Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?
On 5/6/08, Christopher Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 11:00:54PM +0200, Dirk Frigne wrote: On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 08:21:21PM +0200, Arnulf Christl wrote: What was a Desktop GIS exactly? I only have a browser and for some strange reason all that I do starts with an http://... A Desktop GIS is what you switch to when you realize that the browser makes a really poor operating system, and moving outside of it and using the rest of your computer is important to accomplishing some tasks. I understand your answer, but instead of switching to the desktop GIS only, you should decide to switch to the server in some circumstances for accomplishing some tasks... My response to Arnulf was tongue in cheek: sorry that didn't come across well. Actually, I thought it was a very well put response. It came off very well. Recognizing the boundaries of the capabilities of desktop vs. the browser is perhaps the first step toward making a sane application. A few capabilities port over from one to the other. The ones that don't and yet are force-fitted into the wrong environment make for a very sucky experience. -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: OS and proprietary
On 4/27/08, Arnulf Christl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] My original sentiment still stands -- if you have the money, but don't have the skills, and don't need it yesterday, it might be better in the long-term to fund an extension of a good OSS project than to take the easy way out and buy a COTS package. Absolutely. It appears that Open Source is the next level in the evolution of business models[1]. .. Arnulf, is there an English version of that article available? I don't have a reverse compiler for German, but would love to read it. ;-) If not, could you give a summary that is more than Open Source is the next level in the evolution of business models and less than onerous for you to summarize. Many thanks. COTS translates into commercial off the shelf and I wonder why this term should be restricted to proprietary packages. The times when one had to manually compile a PostGIS, MapServer, GeoServer, gvSIG, Quantum GIS and so on, before one could use them are over. You can - and that is an extra advantage - but you don't have to. So my suggestion is to put COTS on the shelf of terminology that is compatible with Open Source. Very good point. Obviously, I meant proprietary, and frankly, I want to see proprietary also co-exist with open source, though my preference leans toward the latter. Nevertheless, yes, COTS could very well be open source, and held to the same standards and expectation as other COTS but proprietary solutions. Best regards, Arnulf. [1] http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/portal/article_show?article=osjb2007-01-02-freyermuth.pdf [2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Software -- Arnulf Christl http://www.wheregroup.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: OS and proprietary
On 4/26/08, Andre Grobler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that is probably another aspect us proprietary experienced people do not remember, there's a ton of stuff I don't need in ArcView that I'm paying for… What I do need from it unfortunately comes from the whole spectrum of its modules / levels and extensions, which is simply put, not remotely affordable. In no way did I wish to imply that OS needs to be more like proprietary, just that cost of entry is time consuming. Which in my current state I'm rather hard pressed for… would pay for training though!!! Unclear to me from the above statement if you have more money than time or more time than money (although the two, in many situations, are interchangeable). To paraphrase the popular saying, There are 10 kinds of people in this world -- those who see open source lacking what they need and choose a proprietary software instead and those who see open source lacking what they need and choose to make it better. If you have the money that you would spend on proprietary software anyway, consider hiring an open source developer to develop what you want, and then put that functionality back into the open source community. André Grobler ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?
On 4/25/08, Arnulf Christl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: .. Legacy GIS Architect In the world of neogeography punks, this is a nice throwback to the future. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] about fire eagle
On 4/18/08, Gao Ang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear all: I'd like to test a new location service provided by Yahoo! It's called fire eagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ And want to test it with the Ruby gem: http://fireeagle.rubyforge.org/ But fire eagle is still in alpha version. I need an invitation code to Login. If there are some fire eagle user in this mail alias. Could you send me an invitation of fire eagle? My Yahoo! id: tomgaoang And email is: tomgaoang # gmail dot com. I can send you an invite but want to make sure you haven't received one already. Please send me an off-list personal email. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Regards -- GaoAng IGSNRR, Chinese Academy of Science Blog: http://www.gaoang.com -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FW: [GSDI Technical] blog - We need a Wikipedia for data
On 4/16/08, Kralidis,Tom [Burlington] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thought this might be of interest: ..Tom From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kate Lance Sent: 15 April, 2008 1:02 PM To: SDI technical Subject: [GSDI Technical] blog - We need a Wikipedia for data maybe some from the geospatial community would care to submit a comment (regarding technical approach/architecture) in response to this recent blog post by Bret Taylor, ex-Googler, about the need for open data sets http://bret.appspot.com/entry/we-need-a-wikipedia-for-data We need a Wikipedia for data - April 9, 2008 Haven't read the above post, but I wonder if the poster(s) know about Open StreetMaps? between -00-00 and -99-99 ___ Technical mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gsdi.org/mailman/listinfo/technical ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Comparison of Open Source Desktop GIS Software
On 3/19/08, Mateusz Loskot [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, For those who do not monitor the Slashgeo, a very detailed and interesting comparison of FOSS GIS for desktop has been compiled by Stefan Steiniger: http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/ Indeed, a commendable compilation. Sure to become a great reference tool. References: http://technology.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/19/1529252 http://freegeographytools.com/2008/feature-comparison-table-for-open-source-gis Greetings -- Mateusz Loskot http://mateusz.loskot.net ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Image Handling in RDBMS
On 2/22/08, Gilberto Camara [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear OSGEO I also beg to differ with Paul about the number of cases where image data handling in RDBMS is useful or necessary. In corporate applications where vectors and raster live together, and data processing and editing operations are used, handling different types of data together in a database is convenient. Control is more important than performance. Our TerraAmazon system (presented in the latest FOSS4G conference) does this, and we handle large files without problems. For one-way image servers, on a write once, read mostly basis, then the case for handling raster data inside the DBMS is less clear. Since the output is an image delivered to the user, either as a file or as a visualization, DBMS features such as concurrency control and long transactions are not needed. Performance is more important than control in this case. And, *that*, my dear all, is really the key. I think what Bruce B has also been saying is that there can be use cases in which storing images in a db can make sense. From a recent post by the creator of my favorite database, regarding storing and speed of accessing BLOBs in a db as opposed to BLOBs on the filesystem and their metadata in the db, I quote One would think. And yet experiments suggest otherwise. It turns out to be faster to read images directly out of SQLite BLOBs until the image gets up to about 15KB on windows and up to about 60KB on linux. And even for much larger images, the performance difference between reading from SQLite and reading from a file is not that great, so it is a reasonable thing to do to read from SQLite if transactions are important to you or if it is just more convenient. The last sentence fragment, if transactions are important... is the key here. Of course, your mileage may vary, and do your own due diligence to decide when to store images in the db instead of on the filesystem. If the db can take care of indexing images for you so you can retrieve only desired portions of the image, if the db can take care of figuring out where and how to store the images on the hard disk, if the db can take care of the boring but essential admin tasks such as backups and restores for you, definitely use a db. That brings us back to PostGIS supporting images. Clearly, most folks who use it don't see it worth the effort implementing. I suggest two things -- one. This being open source, Bruce and others, start developing the capabilities and contribute it back to the PostGIS project as an add-on. Many like you, the silent ones, would appreciate it. two. Again, Bruce, you summed up the thread in another email -- might I suggest that you add the pros and cons of storing images in a db to the edu-OSGeo wiki as a presentation/decision-making aid so other data managers evaluating this issue have a valuable resource to lean on. Open source folks are nothing if not opinionated. Makes for a great conversation just about anything. Thanks. Best regards, Gilberto -- === Dr.Gilberto Camara Director General National Institute for Space Research (INPE) Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [Gfoss] Last chance before cancelling: OSGeo Hacking event in a monastry near Bolsena (Italy)!?
