We always look forward to opportunities to get together with our friends, colleagues and clients to discuss what’s new in geospatial technology. The FOSS4G conferences of recent years have consistently offered the best opportunity to do just that; that’s one reason why we’re so excited about this year’s FOSS4G North America conference.

Last year we had a pretty big hand in organizing the inaugural DC conference, the event went so well that it’s become an annual event. This year we’ve stepped back from the day-to-day planning but we’re still helping out on the program committee, and we’re happy to support the conference as gold sponsors.

We’ll be sending a pretty large contingent to Minneapolis; nine OpenGeo presentations were accepted and we’ll be teaching four workshops. We’re looking forward to an exciting (and busy!) week and hope to see you there. Don’t forget to register to attend; we hear spots are filling up quickly. And if you’ll be in Minneapolis make sure to come by our exhibition table, you never know who you’ll run into.

Interested in hearing us speak? Want to enroll in a workshop? The preliminary program has been announced and the times and dates of specific talks will be posted soon. Scroll down to see list of what we’ll be up to at FOSS4G-NA:

OpenGeo FOSS4G-NA Presentations (Marriott City Center in Minneapolis, MN)

• GeoServer CSS: David Winslow
• Say Hello to OpenLayers 3: Tim Schaub & Eric Lemoine of Camptocamp
• OpenLayers 3: Vectors Redux: Tim Schaub & Andreas Hocevar
• Scripting GeoServer with GeoScript: Tim Schaub
• LIDAR in PostgreSQL with PointCloud: Paul Ramsey
• GeoServer in Production: Juan Marin
• State of GeoServer: Justin Deoliveira
• PostGIS Feature Frenzy: Paul Ramsey
• Diversity in FOSS4G Mailing List: An Analysis: Alyssa Wright & Georgia Bullen of the Open Technology Institute

OpenGeo FOSS4G-NA Workshops (University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN)

• Introduction to PostGIS, Paul Ramsey
• GeoNode, the Open source Geospatial CMS, Ian Schneider
• OpenLayers Application Development, Tim Schaub
• Introduction to GeoServer, Sam Smith

We’re super excited about  this year’s FOSS4G North America Conference. OpenGeo is sending pretty big group to DC. Not only are we Gold Sponsors, we also have nearly a dozen OpenGeo presentations on the program, our own Sponsor Day event, and Paul Ramsey volunteered as conference chair! We’re looking forward to an exciting (and busy!) week.

We’re back from FOSS4G and have been reflecting on our jam-packed week in Denver. Our only regret is that we were so busy we missed some of the plenaries, workshops and talks that we wanted to attend. In case you’ve found yourself in a similar situation or would like to review an OpenGeo presentation we’ve compiled the materials below.

First two videos that we’re lucky that the organizers captured:

And next (almost) all of the materials presented by the OpenGeo team:

We had a great week in Denver and have always felt that FOSS4G is the most interesting and informative conference of the year. FOSS4G 2011 certainly proved to be no exception. If you had a conversation with someone at our booth, or at a presentation, and would like to follow up please feel free to Contact us. See you in Bejing in 2012!

Want expert advice about our open source projects from our real live developers? Come by booth #12 during FOSS4G next month and  take advantage our Meet the Experts sessions. In addition to their workshops and tutorials, the OpenGeo Suite developers and team members will be available to answer questions and hear your feedback at the following times throughout the conference:

Wednesday, 9/14/2011

• GeoServer and GeoWebCache, 10:00-12:00: Gabriel Roldán, David Winslow, Ian Schneider, Justin Deoliveira, Sam Smith
• PostGIS, 12:45 to 14:30: Paul Ramsey, Sam Smith
• GeoNode, 14:30-16:15:  Andreas Hocevar, David Winslow, Jeff Johnson, Rolando Peñate
• OpenLayers and GeoExt, 16:15 to 18:00: Andreas Hocevar, Bart van den Eijnden, Tim Schaub

Thursday, 9/15/2011

• GeoNode, 10:00-12:00: Andreas Hocevar, David Winslow, Jeff Johnson, Rolando Peñate
• OpenLayers and GeoExt, 12:45 to 14:30: Andreas Hocevar, Bart van den Eijnden, Tim Schaub
• PostGIS, 14:30 to 16:15: Paul Ramsey, Sam Smith
• GeoServer and GeoWebCache, 16:15-18:00: Gabriel Roldán, Ian Schneider, Justin Deoliveira, Sam Smith

We hope to see you there!

