OpenGeo

Mmmmmmm, market sandwich...

When describing the OpenGeo Suite, I am often asked one of two questions (depending on who I am talking to): “why not just use ESRI” or “why not just use Google”.

The answer to the first question depends on the person asking, ranging from the “ability to economically scale out to larger user loads” to more managerial things like “having multi-vendor options and flexibility in tool choice”.

The answer to the second question is was the subject of a recent article in Ovum, which notes:

The key exposures for agencies using the free map platforms relate to some natural consequences of the services being provided for free. These include:

• lack of assurances regarding the continuous provision or reliability of the service or that it will remain available for free in the future
• lack of control over the content displayed by the vendors on the platform – particularly advertisements
• lack of control over how the vendors use data that is provided by agencies
• the requirement to indemnify the vendors from any claims arising from the agency’s use of the service.

The market runs from the cloud-based web services (Google, Bing) through to self-managed proprietary (ESRI), and there is a gap in the middle where customers need the flexibility and scalability of the consumer services married with the feature richness and control of self-managed software.

And that gap, in the middle of the “market sandwich”, is where we plant our flag.

I spent three days at the Washington GIS conference last week, and it was a useful reminder about the real world. That is, the world where technology is a means and not an end.

The comparison with an event like Where 2.0 is pretty stark: the metric of evaluation is decidedly not “is it cool”, but rather “is it useful”.

It was gratifying therefore to see “open source” moving into the “useful” column in such practical organizations. A surprising number of presentations were about the use of open source in deployed projects.

Even so, most of the organizations there were still at the “intrigued but interested in learning more stage”. And being practical people, they asked practical questions like “what is the first thing I should do to start experimenting with open source?”

That question put me back on my heels. There’s lots of things one can do to start with open source, but what is the logical very first thing?

The self-serving answer would have been “download the OpenGeo Suite and get to it!”. But the question came from a GIS Manager, so it was not a matter of personal enlightenment, but organizational direction. What can he ask his subordinates to do that will make this new technology option available to his organization?

Fortunately, there is a success story right in the area, Pierce County. A big chunk of the talks about use of open source were from Pierce County employees. Back in 2007, the GIS Manager sent a group of her best technical staff up to Victoria, BC, for the FOSS4G conference to “look for some options” in solving some nagging technology issues they had.

And they came back with lots of options.

So then she empowered them to pick some and try them on pilot projects, which they did. And the ideas that worked found their way into core standards of the county. And now GeoServer is used for some of the map rendering, and OpenLayers is the new standard web map component. And they haven’t thrown out their old infrastructure, much of it is still there: they’ve just improved on it and provided a more diverse road map for the future.

So, here is a draft program for curious managers:

• Decide whether you have a problem. Change will always cost a bit, in terms of convenience and time and learning new ways of doing thing at least. So if you are happy the way you are, maybe change isn’t for you. It might be a good idea to talk to your technical team and see if they are happy too.
• Select a technical core team to learn about the options and empower them to do so. That might mean bringing in training, or just providing “free time” to learn about and report on options, or if you’re lucky sending them to a conference like FOSS4G.
• Encourage the team to learn not just the technology but also the culture of open source. Sign on to mailing lists, attend local user group meetings, get to know how open source is actually developed and by whom. That soft knowledge will be incredible valuable if you start to depend more on open source. (Why? Questions like “will that feature be in the next release?”, “how can I get that bug fixed by Wednesday?”, “does it work (well) with component X?” are all easier to answer for people with the soft knowledge of community interaction and resources.)
• Give that team some problems to solve. Pilot projects, one-time projects, etc. At the same time, ask them to integrate their solutions into the existing infrastructure as much as they can. You want your team to develop knowledge in integration because you’ll never change your whole infrastructure in one go. Having your team learn to build silo’ed all-open-source stacks won’t help in the long run.

The organizational reality of most counties and cities in Washington, and presumably in most of North America, is that their GIS technology is provided overwhelmingly by ESRI. That means that new solutions have to integrate with that stack. Fortunately, there are a number of integration points: at the database level, below the database level, at the user interface level.

Have a look at the OpenGeo architecture for a generic discussion of heterogeneous technology integration. We’ll be publishing a white paper about the specifics of integration with ESRI this spring, based on the many useful things I learned from talking with the good folks at Pierce County!