On 2/12/08, Paolo Cavallini [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jeroen Ticheler ha scritto: Unfortunately only 6 people have signed up for the hacking event until now. This means that I'll cancel the event by Thursday, unless suddenly at least 12 others confirm their participation :-( Too bad, but that's life. One more confirmation that develpers are *the* limiting resource in FOSS ecosystems. I have no idea how you reached that conclusion. I would love to spend a week in monastery in Bolsena communing with fellow developers and FOSS enthusiasts... I would be happy to show that I am not a limiting resource if you can come up with approx. USD 2000 or so to make it possible for me. Hard money is more difficult to come by than time, although to some extent they are translatable bi-directionally. Given a choice to use my money to pay my mortgage or attend a conference, I would choose the former. I hope this event becomes a reality, but the distance * critical mass factor is a very important thing to consider in communities that require physical presence. Bypassing this limitation has been the real power of the internet, but it sure is a poor substitute for the real experience of a monastery or Bolsena. Virtual *anything* is just not as good as the real thing, but it makes do in a pinch. pc -- Paolo Cavallini, see: http://www.faunalia.it/pc ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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] Re: Call for Papers: LocWeb2008 in Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference
Dear OSGeo-ers, I am sending out a second call for papers for the First International Workshop on Location and the Web that will be held April 22 in Beijing in conjunction with WWW2008. The submissions, on any and all geospatial aspects of the web, are due in full by Feb 1, 2008. As I am on the program committee, I would love to see some OSGeo participation. Puneet. The original CFP follows -- On 1/9/08, P Kishor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Below is the call for papers for the First International Workshop on Location and the Web in Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. I hope some of you will consider submitting papers and boosting the OSGeo presence. Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers. Please circulate widely. http://medien.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/LocWeb2008/index.html Scope The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008) focuses on all the geospatial aspects that are related to the Web. A location-aware Web will spawn network effects among geo-referenced data models and services, improving interoperability and interaction by providing a well-defined location concept for the Web. We encourage submissions that will enable mobile search, search in automotive, special local search engines in specialized fields. The workshop will look at the theme of location and the Web from a macro-level, interdisciplinary perspective. In recent years, the topic of location appears in many communities and is achieving great attention - user-generated content, location-related multimedia Web content, Web scale geo-content mining, and mobile search are only some of these developments. -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Call for Papers: LocWeb2008 in Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference
volks, Below is the call for papers for the First International Workshop on Location and the Web in Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. I hope some of you will consider submitting papers and boosting the OSGeo presence. Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers. http://medien.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/LocWeb2008/index.html Scope The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008) focuses on all the geospatial aspects that are related to the Web. A location-aware Web will spawn network effects among geo-referenced data models and services, improving interoperability and interaction by providing a well-defined location concept for the Web. We encourage submissions that will enable mobile search, search in automotive, special local search engines in specialized fields. The workshop will look at the theme of location and the Web from a macro-level, interdisciplinary perspective. In recent years, the topic of location appears in many communities and is achieving great attention - user-generated content, location-related multimedia Web content, Web scale geo-content mining, and mobile search are only some of these developments. -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] summary of VGI workshop in Santa Barbara Dec 13-14, 2007
Greetings, I posted my brief summary of the recently held VGI workshop on the geowanking list, and am reposting it here as well. I hope you find this useful -- Workshop on Volunteered Geographic Information Dec 13-14, 2007 Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara, CA Approximately 30 participants. The participant list and contributed issues papers are available at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/participants.html Presentations ranged from smart sensors for solving global problems (think cell phones that transmit geocoded ambient information, digital traces that we leave everywhere we go such a while swiping a subway card, crossing a traffic light, working at a wifi hotspot, or talking on the cellphone [1] to GPS units that can be extended with low-cost measurement devices: for example, GPS that not only records water locations, but also measures water quality [2]) to VGI from the grassroots where citizens contribute and fill in the gaps that the government can't or won't [3]. OpenStreetMap was presented as a specific case of organized VGI [4] to personalized driving routes [5] VGI implies connectivity. Waldseemüller map was shown as one of the first documented examples of VGI. In today's world, while a formal naming process for placenames exists, technology makes it possible to have multiple names for a single location. VGI itself is described by many different terms: user-generated content/collective intellegence/crowdsourcing/asserted information. Whatever it is called, it leads to empowerment of millions who are untrained and have no authority otherwise. VGI leads to non-uniform coverage as only interesting places tend to get covered, and depends on web search engines to allow us to find it. There are three types of sensors: inert or fixed; carried on moving objects; and human beings. A key trait of VGI is that humans act as sensors. This is really citizen science in action, and some of its examples are the Christmas bird count and Project GLOBE. Some possible research questions to consider are: Why do people do this? Is it self-promotion (exhibitionism, retaining ownership of contributed data); altruism; a desire to fill gaps in the available data; or sharing with friends? Studying the range of authority and assertion, the potential for subversion of information, and the review process which may or may not be localized [6]. Almost 80% of all decisions are based on spatial information. Like in any decision-making, information loops exist in geographic information based decision-making as well. Characterizing VGI quality: completeness, consistency. Notions of place, discovering VGI, integrating VGI and GI, grounding semantics, modeling trust and reputation, liability. Metaphors for web interaction, incentives, social semiosis with VGI. Scaling the loops: from geeks to everybody, from GPS tracks and images to rich data and services, from disconnected loops to interfaced loops, from a few big social networks to many small ones [7]. There is room for both VGI and authoritative GI, for different purposes as well as to validate the former against the latter. One way to think about it is that VGI is action driven while GI is process driven. VGI is basically observational assertions and metadata about such assertions are very important [8]. I offered Amazon's Real Name feature as an example of metadata about assertors. ESRI also demonstrated their distributed GIS platform that allows loosely coupled authors and users, mashups, and use of standard APIs with ArcGIS as a system for authoring, serving and using VGI/AGI. ArcGIS server has a crawl-able, KML-tagged Services Explorer [9] Jack summarized with his observations on the entire workshop. He commented on GIS and VGI relationship — how can GIS users use VGI data? How does GIS support VGI? Does VGI have the promise of SDI? How can we mine VGI data for experts use? VGI benefits greatly from GIS concepts — spatial referencing system, visualization and query tools, web servers and services, shared data bases. What would GIS professionals say about VGI? Well, a good basemap is important, data models are important, standard workflows to create, maintain, edit and manage data are important, good geographic data requires a lot of work, spatial analysis modeling requires consistent data models, VGI observation data and assertions are valuable but how do we organize and integrate? (Spatial data mining, ETL) Six types of geographic knowledge: geog data, data models, geoprocessing models, geospatial workflows, metadata, maps and visualization. Distinction between amateur and professional systems: LA street lights, NESA street lights (Denmark, allows neighbors to dim their street lights), DHS security, NYC 311, BLM surveys, WWF Forest Watch. Google asserted that we are sitting on the long tail of geographic data (breadth: how many places we know; depth: how much do we know about each of those places). Google has counted seven million My Maps instances, 300 million
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Propietary vs. FOSS4GIS round-table in Spain
On 12/26/07, Miguel Montesinos [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi to everybody, A round-table with subject free software, propietary software and GIS was held at Madrid, Spain, last december, the 18th of 2007, with people talking from the propietary side (top managers from ESRI and Intergraph in Spain), people from FOSSGIS side (gvSIG and regional Spanish governments) as well as academics and National Public Administration, under the chair of IGN (Spanish National Geographic Institute). A good thing about this event it's that it's been published in YouTube [1] (with written acceptance by talkers). It's a pitty that it's only in Spanish, maybe from the OSGeo Spanish Chapter we could translate something. Anyway I'll translate some funny things that have been said there. - Alfonso Rubio (Top Manager at ESRI Spain): [2] from an intellectual point of view, I wonder that if free software is a software with freedom to be modified at any time, that is just the opposite of guaranteeing that we are able to work with standards, because any user, or even any implementation, can modify it - A. Rubio (ESRI) in a 2nd talk: [3] it seems that standard support is less guaranteed with free software from an intellectual point of view and finally: a standard -in the end- is a boring thing - Rubén Andreani (Top Manager at Intergraph Spain): [4] How much does it cost to make a software and to maintain it? There's a gossip which says that a version of a GIS software costs around 100-200 million $ ... so, obviously the software cannot be free (for *gratis*) because money has to come from anywhere. .. In many ways I agree with both of them above. If their intent was to denigrate Free Software then they failed, because I see the above as the strength of FOSS. FOSS is indeed freedom to be modified at any time, but that doesn't obviate working with standards. Standards and software are related but in a different way. Someone once wrote on this list that a standard is an interface specification, which I found to be a very useful description. Software can create a specification, but that becomes a standard only either through wide-spread penetration and usage (MS-Word, Shapefile format) or via a consensual agreement of peers (W3, OGC). And, a standard is always open to change. If it is not malleable then it indeed is fossilized in time. As new functionalities are dreamed up, standards are modified to accommodate them. FOSS doesn't guarantee or break standards anymore than proprietary software does (afaik, Apache has never broken the HTML standard, or MapServer has never broken the Shapefile standard). Re. the cost of FOSS, I would contend that if we were to monetize an entire FOSS community's effort to create and support its FOSS (for example, MapServer community's effort to create and support MapServer -- this would include everyone -- from its developers to maintainers to bug fixers to advocates to those who help others on the lists to even those who just lurk and learn from others), yes, it would probably amount to a very large sum of money. It is irrelevant whether it would be US$100-200, because FOSS community has never been interested in monetizing it that way. Besides being incredibly difficult because of its loosey-goosey nature, if it could, it wouldn't be FOSS -- it would be something else. FOSS is much more than the money of it. So, I agree with both those folks. If there intent was to eulogize FOSS, they succeeded, and if their intent was to denigrate it, they failed. Puneet. