[OSGeo-Discuss] CASCADOSS regional workshops. Benelux.
Dear All, CASCADOSS project organizes several regional events, targeted to disseminate project's output, extended with demonstrations, case studies and training. In general there will be 5 regional workshops, held in: Benelux, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovakia and Hungary, organized idependently from each other. For the start I would like to announce the workshop for the region of Benelux. It will be held on February 5th-6th 2009 in Leuven, Belgium. The participation is free of charge. The event is bilingual: French and Dutch, with simultaneous translation. Everyone interested in the practical applications of FOSS4G should find here comprehensive information on: 1. FOSS4G licensing issues 2. FOSS4G business models 3. Software evaluation methods 4. Results of the evaluation on wide range of FOSS4G software projects 5. Practical applications in EA, e-government, decision support. You are welcome to submit your own case study, application, business model, software development cases, community developments etc. You will find more details, including registration and abstract submission forms on our Belgian website : www.cascadoss.be . Best regards: Raf Dr. Rafal Wawer K.U.Leuven RD Division SADL (Spatial Application Division) Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224 BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee Belgium tel. 0032 16 329731 Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Benefits raster data on RDBMS
Dear all Concerning the benefits of having raster data stored together with vector data in a spatial database, let me first quote from an excellent paper from the late Jim Gray (Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade): What’s wrong with files? Everything builds from files as a base. HDF uses files. Database systems use files. But, file systems have no metadata beyond a hierarchical directory structure and file names. They encourage a do-it-yourself- data-model that will not benefit from the growing suite of data analysis tools. They encourage do-it-yourself-access-methods that will not do parallel, associative, temporal, or spatial search. They also lack a high-level query language. Lastly, most file systems can manage millions of files, but by the time a file system can deal with billions of files, it has become a database system. In other words, if you have substantial amounts of raster data (as is increasingly the case in geospatial application), you will need to develop a significant amount of software to manage your files. Unless... your data is handled by a raster-enabled spatial database. Best Regards Gilberto -- === Dr.Gilberto Camara Director General National Institute for Space Research (INPE) Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil voice: +55-12-3945-6035 fax: +55-12-3921-6455 web: http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto blog: http://techne-episteme.blogspot.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo The China event
Ravi: It's nice to know that you pay close attention to our activities. We organize this activity to let students get know of the whole GIS software stack, and let them to realize the benefit of using the open source GIS. However, we won't fight against the commercial software. We'd like to keep an open mind and we welcome commercial GIS users to share their views here. We just want our student know a bit more about the GIS world, especially for open source GIS. We try to spread GIS knowledge to the students. And what's more, we'd like to get more experience from you and get more guide on how to organize a good OSGIS user group event, how to encourage students to try Open Source software and so on. So we want to let you know our activities and what we're gonna provide for the students and OSGIS advocators in our country. Your suggestion will always be useful for us. Regards On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 6:26 PM, RAVI KUMAR [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, the OSGeo China event going to be held going to be held may please be explained on the following points as this will certainly add to info for others. 1. What are the Open GIS lectures proposed 2. The ARC??? software mentioned, is this an exercise to bridge between Prop-Com (proprietary commercial software) and Open GIS. If 'Yes', then it is very interesting, and details may please be provided. Wish the event the best, and hope it will add to the capacity building of OSGeo. Cheers Ravi Kumar ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Benefits raster data on RDBMS
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:13:49AM -0200, Gilberto Camara wrote: Dear all Concerning the benefits of having raster data stored together with vector data in a spatial database, let me first quote from an excellent paper from the late Jim Gray (Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade): What’s wrong with files? Everything builds from files as a base. HDF uses files. Database systems use files. But, file systems have no metadata beyond a hierarchical directory structure and file names. They encourage a do-it-yourself- data-model that will not benefit from the growing suite of data analysis tools. They encourage do-it-yourself-access-methods that will not do parallel, associative, temporal, or spatial search. They also lack a high-level query language. Lastly, most file systems can manage millions of files, but by the time a file system can deal with billions of files, it has become a database system. In other words, if you have substantial amounts of raster data (as is increasingly the case in geospatial application), you will need to develop a significant amount of software to manage your files. Unless... your data is handled by a raster-enabled spatial database. I don't see anything in that paragraph that indicates that storing the *image data* in the database is important. (A link to the paper online or something could change that, of course.) Specifically, I don't think there's any doubt that if you have many-many files, it makes sense to store the *queryable image information* -- things like spatial extent, temporal extent, etc. -- belong in a database. The question is, in the data column, do you store a File