Slashgeo

Lisa Campbell, Autodesk's VP of the Infrastructure Solutions Division, gave the Keynote speech at the Geomatics 2006 event this morning. The speech emphasized on data as key to geospatial business (see previous stories). With Autodesk's backing of the OSGeo, I wasn't surprised to see her focus on open source geospatial software, including MapGuide, with mentions of geospatial standards and the OGC. The Feature Data Objects library was also on the menu. She additionally told us about landxml.org, an initiative I wasn't aware of. On a personal note, in my speech (which took place right after Lisa!), I underlined the fact that the project I was presenting is extensively using GDAL/OGR open source libraries. On another personal note, I was surprised to meet several Slashgeo readers that came to say hello during the day (thanks :-).

GIS Monitor runs two stories on Autodesk. The first one on Autodesk's integration of CAD and GIS and an interview with Mark Christian, Autodesk's Technical Marketing Manager. From the article: "As part of this strategy, the company is complementing its suite of geospatial tools—which includes Map 3D, MapGuide, and Topobase (a topology database developed around Oracle Spatial)—with Feature Data Objects (FDOs), developed by the open source community. More than merely expanding into new markets, Autodesk seems to be focused on enhancing the capabilities of its traditional users in its core markets—cable and telecommunications, energy, water and wastewater, government, and architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC)—and core applications—network engineering, asset management, public works, land management, and transportation—by integrating GIS functionalities into their tools. The company terms this new hybrid "engineering GIS."" Related, APB provide the release dates for Autodesk's product line.

The PerryGeo blog ask an interesting question about comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. From the blog: " FDO, GDAL and FME all seem to operate in roughly the same domain - Providing a data model, API and tools to translate between spatial data formats. Does anyone know of any good write-ups comparing/contrasting the features of these three libraries?" Read the very informative answers on the blog. See also related stories below.

The OSGeo-Announce mailing list informs us FDO 3.3.0 has been released. From the announcement: "Highlights among the new features of FDO 3.3.0 include: - SQL Server Spatial 2008 support, - Addition of an FDO provider for PostGIS, - Added FDO Expression Engine support, - Enhanced WMS image format support for png, tiff, jpeg, and gif image types, - Improved FDO Schema Manager support for database views" FDO has been mentioned a few times before, see related stories below, including a comparison of FDO, GDAL and FME.