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On 11/14/07, Christopher Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 04:12:21AM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would just love to click open and see something nice, specially if someone has already taken the time to make it beautiful. Think of it as the output of a word processor instead of an editor. Excel vs. VisiCalc; and the list may go on forever. All this is to say: not only the data needs a better container, the maps as well. A data format is not a 'container' for maps, it's a container for data. The container for your maps should be something like WMC (though I don't know if it makes sense off the web): grouping together datasources and SLD and the like. The first half of the things you identified: - optional space for metadata, - optional thumnails (in 2 sizes: thumb and browse) - optional embeded symbols (truetype/svg glyphs) and prefered layout - optional coloring and styles, break values, rendering and scale limits, persistent joins or relates, color ramp, ... are things which are provided by SLD and the like, which means that you really want SDF + WMC -- I don't think that this is SDF's job, and I don't think that it should be the job of any geodata format. From a pure data approach, I agree that how it looks does not belong in what it is. Data should be completely separate from the presentation. There is a part of me, though, that believes that embedding some default styling in the data container would be very useful. Apple's Quicklook is a great technology that allows one to quickly look at the data before deciding what to do with it. So, at there is some precedence for this. This is how it could work -- if any styling is provided from outside, the internal styling would be ignored. However, if nothing is provided from outside, then the default styling as determined by the creator would be used. Being able to click on the data package and see a preview would be fantastic. Built in containers for metadata and SRS would be absolutely essential. Manolo, could you please add these to the wiki page that David set up, else I will add it but not until tomorrow or so. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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/ Summer 2007 ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
disclaimer: I speak from a position of complete ignorance about SDF, so everything I might say could be wrong. On 11/14/07, Robert Bray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A little clarification on SDF, since it comes up once or twice in this thread. Jason's earlier descriptions of it's capabilities are pretty good. It supports multiple Feature Classes / Tables per file, strongly typed properties, multiple geometry properties per class, with seperate R-Trees for each geometry property. All of this is stored in a single file that is heavily optimized for spatial reads. The SDF FDO Provider suppports a multiple reader / single writer model. The geometries themselves include simple features + circular arcs in 2D, 2D with Z, 2D with M, or 2D with Z M. The R-Trees are currently 2D. SDF does sound the cat's meow. Is it an open format? ABSOLUTELY (we just never wrote a spec, but I am willing to get it done) What is the licensing of this format? What is the plan for licensing of this format? Is the format going to be put out in public domain ever? This is an important discussion, but it probably doesn't belong in this thread. I bring it up here just to make sure it is not forgotten. Another little known fact is that in the process of creating SDF we (Autodesk) literally wrote the code three times. The first time we built SDF on BerkleyDB, a great open source project but it has some fairly significant license fees for using it in a proprietary product. The second time we wrote it on SQLite, however the performance penalaty of the Relational layer was significant (read orders of magnitude). The third time we chose to strip away the SQLite relational layer and built directly on the SQLite Backend components (B-Tree, Pager, and OS Interface). In the end the third implementation actually turned out to be faster than BDB and is the one we use today. By not having the relational layer we lose a lot in terms of attribute data handling, or is that still somehow preserved in SDF? Keep in mind, SQLite has gone through major revisions, some of them bringing huge speed bumps in the process. That said, different folks have different evaluation critieria -- I believe it was Steve W who said that pretty much all he cared about was speed. For him it seems SDF might work very well. For me, I don't mind sacrificing some speed for ease and flexibility of related data storage, querying, and retrieval. How can we achieve both? All this said, I'd really like to understand everyones requirements for this new format. If SDF fits thats great, if not thats ok too. We are always happy to contribute what we can to the community. Thanks Bob. As you can see, we are still articulating the requirements, and while we might be accused of requirement wanking, design by committee might be better than no design at all. I find two problems with Shapefiles -- one, that it is not in public domain (I am not even sure of what licensing there is on it), and while ESRI is not likely to pull a Unisys on us, it just is philosophically better to free if possible. The second, more major problem is Shapefile's antiquated data technology. DBF is a royal pain in the derierre with its 10 char column name, no relational tables, no indexing of data constraints. The geometry part of Shapefiles seems to be pretty good and adequate; it is the data part that is the problem. Bob - Original Message - From: Michael P. Gerlek [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; OSGeo Discussions discuss@lists.osgeo.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 12:23 PM Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new,open data format Regarding the suggestion that MapServer takes on this new format as the primary format: I think this is way beyond the scope of what OSGeo should be doing. I agree with bitnerd. If the MapServer team thinks this is a valuable and worthwhile format, they will adopt it at some point. It would not be unreasonable for them to step back and see how thing progresses before deciding to spend their valuable ergs on it. The burden is on the OpenShape people to show the idea is worthwhile and meritorious. (My two cents on the standards question: OSGeo is not a standards organization, but / however / on the other hand / nonetheless one of the reasons OSGeo exists is to foster such collaborations. If some people want to try and develop something new like this, I'm all in favor of OSGeo offering mailing list and wiki space to help out. Declaring this to be a standard effort, however, is probably premature in any case -- more useful at this point to see the idea sketched out further, see who's interested, etc.) -mpg ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On 11/14/07, David William Bitner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I never (I think I never did) argued that Shapefile is not open. I argued that it is not Free. I could be wrong. Here's the open published specification: http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf yes, I am aware of this, and have used it on and off over the past decade. Do what you will with it. I don't know in this case what you imply by Free. Might ESRI make changes in the future that they don't publish? Maybe, but at this version of shapefiles -- that are pervasive throughout the industry, I would doubt they would forgo backwards compatibility and this version of the specification is out there and free and open as far as I can tell. ok, so there may or may not be an issue. I did bring it up, and so I risk the discussion focusing on this aspect too much. Let's forget about this aspect for now. Shall we focus on the technical limitations of Shapefiles in order to keep moving forward? Many thanks, Puneet. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
Thanks everyone, for responding. Here is my groundwork. The new format -- - Should be fast. SQLite is plenty fast, and anything that simply extends the Shapefile format to inject relational capabilities should be pretty fast. It should definitely be faster than a geodatabase format (such as PostGIS/ArcSDE) and perhaps even faster than Shapefiles especially while accessing attribute data. DBF is sequential, and searching for textual information is particularly expensive. SQLite has been tuned to excellence. I have been working with it for a few years now, and it really is an amazing product, development community, support, and capabilities. That it is in public domain makes for a transfat-free icing on the cake. - Should be unencumbered by licenses and copyrights. Ideally, the new format could also be put back into public domain. We want to remove all encumbrances to encourage rapid and wide adoption. - Should be a single file. Well, some like multiple files and some like single files. We can achieve both objectives by using a tar-gzipped packaging such as Apple tends to use for much of its stuff (for example, its Pages wordprocessor uses a tgzipped xml file along with other resources for icons and pictures and stuff). Or, if speed is going to be affected because of gzipping and gunzipping, just a package format (I have no idea if this is a Unix thing or a Mac OS thing -- we, in the Mac world, call them packages... they appear like files in the Finder, and like directories in the shell). - Should be easy to transition to. By building the new format on the structure of the Shapefile format, and *in fact*, calling it open shapefiles or some such thing, we indicate from its name that the transition is not that revolutionary but is evolutionary. This, hopefully, will bring some name-familiarity, and make the transition less scary. - Frank mentions SQLite's lack of datatypes as an issue -- I guess that is a matter of preference. I personally quite like that freedom as it gives me, the application developer, complete control over what goes where. SQLite actually does have now a few datatypes that it respects, but doesn't complain about. Since all users will be accessing the data via an application, as long as the application is well defined, it should be fine. - SQLite excels at one thing that it has been entrusted to do -- retrieve data that it has been entrusted with at extremely fast speeds, and maintain ACID data integrity in case of a programmatic catastrophe. The transactions themselves are worth their price of admission, which, happily, happens to be zero. - Langdon mentions Java support -- well, yes, use/work on SQLite JDBC. I have been using it for a few days now and find it to be a pretty competent conduit. Extend it, spatialize it. ANSI standard C is still that magic common denominator that compiles and works predictably on most number of systems. I have a lot against Java, but those who love Java should definitely work on tools for accessing and working with this new format as it would only make the format more widely used and adopted. Ok, enough for now. On Nov 13, 2007 8:52 AM, P Kishor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, I am thinking, Shapefile is the de facto data standard for GIS data. That it is open (albeit not Free) along with the deep and wide presence of ESRI's products from the beginning of the epoch, it has been widely adopted. Existence of shapelib, various language bindings, and ready use by products such as MapServer has continued to cement Shapefile as the format to use. All this is in spite of Shapefile's inherent drawbacks, particularly in the area of attribute data management. What if we came up with a new and improved data format -- call it Open Shapefile (extension .osh) -- that would be completely Free, single-file based (instead of the multiple .shp, .dbf, .shx, etc.), and based on SQLite, giving the .osh format complete relational data handling capabilities. We would require a new version of Shapelib, improved language bindings, make it the default and preferred format for MapServer, and provide seamless and painless import of regular .shp data into .osh for native