BIO Paul van Genuchten graduated in 99 for his masters in Soil Science at Wageningen University. Just in time to notice the first interactive maps on the web. Fascinated by this phenomena he started developing in the world of web mapping using open source technologies like Mapserver, Postgis, Chameleon, OGR and OpenLayers. More recently he focussed on SDI-architectures and metadata implementations for Inspire. Last year he joined GeoCat, the founder of the Geonetwork OpenSource project, where he is a developer and consultant on any Open SDI related matter, with a focus on metadata.
ABSTRACT Using standards to protect investments in Open Source GIS One expects from closed source suppliers that new software versions are either backwards compatible or that a smooth upgrade process is available. Potential users of open source feel insecure in this respect. This presentation will promote the use of standards as an insurance policy against the risk of getting stuck with an abandoned GISproject. B3Partners offers a comprehensive GIS suite that covers most aspects of a geospatial infrastructure: loading of data (ETL), design of maps, security and a geo-cms for publication. This suite is build completely from open source projects. B3Partners did add wizards and user interfaces to ensure utilization without any programming effort. From the start B3Partners was aware of the risk that one of the underlying projects would no longer be supported. Therefore B3Partners designed an architecture based on building blocks that communicate using standards to minimize aforementioned risks. The B3P GIS Suite uses well known OGC standards like WMS, WFS and CSW for communication between the building blocks of the suite. One of more important and visible building blocks is the viewer engine. Back in 2008 B3Partners used a Flash engine, but at the time we foresaw that this may become obsolete over time. Therefore we devised an javascript interface for map engines. The Flash engine was embedded using this interface. Later this interface allowed us the embed OpenLayers and now Leaflet could be next. Thus we are changing engines without the need to change the other building blocks. This protects our investment.
BIO Arnulf Christl is director of Metaspatial specializing on secure geospatial data access. He currently consults to the Ordnance Survey Great Britain on its enterprise scale service architecture. He is a member of the OGC Architecture Board coordinating international standard development. Until 2012 he was president of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) which he co-founded in 2006. He developed the architecture of the eContent+ project ESDIN for a consortium of 12 European National Mapping Agencies. He has a thorough background in agile management and has guided a diverse selection of teams through the changes that are required for successful implementation. ABSTRACT The term "Open Data" touches a broad range of aspects concerning data access, ownership, copyright and licensing but it is neither well defined nor clear cut. As a result there is a lot of potential for misunderstanding depending on who uses it in which context. At the same time Open Data has become a core term used in data policies which calls of a much clearer definition. Increasingly businesses are looking into how Open Data can be leveraged to create added value. To bring clarity into this situation the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) maintains a white paper on Open Data in the geospatial context. It contains a clear definition of the terms, puts them into context and offers an additional set of criteria to more precisely define the scope of Open Data. It can be split into three major types: Factual data collections where values should not be modified (e.g. temperature measurement, speed control data); Authoritative data which is part of a legal framework and system; Community processed data which is created and maintained in an open and transparent consensus process. Finally the presentation will give examples of commercial uses of all three types of Open Data.
BIO Markus Metz received his MSc degree in Biology from the Free University of Berlin, Germany in 1998 and his PhD degree in natural sciences from the Carl-von-Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany in 2005. Since April 2010 he his working as a researcher at Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM, Trento, Italy). His main research interests are remote sensing for environmental risk assessment and Free Software GIS development (Grass).