There will be plenty of opportunities to learn at this year’s FOSS4G Conference. We’ll once again be attending en masse—not only are we Gold Sponsors but we’lll have  nearly two dozen OpenGeo team members in attendance. Along with the first ever OpenGeo Partner Event , we’ll be presenting at nine workshops and tutorials so we’re sure to have an exciting (and busy!) week.

Remember to register for the conference, workshops, and tutorials. If previous years are any indication, they have a habit of filling up. If you’ll be at the show, come by booth #12 to see what’s new or get involved with the communities we work with. Look for us in our signature brown t-shirts. Want your own? Come to one of our workshops, we’ll be giving out t-shirt vouchers there!

Here’s a list of all of the events we’re involved with, all at the Sheraton Denver Downtown:

Want to set up a private meeting, become a partner, or get more involved in open-source communities? Contact us to find out more. Hope to see you in Denver!

We’re excited to announce the first meeting of our Global Partner Network!

We’ll be having our first annual OpenGeo Global Partner Meeting in Denver, Colorado on September 11th—just prior to the 2011 FOSS4G Conference.  Getting together with our our rapidly growing network of international partners will allow us to discuss our plans for continuing to support the increasing demand for open source geospatial software.

We’re thrilled to work together to increase the reach of open source geospatial technologies in real-world solutions for clients. Our partners are crucial in helping users around the world improve their geospatial applications using open source software.  They extend the first line of support for the OpenGeo Suite, provide important translation services for core components like GeoServer, and are skilled at implementing solutions based on proven open source software.

To learn more about OpenGeo’s Global Partner Network please visit our partner page. Interested in becoming an OpenGeo partner? Contact us!

It seems like only yesterday we were enjoying the tapas, warm sea breezes, and interesting fountain shows at FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona. But time and revision numbers move relentlessly forward, and now we’re already thinking about FOSS4G 2011, held this year in Denver, Colorado on September 12-16, 2011.

We at OpenGeo have always felt that FOSS4G is by far the most interesting, most informative, and generally all-around coolest conference on the entire circuit, so we always like to make sure to support it. This year is no different, as not only are we Gold Sponsors, but we will also be presenting nine workshops and tutorials.

Workshops:

• Introduction to PostGIS
• Web Mapping with GeoServer
• OpenLayers Application Development
• Developing OGC Compliant Web Applications With GeoExt
• Opening Data with GeoNode
• A complete open source web mapping stack

Tutorials:

• GeoServer Scripting with Python and RESTConfig
• Map Caching with GeoWebCache
• Working with GeoScript

Workshops and tutorials do have a habit of filling up, if previous years are any indication, so you should register soon. And for all those in North America, you now can’t use the excuse that it’s too far to travel! There’s even a flight discount this year.

Register for FOSS4G

Update: See also Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

Friday was code sprint day, and a healthy pile of nerds settled into a nice modern space at the Barcelona CitiLab for 8 hours of coding and technical discussion. Team PostGIS dedicated the day to discussions of PostGIS 2.0, and identifying and closing off high priority tickets before releasing a 1.5.2 update (to provide support for PostgreSQL 9.0, coming out soon).

Subject to approval by the full Project Steering Committee (PSC) there will a couple big changes to PostGIS through the 2.0 cycle. First, the raster experimental spike will move into the main tree and become a default part of PostGIS. Second, the PgRouting external project will move into the PostGIS source tree and issue tracking system as a spike, and reside there while it is harmonized with PostGIS, probably entering the main tree at the 2.1 cycle. Those are the headlines. The sub-heads are 3d and 4d indexing support, real 3d objects (polyhedra), and an official translation pipeline for the reference manual so we can support the international community more comprehensively.