rendering. Its adoption would be quick in the open source community. The non-opensource community would either not give a rat's behind for it, but it wouldn't affect them... they would still work with their preferred .shp until they learned better. By having a completely open and Free single-file based, built on SQLite, fully relational dbms capable spatial data format, it would be positioned for continued improvement and development. Is this too crazy? -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On 11/13/07, Frank Warmerdam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: P Kishor wrote: So, I am thinking, Shapefile is the de facto data standard for GIS data. That it is open (albeit not Free) along with the deep and wide presence of ESRI's products from the beginning of the epoch, it has been widely adopted. Existence of shapelib, various language bindings, and ready use by products such as MapServer has continued to cement Shapefile as the format to use. All this is in spite of Shapefile's inherent drawbacks, particularly in the area of attribute data management. What if we came up with a new and improved data format -- call it Open Shapefile (extension .osh) -- that would be completely Free, single-file based (instead of the multiple .shp, .dbf, .shx, etc.), and based on SQLite, giving the .osh format complete relational data handling capabilities. We would require a new version of Shapelib, improved language bindings, make it the default and preferred format for MapServer, and provide seamless and painless import of regular .shp data into .osh for native rendering. Its adoption would be quick in the open source community. The non-opensource community would either not give a rat's behind for it, but it wouldn't affect them... they would still work with their preferred .shp until they learned better. By having a completely open and Free single-file based, built on SQLite, fully relational dbms capable spatial data format, it would be positioned for continued improvement and development. Puneet, I've had a similar idea kicking around in my head for a while, but I think of it as open geodatabase. I see the goals as providing a similar role to the personal geodatabase, including: I should mention that over on the SQLite list every once a eon someone asks the question about spatlializing SQLite a la PostGIS. That definitely could be one way to go as I have a little experience in this. Last year I had the opportunity to tackle a point-in-polygon overlay problem that was seeming to be intractable for ArcGIS. So, I dumped the data into Shapefile, unpacked the coordinates from the Shapefile and stuffed them into SQLite, then used the bounding box method to narrow my searches. With the clever use of indexes, and a bunch of optimizations, I basically wrote a fast and functional overlay program with Perl/DBI. The overlay task now takes 2 days, which is a huge improvement from the earlier 7-8 days that it used to be. One thing this new geo database should not be is that like SQLite it should not require a server. As wonderful as PostGIS is, installing and managing PostGres is a major obstacle to its use. I use SQLite for pretty much everything because of the ease with which I can get started with it. It takes me longer to download it than to start working with it on a new machine. As Larry Wall likes to say, you can write faster programs in C, but you can program faster in Perl. It is kinda like that... on the one hand, highlighting the database-ness of the new format would be a good and powerful thing, but on the other hand, it might lead folks to think that a db server is required. Having a server-less, self-contained, rdbms-capable format would be the key. o RDBMS style operations like SQL filtering, joins, etc. o Get past all the shapefile limitations related to the .dbf format (very restricted data types, short attribute names, lots of other limits) o Allow storing many layers in one file. o Built in spatial indexing and attribute indexing. o OGC style coordinate system and geometry support. I have had some hope that the existing SDF format supported by FDO would be this new format; however, SDF is quite a complicated format, and the only available open source implementation is quite heavily tied to FDO. Once you carry along FDO the whole thing becomes fairly heavy in terms of the amount of code required, and the interface complexity. But (I think) it satisfies most of my goals and already exists. I do feel that we need to be cautious before launching yet another format. I'm also a bit dubious about some aspects of sqlite as a native data store. In particular, it's typeless everything is a string approach strikes me as potentially being a problem. It also remains to be seen whether we could build fast spatial indexing directly in, though I suppose with a fat enough middleware layer it could be done. PS. I'm still doubtful it would be faster than shapefiles+qix for most web mapping needs. We will never know until it is done. And, isn't premature optimization the root of all evil? Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
David, On 11/13/07, David William Bitner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Part of the mission of the OSGeo Geodata committee (http://www.osgeo.org/geodata) is to promote the use of open geospatial formats. If there is a group that wants to continue pursuing the creation of a new open geodata format, I would like to encourage the use of the geodata mailing list. That being said, I think part of the discussion that needs to be had is whether or not OSGeo should be creating standards in the first place. A couple comments that I have on some of the discussion that has taken place in this thread: Regarding the suggestion that MapServer takes on this new format as the primary format: I think this is way beyond the scope of what OSGeo should be doing. Even if we spec a new standard, we (OSGeo) have no teeth to be able to make any of our projects do any kind of implementation of that standard. The choice of formats that are used by any of our projects is driven by the needs of the users and developers and the resources (time, money) that have been dedicated towards implementing them. If someone takes OpenShape or whatever and decides they have a business need that they can spend the time or money to get it implemented then it will be implemented. Shapefile has and will continue to be an important format for many projects as it is one of, if not the most distributed formats in the GIS world. I respectfully disagree. I think OSGeo has plenty teeth for those who want to believe in it. In the end, yes, just like any real project, it needs a core of committed developer and plenty of time (or money -- usually they are synonymous). This is not something that can happen overnight, but if good, it deserves a start and support. That the long, long-term effects of a solid, relational, transactional, geodata format would be very good is a reasonable assumption for me. Regarding the comments on standards wanking: Standards can get in the way of progress along a straight line, but they can also encourage interoperability that can create better progress for everyone. To get a singular task done, standards often can slow things down, but there *are* gains to be had from playing well with everyone else. Here I totally agree. I am not sure how to interpret the standards wanking statement. On the one hand it is a reasonably accurate assessment of a lot of public hand-wringing and open alliances (for a really funny take on this, read Fake Steve's tirade on the open handset alliance at http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-not-phone-its-alliance.html). But, on the other hand, it is a pretty damning judgment on any attempt to do things via collaboration, and thus, on OSGeo and such efforts itself. My take is that if I can't do it alone, I will lay it out in the open hoping someone better than me will work on it as well. If I can do it alone, I will do it until I think it is ready to benefit from extra eyeballs. Sometimes getting started is the biggest hurdle. David Bitner OSGeo, Public Geospatial Data Project Chair On Nov 13, 2007 11:40 AM, Allan Doyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Nov 13, 2007, at 12:24 , Steve Coast wrote: OSM: $0 CCBYSA: $0 Donation of entire Netherlands: Priceless Real artists ship. For everyone else there's standards wanking. Perhaps there's an art to wanking standards as well. Seriously though, this is so kafka-esque. When OSM started it was like this: We should have got a committee to design a standard, then we could think about a committee to design an ontology... and choose a name... and on some sunny distant day make a map. On 13 Nov 2007, at 17:09, P Kishor wrote: On 11/13/07, Landon Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Puneet, You wrote: Should be easy to transition to. By building the new format on the structure of the Shapefile format, and *in fact*, calling it open shapefiles or some such thing, we indicate from its name that the transition is not that revolutionary but is evolutionary. This, hopefully, will bring some name-familiarity, and make the transition less scary. I really think you are going to run into problems using the Shapefile as part of the trademark or name for any product not sold by ESRI. I strongly recommend against this move. Let people adopt the implementation of your idea for its merits, not for name recognition that comes from another product line. Good enough point to keep in mind, but not to get hung up over enough to entangle us. Suggestions for names of the data format can be a project in itself. open spatial data format or its variations could be chosen. Still, point taken. You wrote: ANSI standard C is still that magic common denominator that compiles and works predictably on most number of systems. I have a lot against Java, but those who love Java should definitely work
[OSGeo-Discuss] podcast of seminar on IPR might be of interest to many on these lists.
This is triple-list posted... many members are not common, so please bear with me if you receive duplicates. Here is a roundabout invitation to get you to come to my website and pick up the podcasts of the summer NAS seminar on IPR. http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2007/11/08/ipr-podcasts-now-online/ -- Puneet Kishor ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Geospatial Events Calendar?
Thanks for pointing that out Gavin. Please note, the new link will save you a few keystrokes at... http://punkish.eidesis.org/cal/conferences.ics In the same vein of events, please note, among the many events being organized at UW-Madison as part of the GIS Day Expo, there is also going to be a Geospatial Interoperability Summit: Open Technologies for Collaboration – Dashboards, Portals, Web Services . (see link below). Of interest to us here on the list, Bob Basques and other friends from the City of St. Paul will be on hand to tell us all about GeoMOOSE. Yours truly will be moderating a gab session. http://www.geography.wisc.edu/GISDay/summit.htm On 10/29/07, Gavin Fleming [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Puneet The conference calendar link below doesn't seem to work. Please add this to your calendar: Free and Open Source Geospatial 2008 (FOSS4G2008) Cape Town, South Africa 29 Sept - 3 Oct 2008 www.foss4g2008.org many thanks Gavin Fleming conference chair From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of P Kishor Sent: Mon 10/15/2007 5:22 AM To: OSGeo Discussions Cc: Aust-NZ OSGeo Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Geospatial Events Calendar? On 10/14/07, Cameron Shorter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anyone set up (and maintaining) a Geospatial Events Calendar? Ideally one that I can import into my Google Calendar. It would be useful for picking future OSGeo conference dates that don't clash. http://punkish.eidesis.org/cal_public/conferences.ics I try to keep it filled with mostly stuff I am going to attend, but would be happy to add other events as well. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Geospatial Events Calendar?
On 10/14/07, Cameron Shorter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anyone set up (and maintaining) a Geospatial Events Calendar? Ideally one that I can import into my Google Calendar. It would be useful for picking future OSGeo conference dates that don't clash. http://punkish.eidesis.org/cal_public/conferences.ics I try to keep it filled with mostly stuff I am going to attend, but would be happy to add other events as well. -- 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/ Summer 2007 ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Are there any thoughts on how organisations can work with OSGeo projects?