BIO Andrew Ross is Director of Ecosystems at the Eclipse Foundation. He is responsible for the LocationTech working group, Long Term Support program, Common Build Infrastructure initiative, and Membership services. Andrew is an award winning software architect and technology leader. Prior to the Eclipse Foundation, Andrew was Director of Engineering at Ingres. His team added OGC compliant spatial support to the Ingres database, and added support for Ingres geospatial in many applications including ArcGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, and more. Prior to to Ingres, Andrew was a Software Architect at Nortel where he developed Telecom solutions based on open source technologies. Andrew is Director of the LocationTech industry working group hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, a charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), and project lead for the Freeseer video recording and streaming suite. ABSTRACT The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), modeled loosely on the Apache Foundation, was founded in March, 2006. The OSGEO has been incredibly successful and has grown rapidly to support 25 or so projects, some in incubation, 20 chapters worldwide, and a national conference, FOSS4G, which last year in Denver attracted about 900 participants.One of the most important developments in open source software is the rise of the open source foundation driven by a several needs, among which one of the most important is the need for corporate engagement. These non profit legal entities offer projects important benefits that are difficult for a project to fund on its own including providing a host for managing fiscal and intellectual property shared resources such as trademarks and shared copyrights, governance, and a liability firewall for community participants. These foundation encourage trust in the long term stability of the projects they support and, most importantly for enterprise software, they encourage corporate participation. A number of people advocating for open source geospatial software have seen the need for services and facilitates to enable corporate engagement. The Eclipse Foundation provides services to reduce friction for organizations to re-use and contribute to open source projects. This supports business developing products and services that depend upon open source and in turn, the open source projects benefit from re-use, investment, and increased credibility. Based on this thinking the Eclipse Foundation with a team of representatives from notable companies and open source projects has initiated what is now officially known as the Eclipse Foundation LocationTech Working Group along. The LocationTech Working Group is intended to complement the important role the OSGEO and to fill an important gap in the enterprise geospatial market and provide benefits to the broader open source community. In this presentation the motivation for, business benefits, and an overview of the structure of the LocationTech Working Group will be presented.
BIO Oliver Morris, is a member of the executive committee at Neftex, near Oxford, UK where he leads the Technical Services team. Since joining Neftex 5 years ago, he has been responsible for product delivery and database development. Previously, he worked for an Environmental Engineering company working on analytical databases and GIS modelling. He is an active member of the AAPG GIS committee and contributor to the Energy Industry Profile metadata effort. He is a graduate of Environmental Science from Lancaster University. ABSTRACT In this presentation we share our experiences as a user of open source geospatial software, and demonstrate some of the solutions we have developed to expand the range of web-delivered content offered to our customers. Our online mapping applications provide global-scale visualizations of both present day subsurface geology and reconstructions of past environments, mapped at over 200 time intervals going back 600 million years. Maps are displayed together with supporting annotations, charts, geochemistry datasets and other database content, providing users with information valuable for better understanding their areas of interest and reducing their exploration risk. While it is still necessary to utilize proprietary software for managing information, security, quality control and keeping our product set refreshed – adopting server side open source geospatial software has offered benefits beside cost reductions including improved performance, reliability and ease of customisation. Having advanced capabilities for styling map layers, filtering, and polar display projections are particularly useful to easily interact and appreciate complex geological datasets. Publishing secure web services offers a further means of delivering spatial data products into other platforms.
ABSTRACT ISRIC has a mandate to serve the international community as custodian of world soil data and information and to increase awareness and understanding of soils in major global issues. ISRIC collects, stores, processes and disseminates global soil and terrain information for research and development of sustainable land use.. To fulfil this role at the global scale ISRIC has developed its web-based FOSS based Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF), which also contains an enterprise database “World Soil Information Services” for storing soil information. Generally, GSIF i) facilitate crowd-sourced, web-based entry, storage and extraction of soil profile data, area-class soil maps and global grids of environmental data, such as satellite imagery, digital elevation maps and climate and land cover maps; ii) support the automated production of consistent, harmonized soil maps at multiple spatial scales; iii) strengthen soil information handling capacity in an interactive and participatory process; iv) provide feedback mechanisms to increase accuracy and user engagement; and to v) provide added-value products and processing chains to local, national, regional and global soil science communities. FOSS is instrumental in a ) development of these components, and b ) in deployment in our training component and its users around the world, where budget and knowledge constraints are limiting capacity building.
