Spatial software?
> 
> 
> 
> At the Bureau of Meteorology we have a number of projects and systems
> running:
> 
> - We make widespread use of:
> 
>  + OGR/GDAL for conversion of spatial data;
> 
>  + GeoTools to provide spatial functionality to a Quality Management
>    System;
> 
>  + OpenLayers for several simple Map Interfaces e.g. [1].
> 
>  + THREDDS for serving selected gridded datasets internally.
> 
> - We have Production Systems within our GIS2Web environment that serve out
> selected data for Emergency Management and Internal purposes (not yet
> publically available). This environment uses:
> 
>  + Postgres and PostGIS;
> 
>  + MapServer for WMS; and
> 
>  + Some GeoServer.
> 
> - In Climate and Water:
> 
>  + we are doing some prototype work with Rob Woodcock's team at CSIRO to
> serve selected Climate and Water related datasets via WFS in the first
> instance. This work is currently based on SF0 (Simple Features). In the
> future we hope to be working with the international community to develop a
> suitable community schema based on Observations and Measurements to be used
> with WFS SF1 (Complex Features) and Sensor Web Services. We're using
> Postgres, PostGIS and GeoServer for this work.
> 
>  + we are planning to undertake a prototype project using Rasdaman to serve
> gridded and multispectral data via WCS;
> 
>  + we are also planning to do some prototype work with WPS and WCPS.
> 
> 
> This work is mainly for internal use. We are looking at how we can make
> relevant data available publically via Open spatial standards.
> 
> 
> I have not touched on all of the FOSS4G related work that we are doing at
> the Bureau. Perhaps some of my colleagues will add more.
> 
> 
> So what are you doing with FOSS4G?
> 
> 
> Bruce Bannerman
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/
> 
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