OpenGeo

One of our missions at OpenGeo is to create an ecosystem where we can develop the best possible software while growing and investing in the community. We see this as a self-reinforcing cycle; as more people use our software, the more we are able to grow our business and devote more energy into improving the software, thus making it more appealing to a wider audience.

But software is only successful if users understand and use its features. And while one of our aims is to make software easy to use, sometimes you have questions that just can’t be answered by a documentation page. Even in this day of everything-over-the-web, there is still a need for answers from a real person, in a real-life classroom setting.

So, OpenGeo is now offering full-day training courses on the components of the OpenGeo Suite. First and foremost, we offer an Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite, which gives a full overview of PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, GeoExt, along with the applications GeoExplorer and Styler. We also have more in-depth full-day introductory courses on GeoServer, PostGIS, and OpenLayers.

These courses are open to all, and are designed to be accessible to a wide audience. Also, if you are one of our OpenGeo Suite Enterprise clients (Professional, Platform, or Strategic Editions), training days are already included in your package.

Below is our schedule for the next few months. All courses are held in our office in New York City, although we do offer on-site training as well.

• Thursday, March 4, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Thursday, March 25, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, April 8, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Thursday, May 6, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers
• Thursday, June 3, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Tuesday, June 22, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Wednesday, June 23, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, June 24, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers
• Thursday, July 8, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Tuesday, July 20, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Wednesday, July 21, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, July 22, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers

We will be adding new and more advanced courses as demand dictates. We hope that our courses will be a valuable tool for any and all, whether you are a GIS professional, an enthusiast, a software developer, or a CEO.

Chris Holmes and I had a great conversation with Matt Aslett of the 451 Group (an IT business analysis organization) earlier this week.  The 451 Group has been a very useful resource in our exploration of open source business models over the past year, particularly their ominously named “CAOS Blog” (it stands for Commercial Adoption of Open Source). Anyhow it was interesting to hear what an expert in commercial open source thinks our organizational opportunities and risks are and Matt shared his thoughts yesterday on the CAOS Blog.

Paul Ramsey, OpenGeo’s spatial database wizard and frequent poster to this blog, was recently interviewed by Matt Ball for V1 magazine. It’s a good read, and we think you’ll enjoy it.

While the interview covers a wide range of topics, here’s a quote that encapsulates OpenGeo’s software to me probably better than any white paper or business plan could:

Building a web map app is something that a technically inclined forester should be able to do, it shouldn’t require someone from the computer science department. The Web is evolving to be a place where people can put a basic set of development tools, JavaScript and HTML, to a lot of different uses. Not inventing their own language…We’re just providing some geo flavor on top.

Read the entire interview…

On Thursday, the latest major release of PostGIS came out: version 1.5.  This release adds a long-wished-for feature to the open source spatial database—direct support for “geodetic” coordinates.

Geodetics are more commonly known as “lat/lon” coordinates. While you could load and work with lat/lon coordinates in earlier versions of PostGIS, the indexing and calculation code did not make any allowance for the fact that the coordinates were angular units, not cartesian units. As a result, objects that crossed the poles or datelines would not index properly, and calculations of areas, lengths and distances returned strange looking answers in “degrees” rather than meters.

With PostGIS 1.5, the new “geography” type is a 100% sphere-aware type, which can be indexed globally and returns answers in meters, using calculations on the spheroid for maximum correctness. It is built on top of a new disk storage and index format, which the existing “geometry” type will also transition to in version 2.0.

The development of the “geography” type was funded as a PostGIS core development task, by a company that chooses to remain anonymous.  Since the main geography development is complete the old task has been updated to a new version, outlining extra functions and performance additions that could be added to geography support.

We expect that the geography type will make it easier for new users to store their data in PostGIS (without having to learn about projections and coordinate systems before starting) and also allow global data managers to store and query international data sets for effectively.

What gets us up in the morning and into the office? Is it building an open source geospatial software empire, and eventually rolling around in a room full of money? No, that’s not the point.

Making money is a second-order concern for our organization that enables our first-order concern: putting useful tools in the hands of governments and NGOs. The revenue from professional services and support enables the continued development of the open source software, which we want to see as widely used as possible.

So, when we learn that the Amazonian Protection System is using PostGIS and Geoserver in their applications to manage and protect the rain forest, that makes us very happy.

And hearing how scientists and conservation groups have used Geoserver, PostGIS, and OpenLayers in building a decision support system for studying marine protected areas makes us sort of giddy.

And learning that the Great Lakes Commission is using Geoserver, PostGIS and OpenLayers in monitoring the environmental conditions of the Lakes make us quiver a little bit uncontrollably.

And then we have to sit down for a moment.

These are all folks who have used the tools that our team members build and maintain, to do good in the world. They don’t have to ask permission, and they don’t have to pay us, and the world is a little more understandable after they are finished than it was before. And that’s the point.