OpenGeo is in the market for people who know the market… specifically a Director of Marketing and a Sales Executive.  Over the past year we have thought a lot about what it means to build a business on open source, and created a product which we think is a useful addition to the geospatial world.

But we don’t want to throw a party and have nobody show up! So we need to get the word out, beyond the fairly small population of people who might read a blog post like this one, out to the many developers and organizations who are building geospatial applications.  The Director of Marketing will be focused on generating leads and building a system for qualifying those leads as efficiently as possible. The Sales Executive will help to turn those leads into sales, hunt for new leads, and assist us in fielding our current opportunities more efficiently.

If you know someone, or are someone, who wants to be a part of a social enterprise devoted to making open source geospatial tools widely available and used, we hope to talk to you soon!

OpenGeo welcomes our latest GIS intern Byron Bobadilla, a developer working on a geoportal for Guatemala’s Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), a national initiative based on open-source GIS tools.

Ultimately, the goal is to use the philosophy and technology of the GeoNode project to build a Guatemalan resource that encourages institutions to publish spatial data on the web — enabling open sharing of data between governments, businesses, and citizens.

In our Q&A with Byron, he discusses the challenges of SDI development in Guatemala, and the advantages of using open-source tools.

What are you working on while at OpenGeo?
Constructing a new geoportal, way more efficient than the one we currently have, with the tools provided by the OpenGeo Suite. The current system, based on MapBender, is too slow and not very intuitive. This new tool—based on OpenLayers, GeoExt, GeoWebCache, GeoServer and PostGIS—hopes to solve the usability and performance issues we’ve been having.

How are you finding the OpenGeo Suite tools so far?
We’ve already implemented GeoServer in Guatemala, as well as MapServer, but found GeoServer easier to use and configure. Initially, I found it a bit difficult working with the JavaScript libraries, but the OpenGeo fellows and excellent documentation have been a great help. As for GeoWebCache, in very little time I’ve been able to work well with its configuration and setup. It makes it really simple to get an instance up and running.

What are the current challenges for Guatemala’s SDI?
The current system isn’t satisfactory. Few people know about it and the ones that do get easily lost, giving up quickly. With this new system, improvements in usability and performance allow easier and more efficient access to all the geospatial information in Guatemala. This geoportal will enable free Guatemalan spatial data  access for all institutions and the general public.

We currently have all this information spread across shapefiles and other files on disk. The information itself will be decentralized, allowing each institution to take care of the bits that they own, while simultaneously providing a single access point through SEGEPLAN [Secretaría de Programación y Planificación de la Presidencia, the Guatemalan government institution driving SDI development].”

How do open-source tools help this kind of initiative?
Open-source tools greatly facilitate access to technology. I see OpenGeo as a great alternative, especially in developing countries where access to proprietary licenses might be prohibitive due to paid software acquisition policies. I believe professional support is key. Specialists in these kinds of projects are needed, independent of the immense volume of information and documentation already available on the internet.

Byron’s internship with OpenGeo is made possible by support from the World Bank. His work with SEGEPLAN includes the development of open source GIS software, geodatabase administration tasks, and web-GIS development with PHP. Byron is a systems engineer who began working with GIS at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala.

Thanks to Gabriel Roldan for the translation of this interview.

OK, so there was no Google announcement on Thursday, or explanation of what “Google Goggles” are/will be. The red/green glasses Lior Ron was handing out yesterday (at a talk that was supposed to be about “Goggles”, but wasn’t) were a reference to today’s Google April fools joke: Street View in 3D.

While there were fewer references to social location applications and “check-ins” today, there were still more plenary sessions that leaned heavily on that category. Keynote kickoff Kati London began the morning with a review of mobile gaming; Skyhook Wireless built most of the examples in their talk around social location; and Facebook, newcomer to location but dominant incumbent in social networks, riffed on it.

It is a shame that something so fundamentally trivial as social location was the dominant theme, but this year it clearly was. Even the technically interesting launch of SimpleGeo was coloured by the fact that so many of their example use cases are in fulfilling the needs (index all the tweets, index all the check ins) of social location applications.

I think I find social location unimpressive because it’s just a lifestyle application. The founder of Foursquare was asked what his “big goal” was and he said it was to make peoples lives more interesting. He’s a fun guy who wants other people to have fun. Which is great stuff, but not technologically transformative. There might be money in social location (for someone), but it’s not going to change the way I deliver other solutions to people.

