California Chapter Report 2010

California Chapter Events
The chapter maintained a presence at 5 events during 2010. These events included the annual meeting of the California Geographical Society, the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, and the 2011 Southern California Linux Expo. California Chapter member Ragi Burhum also presented a talk at the PGWest 2010 Conference.

California Member Activities
Landon Blake continued his work on the unsupported GPX2 Module. This module allows Java programs to parse GPS files. (GPX files are XML files used to store points, routs, and tracks from recreation grade GPS receivers.) It also allows Java programs to manipulate entities from GPX files as simple feature objects. This work on the next release of the module focuses on the removal of the JDOM for XML parsing. It is being replaced with a hybrid DOM-on-Demand XML parsing library from the SurveyOS Project. Work on the next release of the module will also include implementation of a set of objects to provide a GPX file DOM to Java Programs.

Landon also continued his work as an assistant editor of the OSGeo Journal. This included work on Volume 9 of the Journal, the 2010 Annual Report and exploring ways to make OSGeo Journal Content available in formats other than PDF.

Alex Mandel continued his work to host and build the OSGeo Version 3 and Version 4. A presentation on OSGeo Live was given to the California Geographical Society. Alex also helped convert a university course on GIS from Visual Basic for Applications to the Python Programming Language, and assisted with teaching the modified course to students. At the United States Forest Service International Seminar on Climate Change Alex provided a 2 hour workshop in QGIS using OSGeo Live.

Ragi Burhum started the San Francisco, California Geomeetup. This group has grown into a highly focused geo developer bi-monthly event with more than 450 members from big and small companies across the California Bay Area. The San Francisco Geomeetup sponsors have included O’Reilly, SimpleGeo, CBS Interactive, xCubeLabs, TRulia, Evenbrite and others. Both Ragi Burhum and Josh Livni have given talks at Geomeetup events that heavily promoted OSGeo. Brian Hamlin distributes OSGeo Live DVD’s as prizes during the trivia sections of the Geomeetup events. Ragi write and committed two (2) drivers for GDAL. The first was for ArcObjects. The second was a FileGDP driver.

Ragi Burhum and Brian Hamlin have continued their work with California companies to solve complex problems for California on top of Open Source GIS stacks.