Path, or the Image Data? Until/Unless databases get/have image manipulation tools directly, I can't see the value of storing the image data itself in the database. The points above argue against file-system based metadata storage/retrieval: sorting files by date, searching through index files, etc., so far as I can tell, but I don't see a compelling argument for image data in the database above. Of course, this is assuming that the image data access pattern is the same in the database and on disk: for example, storing GeoTIFF data, then using GDAL to parse the string from the database as a GeoTIFF file. If the database you're using has a different (faster) Image access algorithm, then of course there can be benefits. However, those same benefits could presumably be realized with sufficiently complete libraries for accessing the image externally: If Oracles' Database product, for example, internally tiles the image, and they had a library to access the image in the same way, presumably you could store those bits on disk as well. However, if that library depends internally on a database, then integration of all points into the same database might help in some ways. In any case, I think there's obvious reasons to store your image metadata in a database -- and *using the same tools for accessing the images*, I don't think we've yet seen a compelling argument for storing image blobs in the database. Of course, all things are not equal :) If your database has built in MrSID support, for example, you could imagine using Database Storage for Images, because you'd get the automatic compression combined with the querying -- but that's not about the Database Specifically, just the image storage/reading library that comes along with it. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo The China event
Hi All, the OSGeo China event going to be held going to be held may please be explained on the following points as this will certainly add to info for others. 1. What are the Open GIS lectures proposed 2. The ARC??? software mentioned, is this an exercise to bridge between Prop-Com (proprietary commercial software) and Open GIS. If 'Yes', then it is very interesting, and details may please be provided. Wish the event the best, and hope it will add to the capacity building of OSGeo. Cheers Ravi Kumar ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G2008 conference materials
Gavin Fleming ha scritto: Perfect timing Eduardo There was a permissions bug on the FOSS4G website hosted by OSGeo that was fixed only last week. Many presentations have since been uploaded and we hope to have all of them available soon, along with some of the materials from workshops and labs. Hi Gavin, thanks a lot for the work, I'm definitely looking forward to read about all the interesting presentations that I've missed (busy schedule, could not be everywhere ;) ). I was looking in this page http://conference.osgeo.org/index.php/foss4g/2008/schedConf/presentations and I see materials for, say, 3 presentations only? When you say uploaded I should not read published, or am I just looking in the wrong place? Cheers Andrea -- Andrea Aime I also have quite some interest in this. I see that widget. buzzfuze. com is loading when I view an abstract with Firefox - will presentations eventually be available to view through this? Cheers* joe ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [Fwd: Re: [GRASS-user] Tips for setting up annew FOSS-GEO-linux-box]
I've added some of my own comments about operating systems to this wiki page. I'm no expert on Linux distributions, and the comments are based solely on my own experiences as a Linux user. I hope that this is helpful to others. Landon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 6:34 PM To: Nikos Alexandris; OSGeo Discussions Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [Fwd: Re: [GRASS-user] Tips for setting up annew FOSS-GEO-linux-box] Nikos, I'm forwarding this to the OSGeo general discussion list. You can register at: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Tyler On 2-Nov-08, at 6:22 PM, Nikos Alexandris wrote: My apologies for the off-topic post. I started an osgeo-wikipage (see attached message). It would be extremely useful if experienced users/developers would contribute by sharing some of their secrets on how to best setup an osgeo GIS workstation. Kind regards, Nikos From: Nikos Alexandris [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: November 2, 2008 6:13:43 PM PST (CA) To: grass-user [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [GRASS-user] Tips for setting up an new FOSS-GEO-linux- box I've started the attempt to collect in a wiki-page tips for setting up a GIS workstation. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GIS_workstation_setup_tips It certainly needs modifications. Kind regards, Nikos ___ grass-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G2008 conference materials
Thanks Gavin, I´m gonna wait for that. best, Eduardo Kanegae http://anthologis.com On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 4:02 AM, Gavin Fleming [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Perfect timing Eduardo There was a permissions bug on the FOSS4G website hosted by OSGeo that was fixed only last week. Many presentations have since been uploaded and we hope to have all of them available soon, along with some of the materials from workshops and labs. Gavin -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eduardo Kanegae Sent: 31 October 2008 11:07 PM To: discuss@lists.osgeo.org Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G2008 conference materials Hi, Will the materials from FOSS4G2008 conference be published at www.foss4g2008.org ? thanks ;-) -- Eduardo Kanegae http://anthologis.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss This message is intended for the addressee only. Information and attachments in this e-mail may contain confidential, proprietary, or legally privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, or responsible for delivery of the message to the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution, or any action taken is prohibited and may be unlawful, and could result in a claim against you. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Does the OSGeo have a historian?