The previous Where 2.0 topics that have really transformed my professional world have been new platforms: consumer map APIs; free globe viewers; ubiquitous location on devices. I told a number of folks at Where 2.0 that we have become jaded, expecting to see the industry shaken each and every year. But not this year.

Moving on, in the morning plenary ESRI delivered, as usual, an impressive demo of a their new online service site. It is truly amazing how much new product a billion dollar organization can churn out in a year.

If I have misgivings, they are the usual ones. First, that ESRI tends to toss a lot of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to which parts of this years pot of pasta will stick in the long run. ESRI has been releasing a new map sharing portal every two years for as long as I can remember. Second, that the ESRI story works best if you are already on the ESRI ranch; they continue to be a platform play, they don’t want you to take just one bite, they want you to eat the whole turkey.

None of this is to say that this year won’t be “the year” for the ESRI portal, but there are no guarantees.

The uplifting part of Where 2.0 got only a little bit of plenary time (but a fair number of talks touched on it), and that was a re-counting of the extraordinary effect of the CrisisCamp movement in actually assisting the relief efforts after the Haitian earthquake. The combination of institutional willingness to share imagery data very quickly, volunteer effort to process and map from that data, and the existing OpenStreetMap data to manage and publish the data actually saved lives.

Port au Prince went from being effectively unmapped to highly mapped in just days. Community effort not only helped mapping, but also (for those who could speak the language) on translating SMS messages from survivors, converting place references into coordinates (using the new maps) and passing that information back to emergency responders on the ground.

It was as crystal clear an example of the power of community effort, open tools, and open data as I have seen. And it appears that the example is now being used to open eyes in the corridors of power about the need to ensure that collaborative infrastructure is in place and ready to run before the next crisis finds us. The Birds of a Feather session on Open Aerial Map was inspirational for the passion of the participants and their recognition of the real-world importance be bringing this piece of digital infrastructure up to speed.

So this year’s Where 2.0 in a sentence: location technology can help people have fun, and it can also just plain help people. Good news all around.

Update: O’Reilly has posted the videos from the Ignite talks by Sophia Parafina and Paul Ramsey.

All Points Blog today features a write up of the first day of Where 2.0 2010. In this review, Paul Ramsey’s Open Geostack session is prominently mentioned.

Also in that entry, Adena Schutzberg Joe Francica noted Paul’s contribution in the evening Ignite session:

…Paul Ramsey did have an entertaining way of explaining that mapping errors are compounded as more and more applications are built on top of base maps which they themselves may have been compiled from poor quality data.

The solution: why not just create your own base map instead of relying on those made by others?

Where 2.0 is a unique gathering that mixes together the usual geo-suspects with a potent mix of Silicon Valley strivers and curious IT folks. This year attendance is back up to just shy of 1000 and the venues is packed full. There is nothing like the psychology of a full room to get people buzzing.

And yet, this year, so far the big players have not been making any major announcements, just re-viewing the gains made so far. So Nokia briefly reviewed their Ovi platform, which they launched last year; Microsoft talked about their upgraded Bing site and showed how they working on fusing their existing Photosynth and Seadragon technologies into the mapping experience; Google reviewed their various services.

What’s going on?

It’s too early to make a definitive wrap-up statement, since there are a full day of plenary talks still to come, including a return of Google to the main stage. But it is possible that we are in a technological pause, while we wait for hardware capabilities and data to catch up to our grand designs, and it seems clear the next big ship will be in augmented reality (AR).

In some ways, the always-on news cycle of the internet has worked to defuse the technical excitement we always hope for. Microsoft’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas gave a nice talk about their improving map infrastructures, which would have been very impressive if we were seeing it for the first times — but many attendees, including me, had already seen a longer version of the talk online via the TED video archives.

When Where 2.0 first ran in 2005, the existing technology of web mapping was impressive and there were many excited talks about what could be done with it, but everyone was already looking towards the next frontier, which was mobile devices; but the mobile hardware wasn’t there yet, the devices weren’t smart enough or GPS enabled. With the rise of the GPS-enabled smart phone, mobile is “here”, but our eyes have already shifted to the next goal, which is augmented reality and again we await appropriate technology: light-weight, non-intrusive, computationally capable, spectacles. Soon, everyone will be wearing glasses, and loving it.

There’s an AR panel tomorrow with our own Sophia Parafina, and there is also some talk that we may seen a Google AR talk or announcement at the plenary. We shall see.