This is a very relevant and interesting topic to pursue further. On 9/27/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: sorry for cross posting I have been involved in a number of discussions over the last year or so where people representing organisations have expressed an interest in extending Open Source spatial products and projects but are unsure or sceptical as to how it could be done. To a great extent, they already do. After all, Refractions Research, DM Solutions, even Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources, are all organizations. Some are private, some public, some may employ 20-30 people while other may even be just a solo show. I guess you might be meaning specifically governmental organizations -- specifying what you mean by an organization would be necessary. Some organizations may support an open source project wholesale and wholeheartedly, while others might tolerate one or two of their employees working on them. The State Cartographer's Office in Madison, Wisconsin, utilizes open source geospatial technologies pretty much for everything they do. I myself have been part of organizations that kind of let me do my thing without getting them actively involved. In other words, this is a highly variable landscape, not unlike non-open technologies, but it does have its unique characteristics as you cite below. I'm interested in other people's thoughts on this. Overview: Typically in Government and other larger organisations, funding is Project based with a clear definition of business requirements, end deliverables and time frame. What I have seen of OS projects over the last seven years or so is that they are typically run by a group of committed individuals who have a desire for a particular type of product. Focus is often on delivering a quality product that is released 'when it is ready' rather than to a marketing department's timeframe. While there is often an end goal and a set of requirements for a release of a product, it is sometimes difficult to find people interested in spending their own time on the less exciting aspects of a project. For some context: #1 - I recently attended an workshop that contained representatives from a significant number of government departments from around Australia. There was a general consensus that we liked what we saw with GeoNetwork as a potential 'National' Metadata entry tool and Catalogue. There was also some discussion as to the types of features that we'd like to see developed longer term to support an 'Australian' metadata toolset. If this was to proceed we'd no doubt end up with a program of works that we'd like to see implemented. #2 - I have also been involved on the periphery of the GeoSciML efforts, part of which is a desire to use GeoServer to support GeoSciML and 'complex' objects. The GeoSciML work involves a number of Geological Survey organisations from around the world. This could also result in a program of works that people would like to see included into GeoServer. Some initial examples of issues that I can see (excluding funding) are: - Communication and liaison with the relevant open source community. We may have a block of work that we'd like to see developed, however this may potentially take a project in a direction that the community does not want to go in. How do we address this? - A shortage of developers with the required skills in a particular project. While we could put resources towards this problem, it will take time for the developers to get an understanding of the products and build the necessary credibility within the community. In the meantime, we have the problem of getting some early wins to ensure sufficient funding for the longer term. - Project based funding is typically focussed on a deliverable. The deliverable may well be an enhancement to an OSGeo project. How can a development team get that enhancement accepted into an OSGeo Project's code base in a timely manner? Can they be confident that the enhancement would not be removed at a later iteration of the OSGeo Project? - Where is the best place to discuss issues relating to a program of works that may span several OSGeo projects? + If the discussions were to take place on individual projects' development lists, then the overall 'Program' context may be lost. Also other OSGeo project developers may not be interested in the additional 'noise'. + In the first example above where it relates to a National program of works, it may be better to discuss these issues on the country's local chapter mailing list. At least this would still be visible to interested parties. + In the second example where it relates to an international program of works, perhaps a dedicated chapter could be established under OSGeo? + what would be the best way to coordinate the aims of a program of works and the aims of various OSGeo communities. I'm sure that others are thinking of these
[OSGeo-Discuss] Globalbase
I came across Globalbase earlier today. http://www.globalbase.org Does anyone in the OSGeo community have any insights/opinions on this effort? -- 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/ Summer 2007 ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo in Paris
posted to two lists... some will get this twice. Friends, I have been invited to a workshop in Paris on common use licensing of scientific data products. The workshop is jointly organized by CODATA, GBIF, and Science Commons, and will be held at the Sorbonne on Sep 24, 25. I am writing this email for three reasons -- 1. I will be, as usual, representing OSGeo interests as well, so any feedforward you have for me on licensing of geospatial data inasmuch as they are scientific data, please send it to me. 2. While most of the open geospatial world will be enjoying the beautiful environs of Victoria BC on Sep 24, 25, in the slim chance that some of our OSGeo-philes are in and around Paris at that time, I would love to meet with you. 3. Since I have never been to Paris before (a walk between Gare de l'est and Gare du Nord doesn't count), I am trying to stay over for a couple of days extra bookending the workshop. That coupled with the $ - € exchange rate and the location where I want to stay (walking distance of the Sorbonne) is making for a rather unaffordable trip. I am looking for accomodation suggestions from locals as it is not always the easiest trying to do these things over the internet. For now, I have a room reserved from Sep 23-27 at € 116 a night, which, while is rather inexpensive by Paris standards, is still rather expensive by my standards. Ideally, I am looking for a place in the € 60-80 range from Sep 22-27. Many thanks for any and all responses to the above. -- 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/ Summer 2007 ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Is there an Open Source software application thatwill draw a graticule on a map?
Brent, I am not sure ArcView or its open source replacement can produce the kind of stuff Markus has been producing (maybe it can, just that I haven't seen any). Most, really, really good cartographic output, the kind you can print at 1500 dpi on a Scitex printer at 8 feet by 20 feet requires a helluva lot of work, and lots of planning. If you pick up ESRI's map book, almost none of that stuff is produced with ArcView and home laser printer. It is likely, however, that when you say high quality cartography, you are not referring to this kind of stuff. Markus Neteler's stuff seemed to me of such beauty (raster software does make for wonderful output) that it is something worth trying to recreate. I am sure though that it is not point and click. Best is to let Markus opine on this. On 9/7/07, Brent Fraser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Puneet, I'm hoping that (someday?) high quality cartography WILL be point-and-click. The three apps I looked at come pretty close: uDig- sophisticated, complicated GUI; focus on GIS not cartography QGIS- simple GUI, a print composer, but features (e.g. a real graticule) missing gvSIG - look and feel of ArcView 3.x (the good and the bad), but no graticule I think Paul Ramsey said it best in the Directions Mag interview (http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2517tr v=1): The first project to produce a stable and complete ArcView 3 replacement will gobble up a huge user share, and become the default application for building the high end analysis and cartography functionality. Brent Fraser GeoAnalytic Inc. Calgary, Alberta - Original Message - From: P Kishor [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: OSGeo Discussions discuss@lists.osgeo.org Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 6:24 AM Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Is there an Open Source software application thatwill draw a graticule on a map? On 9/6/07, Brent Fraser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ,, Yikes! Is National-Topographic-Series quality cartography dead? Am I destined to print only pastel polygon diagrams on letter size paper if I adopt Open Source? ;) Write an emai to Markus Neteler and ask him for samples of stuff he has produced with Grass, a real GIS. The quality will blow you away. Granted, I have not seen that stuff on a large piece of paper, but even on the screen, it looks gorgeous. It is probably not easy to produce that kind of stuff, but good quality stuff never is point and click. (MapServer is not a GIS... it says so on the box it comes in). ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- 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/ Summer 2007 ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Return on Equity
Very well written Howard. In tribute to your writing, I will promptly snitch some ideas from your writing below. I have been tackling this issue of selling open geospatial, particularly to agencies for whom generally financial cost is a non-issue. I try to tell them that in most classes open source is the best-of-class technologies no matter what yardstick you measure it against. The defining characteristic, of course, is the mob-intelligence quotient. But how do you measure the quality of knowledge produced collaboratively? There is no gross salary number that can be divided by the staff hours. There is no cash-flow, free money, ROE of the contributors... there is return on investment that can be measured, but usually only after the investment. SLOCs (source line of code) is one measure, but in the world which strives to write as few lines of code to accomplish a task, usually a measure of better software, fewer SLOC would actually be a better indicator of the quality. If someone can condense the qualities of open source to a sound-bite, that would be great, but I have been unable to do so. I find that there is a story behind open source, and that story takes time telling, particularly to those who are not familiar with it. For that, one needs to cultivate relationships so folks can become willing to give their time to listen to the story. I have been shaping my story along the lines of technology, law, and culture. Open source, unlike other forms of knowledge-production, has innovated along all of these three axes... novel forms of technologies created through novel forms of technologies, innovative legal regimes that are continuously evolving participatively, and a culture, an ethos, that fundamentally believes that sharing is better than not sharing. On 8/29/07, Howard Butler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Open source software works because people acting in their own self interest have the auxiliary benefit of helping everyone in the project. Report your pet bug, file a patch, add a new feature -- all of these things immediately help you, but ultimately help the project. This activity also imparts tangential benefits that are very hard to quantify but can be clearly important like personal visibility, credibility, and status. For an open source software project to be viable as a development entity, it must be able to bestow these benefits to its individual contributors. Everyone's reasons may be different, but people must be able to receive a return on their sweat equity that they put in or volunteer effort will not continue to flow into a project. I think that recognition and facilitation of this symbiosis is a blind spot for OSGeo. We should be striving to ensure that it can take place because we are a volunteer organization whose members have common goals. Wait a second? Isn't OSGeo an Autodesk thing with lots of money? How is it a volunteer organization? Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones. The OSGeo Journal effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the lights on for developer tools like Subversion/Trac have been volunteer enterprises (please help flesh out this list, these are only those I am most aware of, I know there have been many others). However, I think financial resources, both in the capacity to generate sponsorship money and the ability to spend it wisely, are what provides the opportunity to set OSGeo apart and provide the volunteerism leverage. When Autodesk came in and helped bootstrap OSGeo, it was fairly clear that our financial existence would not be an indefinite expenditure -- we would have to exist on our own. Additionally, to meet 503c3 requirements, we cannot have a situation where we have a majority benefactor as we do now. We're almost two years down the road into bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very little. As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship dollars beyond Autodesk are the targeted development vehicles like those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL. Another aspect is the sweat equity that has been poured into OSGeo over the past year and a half. Committee members, board members, and of course, especially Frank Warmerdam have been spending a lot of time bootstrapping. The opportunity cost of this effort has not been insignificant. I think it is time we take a step back and attempt to quantify what the return on that investment has been. What has the existence of OSGeo enabled that could not have happened otherwise? With some new blood and hopefully new enthusiasm coming to the OSGeo board, I would like to propose that we challenge the assumptions of the value proposition of OSGeo in an attempt to focus our efforts. Other than some minor benefits (or major pains, hah!) of shared