I spent Saturday walking my legs down to round nubbins.

I could not attend FOSS4G in 2008, and in 2009 I did not feel like there was much momentum in the technology area, but this year it felt like the community was in fact still innovating rapidly. This is a perception of course, they obviously innovated throughout 2009, but the innovators probably just found it harder to get to Sydney.

The places I am seeing and expecting to see more changes are in continuing power in client frameworks, and in the distributed computing (“cloud”) space.

Probably there will be a minor explosion of mobile projects over the next year. gvSIG mobile has been alone in that space for a long while, and emergence of competition is pretty inevitable. At the minimum we should see an open source iPhone mobile framework.

Also, the distributed computing space is ripe for some new projects, in particular distributed spatial analysis in both the vector and raster spaces. I know the intellectual ferment is out there, so we should see first releases and new projects popping out over the next 12 months. And then hear about them in Denver (September 12-16, 2011).

As an aside, I have been surprised there are so few talks about spatial CMS framework extensions at FOSS4G, since so many problems boil down to basic content management with a tasty, spicing of location and maps. There was a talk about a new spatial extension for Drupal, but I think that’s it for this year. Perhaps next year the extremely popular GeoDjango project will get some FOSS4G hype: it deserves some.

Per usual, it was a treat to see the FOSS4G regulars and meet new folks who are just entering the community, my only regret is that the event is over so quickly. It is always the most intense week of my year.

Adiós  Barcelona! Me la pasé bien.

Day three of the conference continued with a large number of presentations starting first thing in the morning. Unfortunately my duties at the OpenGeo booth meant I saw relatively few of them.

I caught the tail end of a “not PostGIS” spatial database track, with Carsten Venemen’s review of alternative databases, in particular the JASPA implementation of a spatial type in PostgreSQL, using PL/Java and JTS to achieve a parallel functionality to PostGIS via an alternative pathway.

Pirmin Calberer then reviewed the SpatialLite add-on to SQLite, a talk entitled “SpatialLite, the Shapefile of the Future?” A prominent community member remarked to me on the way out that it was “not the talk he was expecting” and I agreed. The title implied a discussion of the use of SpatialLite files as a format standard, but the talk was about the functionality of the SpatialLite tool set (which is, let’s be clear, impressive). The topic is not an idle one, since the geospatial community needs a modern common format, and FGDB is unavailable to anyone outside the ESRI ecosystem. SpatialLite is an obvious alternative candidate, but only if the changes to the format are made judiciously and in cooperation with all consumers of it. Thus far the format has changed more-or-less at the whim of the SpatialLite developer, so the rest of the community is loath to spend development effort on supporting it. There is a big opportunity here for SpatialLite to become the central format for the whole open source community, but it will require that the SpatialLite team give up a little control to the rest of us. </harangue>

After lunch, team OpenGeo was all over the place, with Tim Schaub, Andreas Hocevar, and David Winslow talking to packed rooms (I am told), but, sadly, I was rooted to the exhibition floor. Perhaps someone else can report on those talks.

In the final session block, I had an opportunity to exercise my “curmudgeon” muscles, playing the grizzled PostGIS vet (has it come to that?) on a panel discussing spatial databases and cloud computing. My fellow panelists were Craig Taverner (Neo4J graph db), Volker Mische (CouchDB geo), and Mike Malone (Cassandra geo via SimpleGeo). I think it is clear that data sizes are growing fast, so the number of people with “more data than fits on one big machine” problems is getting larger and solutions for them will have to be found. In the proprietary space, Netezza and Teradata have added spatial to their OLAP offerings, which can handle some use cases in the ultra-huge data realm. In the SAAS space, of course SimpleGeo is aggressively pursuing their opportunity. And in the open source world… there is still a void! This topic promises to be a very interesting one over the coming year.

