OpenGeo Announces Gold Level Sponsorship for FOSS4G-NA

FOSS4G North America Regional Conference to be Held in Washington, D.C.

New York, NY, January 26, — OpenGeo, the organization behind the OpenGeo Suite has announced their sponsorship of the FOSS4G-NA conference. The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial - North America (FOSS4G-NA) conference will be hosted by OSGeo North America from April 10th to 12th, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Confirmed keynote speakers include Michael Byrne, CIO of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

OSGeo North America is the newly-formed North America chapter of OSGeo, an international not-for-profit whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. OSGeo North America has scheduled this regional follow-up to focus on the North American open source geospatial community. Just as they did at the FOSS4G global conference in Denver, OpenGeo is once again committed to a gold level sponsorship, In addition, this year members of OpenGeo are also volunteering on the conference organizing committee.

Eddie Pickle, OpenGeo COO said "Supporting FOSS4G and OSGeo is a top priority for OpenGeo. FOSS4G is always a key forum for meeting with our friends, clients, and partners as well as for exchanging knowledge to improve open source geospatial software. A regional event in Washington, D.C. will allow us us to focus on the evolving landscape of open source geospatial in North America. We’re especially interested to see how government agencies have been adopting open source technology to address their needs." He continued "We’re also happy to announce that our own Paul Ramsey has volunteered to be the FOSS4G- NA conference chair; we know the conference will be a success with Paul at the helm."

About FOSS4G-NA

FOSS4G is an annual global conference organized by OSGeo that focuses on bringing together individuals and organizations working with free and open source geospatial software; FOSS4G-NA is a regional event for North America and is being organized by the North American Regional chapter of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), with additional support from members of a volunteer program and conference committee and the conference sponsors

About OpenGeo

OpenGeo is a social enterprise working to build the best web-based geospatial technology. The company brings the best practices of open source software to geospatial organizations around the world by providing enterprises with supported, tested, and integrated open source solutions to build the Geospatial Web. OpenGeo also supports open source communities by employing key developers of PostGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers. Since, the company has provided successful consulting services and products to clients like the World Bank, Google, Ordnance Survey Great Britain, Portland TriMet, MassGIS, Landgate, and the Federal Communications Commission. OpenGeo is the geospatial division of OpenPlans, a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that informs and engages communities through journalism and open source software. All of OpenGeo's revenue has been and will continue to be re-invested into innovative and useful software in support of the OpenPlans mission.

Related Links

FOSS4G-NA Conference - Washington, DC
FOSS4G - Beijing, China
OSGeo North America
Open Source Geospatial Foundation

For those who don't read our geospatial press releases feed, you might be interested in learning about the first FOSS4G - North America conference to be held in Washington DC in April 10-12. We mentioned in the possibility of a North American-specific FOSS4G conference to be organized by the OSGeo, it now has become reality.

From the press release: "In light of the success of last September’s international FOSS4G conference in Denver, Colorado, the newly-formed North America chapter of OSGeo, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data,  seized upon the opportunity to organize a regional follow-up conference focusing on the North American open source geospatial community. “2011’s event showed us that there is great interest in the region to continue the conversation and strengthen the network of individuals and organizations working the open source geospatial field,” said Paul Ramsey,  accomplished geospatial software developer and FOSS4G- NA conference chair."

While at FOSS4G in Spain last year, UMN MapServer (Linux) won the annual competition WMS Shootout with Mapnik not fare behind. During this year event, for distributing vectors (PostGIS) data only : Mapnik was at its best, for vector seeding : MapServer on Linux was way much faster than the other products, for vectors and raster data : Mapnik and MapServer Linux looks better and finally for vectors, rasters and DEM data: MapServer Linux was the fastest.

At the same time, MapServer on Linux was about 3 times faster than on MapServer on Windows on some of charts! The results in details of WMS Shootout will be published soon. At the end of the conference the annual Sol Katz Award was given this year to the lead developer of the JTS Topology Suite, Martin Davis. Congratulations to the first "Java" contributor to win this FOSS4G award!

This year at the FOSS4G the WPS Shootout was introduced and presented some of the conformance / interoperability results, which PyWPS was the most interoperable, as well the ZOO project, while GeoServer had a poor client support. The performance of each WPS software was not evaluated, but with the WMS Shootout coming in this Friday afternoon, the domain of map tiling or Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) could be another standard to be evaluated at the FOSS4G. With so many products now in the market for map tiling, such as MapCache, Tilecache, Mapnik, TileMill, GeoWebCache, MapProxy, I think it might be a good idea to form a WMTS Shootout. It could validate the tiles generation process, the interoperability with clients and the performance on delivering the tiles to the client (ex. OpenLayers) as well as features offered (e.g. reprojection on-the-fly, etc.).