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] domains
Actually, hit me please if I am being silly.. but why this foss4g business (which seems so contrived to me... I recently came across GITS... geog. info. tech. and systems! that really got my eyes rolling). Why can't we just have www.osgeo.org/conferences/year ? On 8/23/07, P Kishor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: wouldn't it be wiser to just have www.foss4g.org/2007 or /2008 and so on? Right now the foss4g.org domain goes to a GRASS-Japan portal site. Perhaps a little bit of negotiation...? On 8/23/07, Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it not wise to already claim domains like foss4g2008.org and maybe even further down the line? Best regards, Bart -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/ 2007 Summer ST Policy Fellow, The National Academies http://www.nas.edu/ == collaborate, communicate, compete == ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Board Geographic Diversity
On 8/17/07, Dave Patton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: P Kishor wrote: I believe pegging Board-membership to geography is a good thing I also believe that while one can contribute as much while being an ordinary member as opposed to a charter or a Board member (I became a charter member only a couple of months ago), Board membership could be an important label to find local support. After all, if there were no difference then why even have these different labels? When one is going around drumming up support, having a position carries a heft. Perhaps there is some resistance to artificially creating a geographically diverse Board, but who say that is the only option? There could be OSGeo Regional Representatives, who are elected, and who, by definition, represent specific geographic regions, without those people necessarily also being board members. They could have an advisory role to the Board. a rose by any other name... should work well as far as I am concerned. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Board Geographic Diversity
On 8/10/07, Steve Lime [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all: Perhaps this has been discussed before, but... Given the apparent desire to maintain geographic diversity amongst OSgeo leadership perhaps in the future we might consider regionally based board seats. This is absolutely the most wonderful, workable, and simplest idea to this problem. When I was casting my vote, I had little to go on. One vote went to someone who I have met personally, if only briefly (that person won the election). One vote went to someone from a geographic area other than Europe/NA (that person did not win). The other votes were based on my recollection of their contribution to the mailing lists, software, activism, and somewhat on the nomination write-ups. It is hard to compare someone who writes code (I don't as much... at least, not basic code) to someone who evangelizes (I do a lot of that... I just spent the entire morning yesterday giving a presentation on open geospatial at the World Bank... it was received with a lot of enthusiasm and interest). Having regionally allocated board seats would cut down on some of this comparison problem, and it would also ensure representation from around the world, from regions that are different levels in diffusion and adoption, and hence, need different kinds of work and involvement. Thanks Steve, for suggesting this... I wholeheartedly second this. That is, you have representatives from: North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, South/Central America and Oceania If the bulk of activity is in North America and Europe then given them two seats. Then you have nominations within a region and so on... Every other year different geographic regions would be up for re-election. As a voting member you'd vote for candidates in each region. If organizational affiliation diversity is more important (government vs. higher education vs. private sector vs. hobbyist) than geographic diversity then the same idea would apply. We do that here in Minnesota for our state GIS/LIS consortium board. That board also has an at-large seat open to anyone. Just a thought... Steve ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ ST Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences http://www.nas.edu/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Election Results
This is not a definitive weigh-in, and frankly, I had not even thought of seeing the vote count until the suggestion, but it might be worthwhile (I am not saying do it; I am saying, think about doing it... there might be benefits). In the spirit of openness, it would be worthwhile seeing where the charter members thought it best to cast their votes. While embarrassment is a possible consequence, I believe if I were running for a Board member, and if I lost, I would still like to see the votes... I am not interested in seeing who voted for who... I am more interested in seeing the voting pattern as a reflection of the pattern of interest, awareness, and even a need for doing more. On 8/9/07, Frank Warmerdam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Tamas Szekeres wrote: I'd also like to see the total count of votes per person it it is possible. I guess it might have been a close competition. Tamas, It has been my suggestion that actual vote counts per candidate not be distributed due to the possible risk of embarrassment, etc. If you, or other members feel this is insufficiently transparent the issue could be revisited. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ ST Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences http://www.nas.edu/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Election Results
This is not a definitive weigh-in, and frankly, I had not even thought of seeing the vote count until the suggestion, but it might be worthwhile (I am not saying do it; I am saying, think about doing it... there might be benefits). In the spirit of openness, it would be worthwhile seeing where the charter members thought it best to cast their votes. While embarrassment is a possible consequence, I believe if I were running for a Board member, and if I lost, I would still like to see the votes... I am not interested in seeing who voted for who... I am more interested in seeing the voting pattern as a reflection of the pattern of interest, awareness, and even a need for doing more. -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ ST Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences http://www.nas.edu/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Election Results
Hi Gary, I was not the person who originally requested this, but I did show interest in this, so I am presenting my reason here, for what they are worth. Actually, I am not even so much interested in seeing who got how many votes as I am in seeing the geographical distribution of whence the votes came from and where they went... if that could be shown on the map... or, if I can imagine it on a map. For now, it is heavily weighted in North America and Europe, and rightly so... most of this technology was invented in these regions, most of the developers are from these regions, most of the implementations are in these regions, most of the momentum in these regions. In the long run, I would like to see OSGeo spread its wings on all corners of the globe. I am not trying to hasten this process artificially, but I am interested in seeing the process itself, and see it happen sooner rather than later... imagine... if I could see a time-lapse movie of open geospatial spreading around the world! For now, I am more interested in seeing where we need to focus more, encourage more activity, perhaps even do some special hand-holding, if required. That is all of my reasoning. It is not crucial or urgent, and there is no other agenda -- if collectively it is decided that not showing the tally is better, I am cool with that as well... On 8/9/07, Gary Sherman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What purpose is served by displaying the results in this way? I see absolutely no benefit, other than to create an ad-hoc popularity contest to see who beat out whom. What lessons can be learned from having the tally known? How can it benefit OSGeo in future elections? Will it deter people from running in the future? The votes were not posted publicly, we know who won, leave it at that. If the final tally by person is made public, will we next ask to see how each charter member voted? This is beyond openness. -gary (Yes I was a candidate, yes I was not elected, no this has nothing to do with my position on this issue) On Aug 9, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote: P Kishor wrote: In the spirit of openness, it would be worthwhile seeing where the charter members thought it best to cast their votes. While embarrassment is a possible consequence, I believe if I were running for a Board member, and if I lost, I would still like to see the votes... I am not interested in seeing who voted for who... I am more interested in seeing the voting pattern as a reflection of the pattern of interest, awareness, and even a need for doing more. Puneet (and Tamas, Bart, ...) I don't have a strong opinion on this. If someone would like to take this issue formally to the board I would encourage you to write up a position in the wiki and add it as a topic for the next board meeting agenda at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Twenty_Eighth_Board_Meeting If so, I'd ask that you be available to speak on behalf of the issue for the next board meeting. Alternatively, the topic could be discussed at the AGM at FOSS4G (planned for late on the Monday I believe). I can't seem to find a wiki page about the AGM, though I think one exists. Of course, discussing here is fine too, but ultimately for action it is helpful for someone to carry the ball. I'm not going to be that person given a lack of enthusiasm about the idea. Best regards, -- --- +-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http:// osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- Gary Sherman Chair, QGIS Project Steering Committee Micro Resources: http://mrcc.com *Geospatial Hosting *Web Site Hosting We work virtually everywhere -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ ST Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences http://www.nas.edu/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] how many open source gis in the world
Besides Jeroen's counter-questions it would also help if you answer, How do you define a GIS? That would be a good start to answering the original question. On 7/18/07, Jeroen Ticheler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Broad Sky (?) A lot ;-) Browse www.osgeo.org and other sites like http://www.freegis.org for instance. But maybe you question had a different intent? Are you looking for how much these applications are used around the world for instance? It would be useful if you would be more specific in your question. Ciao, Jeroen On 18 Jul 2007, at 11:15 AM, broad sky wrote: I just want to know how many open source gis in the world.Any help will be appreciated. Fussy? Opinionated? Impossible to please? Perfect. Join Yahoo!'s user panel and lay it on us. ___ 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 -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ ST Policy Fellow, National Academy of Sciences http://www.nas.edu/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] A report on my recent trip to Brazil