While preparing my recent proposal for the OSGeo I realized there wasn't a lot of information on the history of the organization. I realize part of this is because the OSGeo is pretty young as far as organizations go. However, most of the information I could find about the OSGeo was related to the founding of the organization. Do we have any type of timeline that presents important events in the history of the OSGeo since that time? Do we have a historian? I'm thinking that such a timeline could contain information about projects and sponsors joining the OSGeo, brief summaries about OSGeo conferences, and information about the formation of local OSGeo projects. Landon Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately.___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Software to test a WCS server?
Hi Alexandre, There is a CITE (Compliance and Interoperability Test Engine) which is used to test reference implementations for OGC specs, including WCS. You can get the engine from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/teamengine To get the tests for wcs you need to sign up for an account on the OGC portal.I am not sure if they are publicly available elsewhere. The easiest way (if you are interested) is probably to send a message to the CITE forum: [EMAIL PROTECTED] And state that you want access to the tests. -Justin Alexandre Leroux wrote: Hi all, I tried to find a quick way to test our WCS server implementation (it's specifically for an in-house meteorological data format - not useful outside our organization). What I'm looking for is a simple software such as QGIS, uDig or similar to test loading data from our WCS server, and help us debugging it! :-) After some searches, I found GeoServer supports WCS and well, nothing else. I must be wrong! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Coverage_Service GDAL supports WCS to some extent: http://gdal.org/frmt_wcs.html Thanks a lot for any feedback! Alex http://slashgeo.org -- Justin Deoliveira OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org Enterprise support for open source geospatial. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Does the OSGeo have a historian?
I'll wait for others to respond. If we don't already have this information on the wiki I will create a page. Landon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Alex Mandel Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 1:50 PM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Does the OSGeo have a historian? Landon Blake wrote: While preparing my recent proposal for the OSGeo I realized there wasn't a lot of information on the history of the organization. I realize part of this is because the OSGeo is pretty young as far as organizations go. However, most of the information I could find about the OSGeo was related to the founding of the organization. Do we have any type of timeline that presents important events in the history of the OSGeo since that time? Do we have a historian? I'm thinking that such a timeline could contain information about projects and sponsors joining the OSGeo, brief summaries about OSGeo conferences, and information about the formation of local OSGeo projects. Landon Thanks for asking about this, I was interesting in such information too. I want to make a timeline of OSGeo and OSGeo projects for a poster that we can use in marketing. Maybe we need a history page on the wiki to track such information in one place similar to Tyler's recent summary of OSGeo contributors. Alex ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Raster data on a DBMS
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 08:57:53PM -0200, Gilberto Camara wrote: Jim Gray´s paper and much more on this issue is on his site at MS Research. Gray has hundreds of papers listed on his Microsoft Research page. As I said, I'm not claiming that Gray's paper said or did not say something, merely that the section you quoted did not. Allow me to reiterate my earlier argument, which is that FOSS4G should **allow** users the option of storing raster data in a database. Storing images in a database is not recommended in each and every situation. The user should have the option, according to his needs. I'm not sure if you feel that someone is preventing this from happening in some way. It sounds like you think that there is some blocker here other than someone investing the time and effort to make this happen. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Are United States RD Tax Credits Applicable to Open Source Software Development?