BIO Just van den Broecke studied Chemistry and Computing Science at the University of Amsterdam. For 11 years he worked on telecommunications software as an engineer and architect at AT&T/Lucent Bell Laboratories. In 1997 he became self-employed, working from his own company Just Objects B.V., developing and consulting in the field of object technology, Java, multimedia and mobile applications. After having developed several GPS mobile apps and having a lifelong passion for maps, he fell for the beauty of the Geospatial domain. For Just, Free and Open Source has always been 'a way of life'. He has initiated and contributed to numerous open source geospatial projects such as GeoNetwork, the Heron Mapping Client and recently NLExtract, ETL tools for free Dutch geospatial datasets. He attempts to regularly contribute as a mapper to OpenStreetMap. Just is representative of OSGeo.nl, the Dutch Language Local chapter of the International Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org). ABSTRACT "Navigating the Open Source Geospatial Ecosystem" The use of Free and Open Source for Geospatial (FOSS4G) is increasingly expanding. Many parties have adopted FOSS4G: users, developers, integrators, in education and many more. To an outsider, the world of FOSS4G may seem chaotic, not the least since many of its inhabitants have names prepended with "Open Geo", like the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), OpenGeo (.org) from the US and the OpenGeoGroep (.nl) within The Netherlands. Foremost, there are the community projects where the actual software like GeoServer, MapServer, OpenLayers and many others is produced. In addition, government Open Data and crowd-sourced projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM) should also be added to this mix. All these players seem to be living happily together in a brave new world of giving and sharing. So where is the monetizing here? Where is the marketplace? What business models apply? What's in it for me? Loads of literature is available on Open Source business in general. Here, we will zoom into the Open Geospatial world. This planet is smaller, seemingly united, held together by central organizations like OSGeo and the OGC and by (open) geodata. We will look at the FOSS4G World as an ecosystem, often balanced, sometimes in turmoil, always striving to an equilibrium. Humans, organizations, standards, data and software are in a constant evolutionary movement. In this presentation we will navigate the Open Source Geospatial Ecosystem from within, introducing some inhabitants and their interactions, by presenting cases from actual FOSS4G projects. We will depict where and how value is produced and find out how monetizing is effected. At the same time we will demonstrate how the Open Source development model provides new opportunities within the current economic crisis, contributing to a sustainable world by maximizing reuse and minimizing the production of excess.
BIO Simone Giannecchini (Ing.) is the founder and managing director of GeoSolutions. He is a Charter Member of OSGeo, the Open Source Geospatial foundation. He is also a member of the Steering committee for the GeoTools as well as the GeoServer Open Source projects. Before founding GeoSolutions he has worked as Software Engineer at the NATO Undersea Research Center, a Military R&D facility based in La Spezia (Italy), on the implementation of a client-server infrastructure capable of storing, managing and disseminating geospatial data (vector, gridded, imagery) leveraging on WCS, WFS and WMS Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Specifications. ABSTRACT Creating and Leading an SME Exclusively Based on Open Source Software: Vision or Illusion? GeoSolutions was founded in 2006 around a simple and somewhat naive idea: leveraging exclusively on Open Source was a perfect business model for a SME to emerge and gain decent visibility in the geospatial arena. After 6 years of steady growth we want to take the occasion to look back to the road we covered so far to analyse how we got here, the errors we made as well as the decisions we took that proved to be correct. We will discuss common misconceptions about Open Source used to discredit its adoption but we will also discuss the common mistakes performed by entities approaching Open Source Software at first that may lead to failed adoptions. Lately the OpenData movement has been gaining momentum as a bottom-up process thanks to the high demand for transparency and participation arising from citizens. Alongside the INSPIRE directive has come into force resulting from a standardization process following the usual (which is not, per se, a synonym of successful) top-down approach. We will discuss and analyse the impact of these two new elements on the business model being presented trying to highlight opportunities and impediments for companies like GeoSolutions but also for the target clients.
BIO For more than 10 years Marc Vloemans has been professionally involved in the marketing and adoption of open standards, -source and -data. As an entrepreneur, interim business developer, consultant, writer and speaker he specialises in the interface between public policy and private ICT-sector. Both in the Netherlands and internationally. At present he serves as a director for the Dutch Government Re-use Foundation and community manager for the Flamningo GeoCMS community. His upcoming new book 'ICT Re-use' offers a practical guide for governmental agencies and commercial service suppliers to develop innovative public-private-partnerships - communities - around open technology. ABSTRACT Open Sourcing the Flamingo Geo Content Management System Over the last 8 years the Flamingo mapviewer has evolved into a standardised geo-CMS under GPL-license. Originally developed for and by Dutch regional government it was recognised that future adoption and continuity required a tailored open source approach to the organisational aspects of the project. The principal question revolved around how to enable developers/service providers in their technical and commercial activities, while at the same time protecting the influence and investments from non-technical end-users in the public sector. The solution was found in an unique and innovative public-private-partnership that honours the demands of these various stakeholders in the Flamingo-project. A partnership that incorporates other re-use initiatives beside the Flamingo-project, thereby embedding the open geo-agenda more firmly in governmental ICT-policies. As such it provides a blue print for open public policies in other countries. This presentation is aimed at representatives from (semi-)public and private organisations from the Netherlands and other countries.