One of the key speakers at this FOSS4G Denver conference which impressed the crowd (and me as well!) was Brian Timoney. He did not use big “digital slide presentation”, he just let his own passion to geospatial speaks by it self. On Tuesday, he exposed in a simple way without any slides presentation: how the federal government with its GeoSpatialOneStop web portal was outdated, why it was not suitable in the evolving market of today and how public organisation such as NGA and the military industry is driving the FOSS4G world in the USA. He pointed out that during the Hurricane Irene along the East Coast only pdf type of maps were released to the public to help themselves to know which area were asked to evacuate. It was a really good presentation by Brian as well as its implication in the workshop related to Business of Open source. I hope his ideas might open the minds of some people outside the FOSS4G environment to look at open source software not only military and defence type of organisation, so it can be integrated into others types of organisation in the geospatial world!

That's probably our biggest "geonews in batch mode" issue ever. That's the price I have to pay for three weeks of holidays! ;-) I tried to keep only the most pertinent geonews. After reading this unusually long entry, you and I are back to being up to date in terms of geonews.

• Here's a Google Earth mashup of Fukushima and Chernobyl meltdowns side-by-side
• Google added a Regional Expert Reviewer Program to Google Map Maker
• The tool Shaderlight to create awesome SketchUp models is now at version 2
• Google purchased Zagat Survey, a firm offering local ratings of restaurants and much more  
• And there's new imagery in Google Earth released on September 7

• ArcGIS 10.0 SP3 is coming next month
• Spatially Adjusted has an entry seemingly confirming You Can’t Edit Spatial RDBMS with ArcGIS for Desktop without SDS
• V1 reviews the Esri Map Book, volume 26

• Via no solo I read this informative QGIS and gvSIG comparison, useful to understand the differences between what are probably the two most mature open source desktop GIS packages available
• The FOSS4G conference will take place in Beijing, China
• We did mention them before, but only indirectly - here's osmdroid, OpenStreetMap tools for Android (maybe that's what missing for iOS?)
• In case you don't read our geospatial press releases, the OSGeo-Live 5.0 DVD has been released
• If you're interested in Brazilian topography, see this entry on TOPODATA's version of SRTM-DEM for Brazil

In GPS news:

• North Korea forced a US reconnaissance plane to land by jamming GPS signals
• Via Spatial Law, Bangladesh Mandates Use of GPS in Vehicles

In Apple news:

• Autodesk released the 'Lite' version of AutoCAD for MacOS X, in addition to the full version available since a year
• For their iOS devices, Apple is exploring enhancing maps with augmented reality
• APB mentioend Apple's patent application on crowdsourcing data for local searches
• The class-action lawsuit against Apple in South Korea over location data collection has started 

In Microsoft news:

• Streetside is now available for parts of London
• Microsoft shares an entry on the Bing Maps v7 Module CodePlex Project
• Even if Virtual Earth 3D is discontinued, Microsoft posted details to enable you to use it longer
• Microsoft released the Bing Maps 'Windows Presentation Foundation' (WPF) Control
• Here's an entry on the Wall Street Journal using Bing Maps in their hurricane tracking tool

In transportation news:

• SignalGuru system that change your route to avoid red lights
• Regarding tracking and privacy, the NYC mayor wants traffic cameras at every corner

In remote sensing news:

• A critical milestone has been reached for Landsat's LCDM mission in, aka "Landsat 8"
• Both NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X remote sensing satellites have been launched successfully
• The ERS-2 mission is completed, its last image has been taken
• Can you believe that over 700 government satellites will launch in the next 10 years? Obviously not all for remote sensing purposes
• The bankrupted RapidEye has been purchased

• It seems UniStrong has 40% of GIS marketshare in China
• V1 shares a perspective named Where Did All the Talk About Spatial Data Quality Go?
• The data provider Infochimps have a new GEO API
• Slashdot discusses a story named Judge Nixes Warrantless Cell Phone Location Data
• Of course I'm a bit too late, but here's a recap of mapping and mobile data for Hurricane Irene
• Here's an entry named Everything you wanted to know about UK Coordinate Systems
• It's confirmed, Kansas is flatter than a pancake
• Do we need another map building website? There's the new Build-A-Map site in Beta
• APB mentions 'Location Aware', a free location-aware task management app for Android

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly shared a map of U.S. job losses
• Here's the U.S. National Parks as seen from space
• Tthe USGS launched their Historical Topo Map Collection

While the FOSS4G just began Monday, it looks that the number of attendees for the overall conference would beat the best ever in Spain last year. The first two days of the Conference started with one of the moment always appreciated by the community: the workshops. This year in USA around half of the audience of the workshops were newbies in geospatial open source community (mainly from the Colorado area) and the other half were developers, users and experts of the FOSS world.

I have attend two workshops on Monday, the first one was: Introduction to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This organisation has been involved manly since the Earthquake in Haiti by sharing mapping resources with the affected people when needed. I found particularly interesting at the workshop is the “Walking papers” application. This idea is a way to “round trip” map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.

Walking Papers is a website and a service designed to close this final loop by providing OpenStreetMap print maps that can be marked up with a pen, scanned back into the computer with a cellphone, georeferenced automatically by the service and traced using OSM’s regular web-based editor, such as Potlatch or JOSM.

