OpenGeo

We all know that FOSS4G is the greatest conference of its kind of the entire calendar. Those of you who were able to make it to Sydney, Cape Town, Victoria, Lausanne or any of the other previous conferences surely know this. But FOSS4G is not just about location (there may be a pun in there), it’s also a great place to learn about new software, improve at old ones, and meet people who you previous might have known only as an email address.

This year will be no different. And OpenGeo will be descending upon Barcelona en masse.

As you may know, the first day of FOSS4G is devoted to workshops – long form, hands-on sessions where you learn the tools you need to make your work awesome. This year, we are leading or co-leading four workshops:

• Web Mapping with GeoServer
• Web Mapping with OpenLayers
• Introduction to PostGIS
• Geospatial for Java

With the exception of the last one, these are all introductory courses, designed for those who want a flavor of these tools and to see what they can do.

We don’t want to bribe you, but for our PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers workshop attendees, we will be giving away t-shirts emblazoned with the software logo. Not only does this mean that you can now go one more day before doing laundry, but you can show your true colors, your PostGIS blue, your GeoServer green, or your OpenLayers, um, teal, I think.

There are just a few slots left for each workshop, so you want to register now.

And don’t just come for the workshops, we’ll be leading or co-leading tutorials and presentations too:

• Building Web Based GIS Applications with GeoExt
• SDI best practices with GeoNode
• The State of PostGIS
• Tips for the PostGIS Power User
• GeoServer CSS: Mapping in Style
• GeoNode Architecture: Wrangling $100 million worth of open source software to make SDI building a walk in the park
• Mobile Augmented Reality using FOSS
• GeoServer WPS: an integrated, extensible processing service
• GeoServer cartographic rendering: new features for map makers
• Graphical style editing with Styler: Make a basemap without seeing SLD
• Web Map Printing with GeoExt
• Performance Considerations In OpenLayers Based Web Mapping
• OpenLayers’ Future

And, of course, don’t forget the yearly WMS Performance Shootout.

You haven’t registered yet?

In addition to all of this, we’ll be at our booth, listening and talking, learning and teaching, and helping to make this year’s event as good as it can be. Come say “hi”. We’ll be easy to spot, as we’ll be wearing the t-shirts too (we got extras for ourselves).

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!

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.

Update: We’re here! Look for Paul Ramsey and Sophia Parafina on stage at Ignite on Tuesday. Paul will also be at the OSGeo booth intermittently throughout the event!

I’m looking forward to this year’s Where 2.0 in San Jose coming up in three weeks! Where is always a different mix of folks from a usual GIS show, and the Silicon Valley vibe is something you can only get… well, in Silicon Valley.  I am going to be teaching a workshop with Steve Citron-Pousty on the open source geospatial stack, using our own OpenGeo Suite for a big part of the software we show.

If you’re coming to Where 2.0 and want to talk about OpenGeo in general or PostGIS in particular, please let me know! Either drop me an email or hit my Where 2.0 profile.

If you missed attending FOSS4G, you can now experience a part of the conference via videos! Here are the talks that we gave that were captured by the video team from FOSSLC:

• Geoserver: Past, Present and Future [0, 1]
• The State of PostGIS
• Styling with SLD
• Geoserver In Production
• WMS Performance Shootout
• OpenLayers Vector Mayhem
• Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts [1, 2, 3]

Happy viewing!

The delegates are heading home, or wandering the outback, and our OpenGeo conference team of seven has dispersed as well.  The conference was a great success this year, bringing the message of open source geospatial to well over 400 delegates (the final number might take a little while to compute; apparently there was also a large contingent of walk-up registrations).

The OpenGeo team presented web mapping concepts (SLD, performance, production tuning, tiling) and our core projects (OpenLayers, GeoWebCache, GeoExt, Geoserver, PostGIS).  We got a feel for the future from the presentations of others.

The second day keynotes gave some good hints.

First, Senator Kate Lundy spoke on Australian government open data and access policies. We are seeing this trend throughout the world—governments are recognizing the power of data access to improve services and engagement, and the democratic imperative of transparency in government. In my home province of British Columbia, the city of Nanaimo has been providing practical examples of data openness, while the City of Vancouver has made open data explicit policy, passed by council.