I'm currently working on a proposal to secure some corporate funding for development of OpenJUMP, an open source desktop GIS viewer. I'd like to know if any of you have experience with applying research and development tax credits to the development of open source software (in the United States). It will be a lot easier to secure funding if I can show my boss that we could be eligible for a tax discount. Is it possible to apply research and development tax credits to open source development? Where could I learn more about the rules and limitations that would apply? Does the OSGeo have a guide for companies or organization interested in funding open source development? Could we put something like this together? Landon Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately.___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Raster data on a DBMS
On 11/3/08, Gilberto Camara [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: .. Allow me to reiterate my earlier argument, which is that FOSS4G should **allow** users the option of storing raster data in a database. Storing images in a database is not recommended in each and every situation. The user should have the option, according to his needs. .. There are two kinds of users in this world when it comes to storing raster data... and, fortunately, the world is big enough for both of them. The FOSS in FOSS4G gives each kind to develop what they need/want. There is no concept of allowing anyone the option. Gilberto, my sense is that instead of convincing someone else that storing rasters in a db can/may be a better option in some cases, energy and resources might be better deployed in making options available, and making existing options easier and more powerful. In another thread you wrote -- INPE´s FOSS4G developement of raster data on RDBMS using the TerraLib library is a tangible proof of concept. TerraAmazon (built using TerraLib) is INPE's OS solution for monitoring tropical forests operationally. While I have an earlier version of TerraLib/TerraView that I got when I visited INPE last year, I am not familiar with its raster-in-db capabilities. Making and distributing a product that can work on different platforms, Windows, Macs, *nix, will be the best marketing for such capabilities, and provide the options that you advocate. Fwiw, O'Reilly's database war stories series has an article on Flickr that store metadata in a db and the photos themselves on directly in the filesystem. See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_3_flickr.html. Other stories in that series are also very instructive. Apple's Aperture does the same thing... all the metadata are in SQLite (Coredata on Mac OS X) while the images themselves are stored in folders on the disk -- albeit hidden from the user. See http://www.bagelturf.com/aparticles/tips/tiplib/index.php and http://www.mungosmash.com/archives/2005/12/the_aperture_da.php. Of course, both of the above examples are of the high number of small size images variety while the raster/geographic applications are of the relatively fewer number of very large size images kind. Still, the case studies are instructive. I think the best argument for any approach is the approach itself. The free and open part in FOSS4G allows any and all approaches to exist. Scratch your own itch, meet your own need, then put it out for others to use. If they like it, they will adopt it and improve it. If they don't like it, it will die a timely death. Darwinian at its best. -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) http://www.osgeo.org/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] A new version of GeoKettle released!
Hello, The GeoSOA research group (http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca) of the Centre for Research in Geomatics at Laval University, Quebec City, Canada is proud to announce the release of a new version of GeoKettle (http://www.geokettle.org). GeoKettle is a spatially-enabled version of Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle, http://kettle.pentaho.org). Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) is a powerful, metadata-driven ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool dedicated to the integration of different data sources for building data warehouses. It is part of the open source BI (Business Intelligence) software suite designed by Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.com). This special distribution of Kettle includes extensions which enable the use of geospatial (GIS) data. Like Kettle, GeoKettle is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). GeoKettle v3.1.0-20081103 is still in alpha version but demonstrates the potential of this ETL tool dedicated to spatial data warehouses and Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) applications. What's new since release 2.5.2-20080531 ? - The GeoKettle extensions were ported to the new Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) version 3.1.0-GA. As such, this release of GeoKettle includes all the improvements from the new PDI version. - Changed the core Geometry object framework from GeOxygene to the Java Topology Suite (JTS). - Added native support for Oracle Spatial and MySQL geospatial DBMS. - Speed improvements: due to the upgrade of PDI core and to the JTS library, GeoKettle now offers better throughput. We measured a typical speedup of row throughput between 15% and 60% (depending of the transformation) when using geospatial data. For further details, to download GeoKettle and to join the active GeoKettle community through the different mailing lists, please visit the GeoKettle project page: http://www.geokettle.org Hoping you will enjoy GeoKettle. Th. -- Prof. Thierry Badard, Ph.D. Professeur au Département des sciences géomatiques (http://www.scg.ulaval.ca) Chercheur régulier au Centre de Recherche en Géomatique (http://www.crg.ulaval.ca) Chercheur régulier du Réseau de Centres d'Excellence GEOIDE (http://www.geoide.ulaval.ca) Chercheur collaborateur de la chaire de recherche industrielle en base de données géospatiales décisionnelles (http://mdspatialdb.chair.scg.ulaval.ca) Responsable du projet de formation sur les normes internationales en géomatique (http://standards.scg.ulaval.ca) Administrateur des projets open source GeOxygene et GeoKettle (http://oxygene-project.sourceforge.net http://www.geokettle.org) Membre votant de la fondation OSGeo (http://www.osgeo.org) Département des sciences géomatiques Faculté de foresterie et de géomatique Pavillon Louis-Jacques Casault 1055, avenue du Séminaire Local 1343 Université Laval Québec (Québec) G1V 0A6 Canada Tél.: +1.418.656-7116 - Fax: +1.418.656-7411 Courriel : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca *AVERTISSEMENT* Avis relatif à la confidentialité Notice of confidentiality Advertencia de confidencialidad http://www.rec.ulaval.ca/lce/securite/confidentialite.htm ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Best Place For My OSGeo Presentation
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Landon Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've finished with my OSGeo presentation at the Gold Country GIS Users Group. (Thanks for all of those that provided reference material and copies of their own presentations.) I was wondering where the best place would be to archive this presentation. Who should I speak to about this? (I can make the presentation available on my own website, but I thought it might be helpful to include it with an archive of other presentations.) A couple of OSGeo presentations are tagged osgeo here: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/osgeo (maybe there are more, just missing the osgeo tag) Markus ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