Chris, Please see my response below -- On 5/21/07, Chris Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 4. After 5 days of meetings, I visited Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias (INPE) http://www.inpe.br/ingles/index.php/, the premier Brazilian National Institute for Space Research at the invitation of its Image Processing Division (DPI) in nearyby São José dos Campos. Researchers from DPI are also developing a project called TerraLib http://www.terralib.org/, an open source set of GIS classes and functions library written in C++. Of particular interest is a program called TerraView http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terraview/index.php based on TerraLib. Also open source (GPL), TerraView can be described as a more scientifically and analytically oriented ArcView. I promptly downloaded TerraView, and within minutes, with a little help from the TerraView Development Manager, I had it running under Parallels/WinXP on my MacBook Pro, and had imported Shapefiles into its own data format. A very quick program, TerraView not only works with PostGres, MySQL, and Oracle, it natively manages geographic data in a relational format using ADO. TerraLib/TerraView are successors to INPE's earlier free, but not open source, project called SPRING http://www.dpi.inpe.br/spring/english/index.html. Because of historical reasons, SPRING is not open source, but is available to anyone and can be used on Windows or Linux. TerraLib/TerraView are currently under more active development, and are available as true open source programs. At my suggestion, INPE will be looking into joining OSGeo. The INPE researchers are doing amazing work, and the spirit of free access to data and software seemed to permeate everyone I met. Having active involvement and backing of an institute of INPE's prestige and caliber will be very beneficial to the open geospatial community. I heard about this project when Iwas in Brazil, and was really impressed by the amount of effort going in to it. I think at the time the government was employing something like over 40 people working on it. Not sure if that's still the case, but there's obviously a lot of effort. But it's frustrating because it's all parallel to the rest of our efforts. It'd be great to get them to be a part of OSGeo, but _really_ great if we get their work inter-operating with what we are doing and hopefully contributing to common software packages, and indeed having their stuff implement OGC standards. If you have contacts I'd be more than happy to help talk to them further. As I mentioned in my email above, INPE will be looking into getting more actively involved with OSGeo. I am cc-ing this email to my friend Lúbia Vinhas, the Development Manager of the TerraLib project. Lúbia was kind enough to invite me to INPE and host me while I was there. INPE might even be interested in submitting the TerraLib/TerraView project to be included under the OSGeo Foundation umbrella, but being a large, governmental institution, I am sure they will have to work within their own mandated boundaries. These are absolutely stellar folks, and any support from them will be only good for us. I hope to continue the conversation with Lúbia, and hopefully we can see their efforts be a more integral part of the OSGeo family. I know that they can immediately benefit from help with translation of documentation and tutorials, so there is much to gain for both parties. Regards, -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] A report on my recent trip to Brazil
[I have put the following report on the wiki as well. It may not be the most appropriate place, but I don't seem to have access to a Tyler Mitchell-style blog ;-) ] The second week of May I attended three different but related meetings of interest in Atibaia, Brazil (São Paulo). Here is a brief report. 1. The United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development launched a Global Alliance for Enhancing Access to and Application of Scientific Data in Developing Countries, or e-SDDC for short, on May 7 http://www.un-gaid.org/en/node/237. Besides representatives from UN-GAID, representatives from various national science academies, research foundations, and international agencies were present. I was a rapporteur at the meeting. Of particular interest is the plan for a series of online courses/workshops on data management, access, and repositories. The focus is on scientific data, but open geospatial is very germane to the underlying themes of disaster mitigation, poverty reduction, and public health. It would be worthwhile keeping an eye on this initiative and look for opportunities to contribute to it in the area of geospatial data management and access. 2. The second meeting was a 3-day workshop on Strategies for Permanent and Open Access to Scientific Information in Latin America and the Caribbean http://www.cria.org.br/eventos/codata2007/agenda sponsored by the International Council of Science's (ICSU) http://www.icsu.org/ Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) http://www.codata.org/. The meeting was hosted by Brazil's Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA). I made a presentation on geospatial data and integration with biodiversity information. I received help from several people in putting together the presentation including Ned Horning and Markus Neteler of OSGeo. I had very fruitful discussions on licensing of geospatial data with Harlan Onsrud of the University of Maine, Orono, and John Wilbanks of Science Commons. John has promised to actively work on clarifying the issue of geospatial data licensing. 3. Finally, I attended a meeting of the Inter-Academy Panel (a panel of 94 national science academies from around the world) on International Issues focusing on the use of digital knowledge resources in developing countries. Of particular interest was a focus on the science academies of Latin America and the Caribbean promoted by the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and the US national science academies. There is likely to be a project on access to publicly funded geospatial data in the near future. 4. After 5 days of meetings, I visited Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias (INPE) http://www.inpe.br/ingles/index.php/, the premier Brazilian National Institute for Space Research at the invitation of its Image Processing Division (DPI) in nearyby São José dos Campos. Researchers from DPI are also developing a project called TerraLib http://www.terralib.org/, an open source set of GIS classes and functions library written in C++. Of particular interest is a program called TerraView http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terraview/index.php based on TerraLib. Also open source (GPL), TerraView can be described as a more scientifically and analytically oriented ArcView. I promptly downloaded TerraView, and within minutes, with a little help from the TerraView Development Manager, I had it running under Parallels/WinXP on my MacBook Pro, and had imported Shapefiles into its own data format. A very quick program, TerraView not only works with PostGres, MySQL, and Oracle, it natively manages geographic data in a relational format using ADO. TerraLib/TerraView are successors to INPE's earlier free, but not open source, project called SPRING http://www.dpi.inpe.br/spring/english/index.html. Because of historical reasons, SPRING is not open source, but is available to anyone and can be used on Windows or Linux. TerraLib/TerraView are currently under more active development, and are available as true open source programs. At my suggestion, INPE will be looking into joining OSGeo. The INPE researchers are doing amazing work, and the spirit of free access to data and software seemed to permeate everyone I met. Having active involvement and backing of an institute of INPE's prestige and caliber will be very beneficial to the open geospatial community. 5. I also had a long meeting with the director of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change http://www.iai.int/. Promoting open geospatial software and data is directly convergent with IAI's mission of science and capacity building, but there is a general lack of understanding of the issues related to open and free access to data and software, especially at the highest levels. OSGeo can once again play a significant role by providing software, educational material, and data sets in this. I wrote the following summary in an earlier email on the edu.osgeo list. I am reproducing most of it here as it sums up my findings -- a. The scientific
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Promoting freely available geodata
I am following up on this thread, and cross-posting to several lists -- sorry for the noise -- to inform you all of my related activities. I have spent the past five days in Atibaia, Brazil at a CODATA-organized (http://www.codata.org) workshop on Open Access to Scientific Data (http://www.cria.org.br/eventos/codata2007/). Besides representatives from all the science academies from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as from India, China, and the US, many open access advocates, including John Wilbanks from Science Commons, were present. The meeting was concerned with all kinds of scientific data, geospatial data being a small but significant portion of the same. Besides myself, Harland Onsrud from U of Maine, Orono, were carrying the open geospatial torch. On 3/30/07, Chris Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: .. I just got off the phone with the lead counsel of Science Commons, which is the branch of CC made to deal with data. It was an interesting conversation, though unfortunately not much good news for CC licenses for Geodata. .. Chris's summary above describes the current position correctly. So, what is the way out? Well, it is easier for those who create geospatial data from scratch going forward. The general recommendation is that you slap a CC-license on it and put the data in public domain. A strong-ish model for this is a geodata commons (http://geodatacommons.umaine.edu/download.php). Of course, even better might be to just waive all your rights in it, but that may not be a viable alternative for many. The problem, of course, is that most people don't create geospatial data from scratch. Most of us take existing data whose provenance is indeterminable and then we build upon it. Well, since we end up using existing data, we are at risk of violating someone else's rights. One belief is that in such a case as well waiving one's own rights might be helpful. A related belief is that put it out there and wait to see if someone will sue you. The general sense is that no one has been sued *yet*. CC agrees that it does not have a clear and hopeful position on geospatial data, but John Wilbanks and I shook hands whereby Science Commons has agreed in principle to work with the geospatial community to help develop clarity on this issue. Tomorrow I will be at INPE, the Brazilian Space Research Institute in São José dos Campos, where there is a tremendous amount of interest *and* activity in open geospatial data and research. It is really heartening to see very large and important research institutions such as INPE be a strong practicing advocate of open source and open access. Finally, I have a Fellowship from the National Academy of Science this summer working on open access to public sector information including geospatial and environmental data. I hope to continue to serve OSGeo's and open geospatial communities interests in the science policy circles. To summarize -- 1. The scientific community as a whole wants open and permanent access to scientific data, and that includes raw research data, not just the publishable results of it; 2. GeoSpatial data are a small but significant portion of the corpus of science data, so it is very important to continue to maintain an active and vocal presence in the dialong; 3. As is, data can't be copyrighted. For those creating data, the best option going forward might be to put them in a public commons; better yet, waive all rights to them. Of course, this may not be a viable alternative for many. This area is murky at best, since there is confusion between facts and data about facts; 4. For those doing research utilizing existing data that don't come with a clear position on their provenance, (besides not using such data) the best one can do is to waive one's own rights in the research, and then wait till someone sues. Of course, this too is less than satisfactory; 5. Work is needed to create a clear and unequivocal set of statements and facts on the existing situation. As is, the situation is murky, and not knowing what one can do itself is a big deterrent to doing something; 6. I will be in a position to serve the open geospatial community's interests in the ongoing dialog about access to scientific data, especially the public sector scientific data, so please send your thoughts and ideas to me via this list. Educate me on your concerns via this list so I can contribute to the dialog at the Academies and other agencies in Washington DC this summer and beyond. Best regards. Now I go out to enjoy the late Fall sunshine in Southern Brasiooo. -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Ph. D. Program, Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Vice President, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/ Fellow, National Academy of Science http://www.nationalacademies.org - collaborate, communicate, compete