Second, Raul Vera from Google gave a roundup of the emerging spatial technology consensus—ubiquitous geolocation, web-based information delivery using HTML/Javascript technology, and cloud-based computing infrastructures. At OpenGeo, we like the way the open source model fits with the cloud and have committed to an HTML/Javascript technology for user interfaces, so this is a vision of the future we share. Vera also talked about the future non-map-based location services.  That is something we are working on for our next revisions—server-side scripting to provide direct access to all the spatial power of Geoserver and PostGIS.

Out on the exhibition floor, it was great to see Autodesk still pushing their open source agenda strongly. Jackie Ng, a local developer, presented his FDO Toolkit application at the conference, a cool desktop take to the FDO library that probably wouldn’t exist if Autodesk hadn’t open sourced that technology two years ago. Autodesk was a Gold sponsor this year along with ourselves and Ingres. I also had a chance to talk with representatives of both MapInfo and ESRI on the floor—the world of open source is definitely getting larger (Intergraph, where are you?) and more inclusive. I hope next year in Barcelona we will see representatives of European companies like Geoconcept and Cadcorp on the floor.

Dale Lutz of Safe Software highlighted the new inclusiveness of open source in his lightning talk about the “End of Religion”, in this case the religion of open source. It does seem that we are entering a new era of pragmatism (or at least acknowledging that we were always at our core pragmatic), where what matters is the best tool for the job, as measured by some combination of features and value and organizational capability.

Reports from the tutorial sessions (1.5 hour technical deep dives) indicated overwhelming demand for some topics. The “Making Maps Fast” and “Making Maps Pretty” sessions our team participated in had people on the floors and out the doors. The demand for information about practical operational topics remains very high—an important thing for next years organizers to think about when soliciting talks and tutorials.

My personal favorite technical talk was given by our own Tim Schaub. “Openlayers: Vector Mayhem” was a concise tour of the vector subsystem and clarified a number of issues that I personally found a little confusing when trying to figure out the system guided only by the API documentation. When his slides go online on the conference site, be sure to check them out. For the database lovers, particularly folks who have to work with Oracle, Simon Greener’s “PostGIS and Oracle Spatial” slides will be a treasure trove of techniques for making Oracle Spatial easier to work with.

Finally, the technical highlight was the anticipated Mapserver/Geoserver performance benchmark, presented at the closing plenary. The end result showed little difference on the smaller point/polygon test layers, but some differences when the testing moved to a larger 5M line roads layers, and larger differences still for raster layers. In the end, Mapserver was faster in most cases, but usually by small amounts, the exception being raster layers, where it had a significant advantage. The database backends also provided very similar performance numbers. PostGIS was the fastest, but never by very large margins. I’m already planning for next year’s process, thinking of new ways to exercise the servers and bring their differences to the fore.

Also at the closing plenary, this year’s Sol Katz Award was presented to Daniel Morissette. Daniel pre-dates me in open source geospatial involvement; when I showed up, he was already a leader in the Mapserver community, and had contributed some very important format support options (MapInfo TAB, and Arc/INFO coverage) to the GDAL/OGR library. Over the years, he’s continued to lead Mapserver (he’s the 5.6 release manager, once again), has been a leader in two important open source companies (first DM Solutions and more recently MapGears), and has become involved in OSGeo outreach activities, in particular in his home province of Quebec. They are having regular meetings with 40 people in attendance now, which is very impressive. Many congratulations to Daniel!

So, the 2009 takeaways: yet more cross pollination between open source and proprietary; the inexorable growth of the web as primary platform; and the insatiable demand for information on web publishing best practices.

We look forward to participating next year, at FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona , and hope to see you there!

Our own Paul Ramsey will be giving a keynote address at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney tomorrow! Titled “Beyond Geeks Bearing Gifts: The Future of the Open Source Economy”, the talk will cover how open source companies (like ours) are building businesses by nurturing open source communities and adding value for customers through services and enhancements. It will also examine the relationship between proprietary and open source software and explain why the future is so bright for open source, that we have to wear shades. Really, we do, the office is blinding.

Once again, OpenGeo is participating in the popular annual WMS benchmarking tests that are presented at FOSS4G. For the last couple years (2005, 2007, 2008) MapServer and Geoserver have been tested, against PostGIS, Shape file, and image file data sources. This year, in addition to the regular components, there are some new and exciting additions: ESRI is participating with ArcGIS Server, and the list of data sources has been expanded to include Oracle Spatial and ArcSDE-on-Oracle.

Our own Andrea Aime is coordinating the Geoserver set-up and configuration, as well as providing expertise in benchmarking that he gained working on the tests in previous years.