At the closing plenary, Tyler Mitchell shared some statistics on the continuing growth of OSGeo, in terms of members, community participants, and code contributions over the past year. The numbers are great to see, since it is hard to mentally encompass all the projects and people that now work in OSGeo projects.

This year Helena Mitasova received the Sol Katz award for contributions to the open source geospatial community. As a member of the selection committee, I was very impressed by both the number of years she has been working in the community (two decades in the GRASS community) and the diversity of the people who brought her name forward as a candidate, ranging from developers to teachers to users across two continents and multiple software projects. Congratulations to Helena, and thanks for all the hard work over the years!

Tomorrow is the code sprint day, and I’m looking forward to discussing the PostGIS 2.0 development plan with my fellow project members.

Lots and lots of presentations on day two! The day started with another plenary session, featuring speakers from OpenStreetMap, Inspire, and ESRI.

First, ESRI’s Michael Gould made the case for ESRI as an “open” company, though I do not think he made the sale with most folks in the audience. ESRI’s participation in 52 North, while interesting, doesn’t produce much software that attendees at the conference actually use. And the pitch for building open source extensions on top of the ESRI platform sounded like the Microsoft message box from 2005 — even the beast from Redmond has gotten more subtle over the past years. Curiously, he did not mention (or perhaps my cloth ears did not hear him mention) that ESRI funded a good deal of work on GDAL in the past year, a project which most attendees actually do get a lot of use from.

I have talked to many ESRI employees over the years who are brimming with enthusiasm for really engaging with the open source community, but it seems like the executive direction remains firmly lodged in an earlier era. Here’s some personal, unsolicited advice for ESRI if they truly want to be an “open” company:

• End closed data formats now. Open FGDB, stop promising it, just do it.
• End closed styling formats now. LYR files lock map creation processes into the ESRI stack.
• End ST_GEOMETRY on databases that have their own spatial type. Existing client software for Oracle Spatial and PostGIS supports the native types, ST_GEOMETRY is a transparent attempt to prefer access to the ESRI client suite.

The open source community wants to be interoperate. To build systems where the components work together cleanly, without hacks and cludges. That requires open formats. Documenting them is not even necessary, just make them comprehensible and readable (e.g. the ArcView 3 .avl and .apr files).

After Michael, Ivan Sánchez gave an entertaining talk about utility optimization, as it relates to open source and open data, via game theory. And the end, he concluded that the optimum strategy was use of share-alike (GPL) licensing, a conclusion sure to rile at least 50% of the audience (because who doesn’t like to argue about licenses?).

Finally, Ioannis Kanellopoulos from JRC gave a run down of state of the INSPIRE initiative. If you take anything away from his talk, take this: SOAP bindings for W*S services are optional. Repeat, optional. Over.

After the plenary, I banished myself to Room 6 for a day-long festival of talks on PostGIS. I gave an introductory talk on PostGIS, learned about the state of the PostGIS raster-in-database projects (intriguing), and gave a talk on advanced PostGIS techniques.

The PostGIS raster project has moved from a notion to an implementation over the past year, with the ability to load data directly, alter it in place, and do some basic analytics. I am very impressed with the API decisions and the clean way it integrates with the rest of the spatial functionality. My only concern now is performance — will it be possible to perform massive analytical runs, or will the trade-off for the design elegance be a painful performance hit?

The last PostGIS talk of the day was a fun dual talk from Marc Jansen and Nicklas Aven, on web interfaces for visualizing spatial SQL. People take a run at this regularly (I did one four years ago) but Nicklas’ is the most complete I’ve seen yet, and really understands that the goal is creating a compelling teaching tool. Check out postgisonline.org for yourself.

Tomorrow I will be at the OpenGeo booth with the rest of our lively crew. Stop by, pick up a shirt, and tell me how wrong I am about ESRI, I can’t wait to hear from you!