GeoInterpolations

Day 1 of FOSS4G 2009 kicked off on Wednesday, October 21, at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. Day 0 was the day of workshops, but Wednesday was the starting day of the main conference with keynote speakers and presentation sessions.

Day 1 started off with a series of keynote talks. Many of the were on high-level, vague topics and I didn’t find them particularly interesting. Show me the code. But then Paul Ramsey gave a highly informative and entertaining speech entitled Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts: The Future of the Open Source Economy. The basic message was how the most proprietary software companies sell products (rather than software) by including value added items (installation, support, Larry, etc.) with the software that you purchase (or rent). In order to have a successful business model, open source software companies also need to sell a complete product, although in this case the software is free and the value added products are sold. Paul is a great speaker, and is able to flawlessly incorporate his mother-in-law and killer rabbits into a speech that seemed to keep everyone interested. Luckily somebody captured the talk and already posted it on YouTube, and I would encourage everyone to watch it here.

After that it is was on to the technical sessions. As usual for a FOSS4G conference, you are continuously picking between multiple interesting talks. Hopefully some of the sessions I missed were taped, and will be available for later viewing. Of the ones I that I was able to attend, here are some of talks I found the most informative…

Emmanuel Christophe gave an overview of the Orfeo Toolbox, a project that has integrated a number imaging and geospatial libraries (ITK, GDAL, OSSIM, etc) for use in the analysis of remote sensing data. It is a project funded by the French Space Agency through 2010 in order to increase the usable value of remote sensing datasets. To date, it seems that there has been a relative lack of compelling open source alternatives to proprietary remote sensing analysis packages (particularly desktop apps), so I was quite happy to see substantial development in this area and that the project is likely to be funded beyond 2010.

After lunch were a few talks on how ‘cloud computing’ and geoprocessing can work together. Bastian Schaeffer gave a quick overview of cloud computing platforms that can be used to run geospatial applications written in Java, focusing on Google’s AppEngine (less flexible, easier to setup and administer) and Amazon’s AWS (more flexible, more challenging to setup and administer). Next up, Claude Philipona gave a talk on using AWS to deploy websites created using the MapFish framework (such as http://map.veloland.ch). They had an interesting approach in solving the issue of allowing users to select which map layers are displayed while maintaining a good response time. Their solution was to create tiles of individual map layers, which are then combined on demand (server side) based on what layers the user has requested.

Other interesting talks included Volker Mishche’s Geodata and CouchDB which presented some initial work on adding geospatial query support to CouchDB, a non-relational document-oriented database with a RESTful API. It sounded promising, but I admittedly have a relational database mindset so I kept thinking how repetitive and wasteful the non-relational approach would be for complex features, and I came away thinking I need to do more reading on document-oriented databases so I can understand the potential benefits. My current impression is that they can scale to massive numbers of users, but the tradeoff is that you lose important analysis capabilities.

Later on, a couple members of the Zoo Project gave a presentation on their open OWS platform, on which developers will be able to expose their geoprocessing services as a standardized Web Processing Service (WPS). The expect their project to be released with examples and developer documentation around March 2010. One of my main goals of attending this year’s FOSS4G was to gain a better understanding of methods that are being used to create geoprocessing web services. While various WPS implementations were discussed by many presenters, nobody seemed to have working demonstrations of using WPS to do anything interesting. I’m not sure whether that is due to the complexity of the WPS spec, or whether there haven’t been enough compelling use cases to drive the development. WPS hasn’t arrived yet, but the potential is there.

For more reading, here are a few other posts on FOSS4G 2009:

• How 2 Map - FOSS4G Day n+1
• From the Inside Looking In - FOSS4G 2009 - Day 1

That’s all for now, I’ll follow up later recapping the remaining days of the conference. I have to go explore more of this beautiful city while I have the opportunity to do so…

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