Slashgeo

The FOSS4G 2007, the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial 2007 conference, has been in preparation for some time already. This year, it will be held in Victoria (BC) Canada. Paul Ramsey announced the Workshops and Labs program are now established. This conference is increasingly important in the geospatial community. The call for presentations ends in late June. From the main site: "The annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference brings together the people who create, use, and support open spatial software. No other event brings together members of the open source development, open data creation, and open standards promotion communities like FOSS4G. Find out more about FOSS4G." See this entry on the future of GITA vs FOSS4G conferences. See also related stories below for FOSS4G 2006 items.

Safe Software writes "Safe Software to Demonstrate Technology for Data Exchange between Proprietary and Open Source Platforms at FOSS4G Excerpt from press release: Safe Software, the recognized leader in providing spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) tools for translating and transforming spatial data, today announced that the company is sponsoring and presenting at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, BC, from September 24-27. Conference attendees will have several opportunities to learn how the company's FME platform can play an important role in improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of geospatial systems by serving as a bridge for exchanging data between open source and proprietary software. For more details, visit www.safe.com."

Still recovering from my recent accident I was not able to provide a timely coverage of last week's Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics (FOSS4G) 2007 conference in Victoria. With open source geospatial software being widely used nowadays, even by behemoths such as Google, Autodesk and ESRI, this conference is doubtlessly important. Here's a wrap up of the most interesting entries on the event that I could find, see also the previous related stories below. Let's start with the official program and OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell and Autodesk's Geoff Zeiss preemptive notes. If you have only time for one wrap up to read, here's Peter Batty's extensive review of FOSS4G 2007. From this entry: "The quality of the sessions I went to was consistently high, and there was a real energy and buzz around the whole event (much more than at most of the more established geospatial conferences I have been to recently). Adena Schutzberg said in her closing comments that her overall impression of the conference and the open source geospatial community was one of maturity [...]. The event reaffirmed the belief I had before coming here that the role of open source software in the geospatial industry will continue to grow quickly." All Points Blog offers an excellent coverage of the whole event, here's their entries: on the opening/lightning talks, tidbits I, tidbits II and exhibit highlights. Other entries include GeoServer news and tutorials, a short entry on an OpenLayers talk, Autodesk's announcement of code donation (covered last week), Andrew Turner's Beyond GPS slides, Archaeogeek one, two and three interesting accounts of the event. Update: 10/03 19:24 GMT by S : OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell just provided it's own overview of FOSS4G's success.

The OSGeo mailing list announced the availability of the OGGeo journal volume 3 which concentrates on the FOSS4G proceedings. The contents: "Editorial & Index (PDF - 0.6 MB), Integration & Development: Portable GIS: GIS on a USB Stick(PDF - 0.8 MB), Automatic Generation of Web-Based GIS/Database Applications (PDF - 0.9 MB), db4o2D - Object Database Extension for 2D Geospatial Types (PDF - 0.3 MB), Google Summer of Code for Geoinformatics (PDF - 0.3 MB) Topical Interest: A Generic Approach to Manage Metadata Standards (PDF - 1.6 MB), Towards Web Services Dedicated to Thematic Mapping (PDF - 0.4 MB), Interoperability for 3D Geodata: Experiences with CityGML and OGC Web Services (PDF - 0.8 MB), A Model-Driven Web Feature Service for Enhanced Semantic Interoperability (PDF - 0.7 MB), Spatial-Yap: A Spatio-Deductive Database System (PDF - 1.5 MB), Case Studies: The DIVERT Project: Development of Inter-Vehicular Reliable Telematics (PDF - 1.8 MB), GRASS GIS and Modelling of Natural Hazards (PDF - 2.5 MB), A Spatial Database to Integrate Information of the Rondonia Natural Resource Management Project (PDF - 0.4 MB), GeoSIPAM: Free and Open Source Software Applied to the Protection of the Brazilian Amazon (PDF - 1 MB), The Amazon Deforestation Monitoring System (PDF - 0.7 MB)" A few related previous stories linked below.

A colleague sent me a link to a Linux Journal interview with Tyler Mitchell, OSGeo's executive director. From the interview: "When we talk about open source geospatial technology, we are usually talking about freedom to choose things such as -- target operating system, scripting or programming languages, target browsers, data formats required, analytical tools required, etc. Because applications can interact at several different levels, it is possible to build a stack of geospatial technology that uniquely meets your given requirements. This includes the common need to interoperate with proprietary platforms at a data or services level. By having these choices, a development team, integrator or user can choose to focus on future goals instead of ongoing limitations. Just because these are open source doesn't mean they are without limitations, but the possibility of overcoming the limitations is very real." See also related stories below and our OGGeo topic.