The second workshop I went to on Monday was: FOSS4G routing with pgRouting tools, OpenStreetMap road data and GeoExt. This workshops has been given in previous edition, but this time in Denver new improvement have been made. One of the topics discussed in the workshops was that pgRouting functions is an effective way to trace in one or two seconds a shortest path based on more than 500000 features by using the wrapper with bounding box. Even if pgRouting was quite effective for the OpenStreetMap data of Denver during the workshop, it does not mean that all parts of the world are well covered with topological streetsline. The osm2pgrouting is a great tool to prepare OSM datasets to routing and show if the datasets needs be cleaned and snapped. At the same time, Daniel Kastl from Georepublic, as one of the trainer at the workshops, said that pgRouting was made first for geospatial analysis and will never be as effective as the one implement in Google Maps, because the Google routing engine is precalculated and can be effective for entire continent. This pgRouting has not published a new releases since and any developer involvement or corporate supports is welcome.

I have made a pause and I went to see the Monday Night football at the Mile High Stadium in Denver were fans were predominantly in orange jerseys to support their home Team! It was great game, in a very nice Stadium that has quite a lovely view of the City by night.

On Tuesday, An Introduction to Geospatial Open Source was the last workshops have been to before the formal presentation part of the conference starting on Wednesday. This workshops is given an overall tour of FOSS4G world and its business model and main open source projects.

Still in catch up mode, here's the last three weeks of geospatial open source news in batch mode.

• Of huge pertinence to the geospatial open source and open data communities, the FOSS4G and State of the Map conferences are set to being in a few days. If you're in the Denver area and still hesiting, don't, they are really worth. I'll have to miss them myself this year, but Slashgeo's editor Nicolas Gignac will be attending and provide coverage.
• Directions Mag share an interview with Peter Batty on what to expect at FOSS4G
• Another recent article at DM is named Open Source Licensing: Risk and Opportunity, risks related to intellectual property and governance
• Sextante, the open source spatial java data analysis library, can now work in ArcGIS, and run SAGA and GRASS GIS in ArcGIS via Sextante, and why not, use Sextante algorithms in ArcGIS Model Builder
• PostGIS's Paul Ramsey continues to share insightful comments in an entry named Open source is not free (as in beer) ...
• Users of Autodesk's MapGuide Open Source will be happy to know MapGuide Maestro 3.5 has been released. We already know that MapGuide Maestro 4.0 is introducing 'Local Conneciton Mode'
• V1 mentions updates to the open source multi-modal routing software OpenTripPlanner, which now supports Canada, Poland, India, Spain, Ireland, and Israel (we covered OpenTripPlanner in May) 
• Tim links to a generic article on Quantum GIS in the GeoInformatics magazine, and here's a tip on modifying SVG symbols in QGIS
• Here's an entry on getting GPS data (GPX format) into SpatiaLite, either from QGIS, CSV or OGR
• Here's web-based PostGIS geometry and raster viewer, no need to install anything
• GeoServer now has extensions to monitor and audit your GeoServer installation

Version 5.0 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection has been released. OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive. A DVD or USB of OSGeo-Live is being distributed to every delegate at the upcoming international conference for Free and Open Source Software.

Highlights:

• 47 Quality GeoSpatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured
• Quality free world maps
• One page overviews and quick starts for all applications
• Overviews of key OGC standards
• Translations for Greek, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese

The full scoope - including what packages are included

A Broad Range of Topics Are Addressed in More Than 140 Presentations DENVER, June 15, -- The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference has just announced the lineup of presentations that features more than 140 individual talks with noted plenary speakers. FOSS4G is the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software. The selection of presentations was very competitive, with 300 submissions for roughly 150 session slots. The five-day event includes two days of workshops followed by three days of sessions that cover a broad range of technical topics, tool-specific tutorials, application case studies, lightning talks, panel discussions and overviews.  The breadth of content address a full range of technical expertise, applications, regional interests, and business purposes. Among the program highlights regarding the use of open source software are:

• A full-day introduction to geospatial open source with case studies and business cases
• Workshops and tutorials on popular open source geospatial tools such as PostGIS, GRASS, GeoServer, GeoNode, MapFish, Geomajas, Spatial Wiki, GeoTools, etc.
• Workshops and sessions organized by educators for educators
• Sessions regarding open spatial data and spatial data infrastructure directives
• Timely sessions addressing such applications as mapping the BP oil spill, monitoring flood waters, and responding to the earthquake in Japan
• Several sessions of five-minute lightning talks

• Michael Byrne, Geospatial Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, talking about the National Broadband Map, which is based on an open source software stack, and implements some innovative ideas regarding open data
• Peter Ter Haar, Director of Products at Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, speaking about their experience with open data initiatives and open source software
• Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, talking about the past, present and (mainly) future of this wiki-style collaborative geospatial data creation phenomenon
• Paul Ramsey, a team member of OpenGeo and founder of the PostGIS spatial database discussing different open source business models
• A panel on "Open x 4" that will discuss various aspects of openness for open source, open data, open street mapping, and open standards