[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: open geospatial data access
On 18 Apr 2007, at 08:35, I asked: Dear all, In a workshop I will be attending in Brazil in a few weeks time, I have been asked to propose a cooperative activity that would improve access to digital scientific data, particularly in Latin America. Well, I turn to your collective and collaborative brainpower to come up with ideas for such an activity as it concerns digital geospatial data. My immediate thought is to work on developing a licensing/contracting framework that might be suitable for the Latin American context. But, perhaps that is too messy and complicated. The next thought is for setting up a digital spatial warehouse of some sort -- more do-able, no? I particularly welcome ideas from OSGeo/list members who are from Latin America. So, thinking solely of advancing the cause of open access to digital geospatial information -- What would such an activity be? Who could be involved in it? What would be the main steps to initiating and running it? How long could this take? What would be the recognizable milestones? I got four responses, all good, that I will summarize here. The following two responses suggest grassroots data collection activities. On 4/25/07, SteveC [EMAIL PROTECTED] suggested that I should Run a mapping party :) and on 4/18/07, Andy Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] immediately thought it would be an ideal opportunity for a talk about the project OpenStreetMap (OSM). note to SteveC: consider joining the edu.OSGeo mailing list On 4/18/07, Paulo Marcondes [EMAIL PROTECTED] told me that there is no such thing as a latin american culture. Although I never implied that there is, thanks to Paulo, we are reminded of the difficulty of conducting a pan-continental activity because of cultural and legal differences. Paulo's suggestion is to have national initiatives for building geodata warehouses (my term) of some sort, perhaps with the national/regional universities taking the lead. Political continuity and backing would be a key factor in sustaining such national initiatives according to Paulo. On 4/18/07, Ned Horning [EMAIL PROTECTED] pointed out the work being done by CATHALAC, NASA, and a bunch of other agencies (too many to list here; see http://servir.nsstc.nasa.gov/about.html) under the SERVIR banner. Although it is currently targeted to Mesoamerica, perhaps a similar initiative could be started for the rest of Latin America. Rather than choose among these, I am actually going to talk about all of the above in Atibaia two weeks from now. These activities, however, concentrate on the data side, although Paulo's suggestions are only possible if, along with the technology, the legal and cultural hurdles are also tackled. To that end, encouraging the open geospatial players in Latin America to take the lead in licensing/contractual issues would be very important. OSGeo's geodata licensing group offers a space for them to get involved and take the debate/discussion beyond Canado-Euro-American framework. Anyway, thanks for your ideas. Helps me rightfully spread the OSGeo ideas. If you have more, please do send them my way, as collectively you know way more than any one person does. -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] open geospatial data access
Dear all, In a workshop I will be attending in Brazil in a few weeks time, I have been asked to propose a cooperative activity that would improve access to digital scientific data, particularly in Latin America. Well, I turn to your collective and collaborative brainpower to come up with ideas for such an activity as it concerns digital geospatial data. My immediate thought is to work on developing a licensing/contracting framework that might be suitable for the Latin American context. But, perhaps that is too messy and complicated. The next thought is for setting up a digital spatial warehouse of some sort -- more do-able, no? I particularly welcome ideas from OSGeo/list members who are from Latin America. So, thinking solely of advancing the cause of open access to digital geospatial information -- What would such an activity be? Who could be involved in it? What would be the main steps to initiating and running it? How long could this take? What would be the recognizable milestones? Many thanks, -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Libre Graphics Meeting - Montreal, May 4-6
On 4/6/07, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I was talking to some folks involved with the Libre Graphics Meeting (below) and I think it'd be interesting to try to find some synergies between our geospatial visualisation needs and their applications: Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus. We all know map production is near and dear to our hearts and similar concepts are to theirs too. It'd be great if someone could go and do a presentation about our perspective on graphics with geo on the brain. A long time ago, another life, another place, I used a product called Mapublisher made by a Canadian company called Avenza. A plugin for Adobe Illustrator, t allowed me to import shapefiles into Illustrator and create nice looking posters/graphics, basically bypass the limitations of Arcview or of cutting and pasting bitmaps. Slick idea, it was. I believe Deneba's Canvas (or whatever the company is called now) does that as well. Having the ability to import shapefiles into Inkscape (a really fun product) would be very nice. .. -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4G 2007 Workshop Submission
sorry to bung into this conversation given that neither am I organizing, nor presenting, not even being there in person. Nevertheless, I echo Dan's viewpoint about the relative value of 20 mins presentations vs. longer workshops. I have been a few conferences in the lifetime, and I just can't imagine why anyone would spend a thousand plus dollars to spend talking 20 mins about a project that he/she has spent a year or two working on. Sound-bytes can be so frustrating, so TV like, where everyone has a short attention span, almost by design. Hopefully next meeting, wherever it is, will consider a format that allows the presenter and the audience to spend a longer time to delve into the issues and really have a conversation. Of course, that does not obviate 5-min lightning talks on snack-size issues as well. On 3/29/07, Daniel Ames [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Paul and others, I too was disappointed to be in the 22 of 34 workshop proposals that were turned down and would like to suggest that the conference organizers re-think the approach to include more workshops. At FOSS4g2006, I found the workshops to be perhaps the most useful element of the conference. For a highly technical meeting, the value of a 1.5 to 3 hour hands-on workshop versus a 20 minute pre-canned powerpoint presentation can not be overstated. Our project (and I suspect many others) has tried to embrace the concept of the FOSS4g venue as an alternative to hosting our own separate conference. Certainly this concept was encouraged by last year's conference organizers. However for this to work there needs to be the opportunity to present our workshops. May I suggest the following two changes: 1) Reallocate time for more workshops. 2) Let the registrants decide which workshops stay. In other words, post a list of 34 workshops and keep only those that meet a minimum number of committed/paid attendee registration fees. I suspect that every one of the 22 rejected workshop proposers could argue that they easily meet all of the four criteria listed here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/FOSS4G2007_Workshops#Criteria_used_by_the_workshop_committee_to_review_workshop_submissions Hence letting the broader community vote with their registration dollars would seem to be a more free and open approach. It would be unfortunate to see this as the beginning of a general culling process where instead of trying to attract new projects, the FOSS4g community begins to become more exclusionary. Dan Daniel P. Ames, PhD, PE Idaho State University Geospatial Software Lab On 3/29/07, Paul Ramsey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jeroen, I appreciate your frustration, and I know it is shared by many others, as only 12 of the 34 3-hour workshop submissions could be hosted. The criteria the workshop committee used in their evaluation are here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/ FOSS4G2007_Workshops#Criteria_used_by_the_workshop_committee_to_review_w orkshop_submissions All the committee members ranked the submissions on those criteria and the rankings were averaged. Two workshops in the top 12 that were topic duplicates were removed and the next-lowest-ranked non- duplicates were moved up. It appears that being on the committee is no guarantee of satisfaction with the final result. The average of a bunch of lists people want is a list that no one is 100% happy with. Paul On 28-Mar-07, at 10:36 PM, Jeroen Ticheler wrote: Dear people, Thank you for your information. I have to say I find that pretty frustrating and annoying knowing that GeoNetwork opensource is one of the incubator projects of OSGEO, the number of OSGEO projects is (still) limited and FOSS4G is the OSGEO conference. Participating with the project in OSGEO has multiple reasons, one of them being that it provides opportunities to work on synergies and work on marketing the OSGEO software stack. Now how does the intent of OSGEOs mission fit with refusing a (single) workshop on one of its projects. Maybe I miss something, but I'd assumed there was at least some kind of a relation!? Looking forward to some good feedback and discussion on this, also on the OSGEO mailing list as I consider that discussion very relevant in the further development of outreach strategies for ourselves and the OSGEO foundation through conferences. Core question: Should OSGEO projects have guaranteed workshop and presentation space for at least one session? Regards, Jeroen On Mar 28, 2007, at 5:58 PM, FOSS4G 2007 wrote: Dear Jeroen Ticheler, We regret to inform you that we will not be able to accept your Half Day workshop, Using the GeoNetwork opensource Spatial Data Catalog, for the FOSS4G 2007 program. We had a very large number of submissions this year, and have been able to accept less than half of them . We hope you will consider bringing some of your ideas to the conference in the form of a presentation. The
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Requesting an article review...
On 3/12/07, Landon Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am working on an article that will introduce readers to the topic of spatial relationships for the first issue of the OSGeo Newsletter. I was hoping I might find someone that would be willing to do a brief review of the article before I submitted it. The article will be short, probably only 2 or 3 typed pages, and the review won't take long. If you are interested in helping me out with this you can just send me a quick e-mail. I am going to try to have the article complete by the end of the week. Landon (A.K.A. – The Sunburned Surveyor) Landon, I will be happy to review the article. Just send it over. Many thanks, -- Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/ Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/education/ - collaborate, communicate, compete = ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
