Australia/New Zealand Chapter Report 2008

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OSGeo Australia / New Zealand

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Bruce Bannerman


Key Accomplishments

  • FOSS4G-2009 Preparations

Preparations for FOSS4G-2009 have been dominating AustNZ activities for 2009. We have a strong team of local volunteers from Australia and New Zealand as well as from the International OSGeo family.

We're looking forward to an exciting conference. The current economic conditions provide us with an opportunity to show how beneficial open source can be to all.

For more information see: http://2009.foss4g.org/


  • CCIP-2009

A spin off from the FOSS4G-2009 work has been a project that is developing legs of its own.

The Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest 2009 (CCIP-2009) has been adopted and is managed by the OGC.

CCIP demonstrates standards based interoperability between geospatial applications based on a Climate Change scenario. It consists of a server with multiple virtual machines, each installed with geospatial applications offering standards based web services. All web services will demonstrate a common dataset, and will be accessed by a range of geospatial client applications installed on client computers.

For more information see: http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome


  • GeoNetwork - ANZLIC Profile

The Australian and New Zealand Metadata communities were engaged to try and get some momentum back into the seemingly stalled ANZLIC Metadata Catalog work based on GeoNetwork.

There is a lot of good will towards making GeoNetwork work as the tool of choice. Jeroen Ticheler arranged for ANZLIC development (BlueNet) to be developed within a Sandpit environment within the GeoNetwork community.

The ensuing email thread showed how much open source spatial work is happening in the region and good will towards working together.


  • Victorian Government Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data

Bruce Bannerman and Cameron Shorter prepared a submission for Australia's Victorian Government's Parliamentary Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data on behalf of OSGeo-AustNZ.

This submission was prepared at short notice and to a tight time frame and covers a lot of current issues relating to open access to spatial data.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/1/14/Osgeo-austnz_vic_inquiry_psi_v1.1.pdf


  • Presence at conferences
    • 2008-11, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne - Autodesk, LISAsoft, Ennoble Consulting, and a couple of others put on an Open Source Workshop.
    • 2008-10, Wagga Wagga, [Mapped Out] Stand at Spatial conference for regional councils.
    • 2008-03, Brisbane, Queensland Spatial Conference
      • 3 hour workshop on Geospatial Open Source and Mapguide OpenSource
      • OSGeo Stand
    • 2008-03, Perth. WALIS Forum
      • An afternoon thread dedicated to everything "Open". Presentations are available from the website.
      • OSGeo stand
      • Early details at WALIS stand


  • OSGeo-AustNZ adopted a new logo

After a brief competition, a logo was selected for OSGeo-AustNZ. This logo was designed by Jody Garnett (Thanks Jody!).

See logo at the top of this page.


Areas for Improvement

  • We have still not incorporated as a legal entity. This needs to be addressed as a priority. One of the issues holding this up is finding appropriate insurance for the entity.
  • Most of the work by the local chapter is still being done by a few key people. We are seeing this improve with the timely help of Mark and Simon on FOSS4G-2009. If we are to get the OSGeo message out there, we need more assistance from within the Australian and New Zealand OSGeo communities.
Collaboration with parallel efforts, e.g. the NZ GIS and NZ OpenGIS projects, including facilitating LINZ's Free-with-attribution government geo-data negotiations with OSM and incorporation of Transit NZ's High Speed Data Collection Survey into OSM.

Opportunities to Help

  • FOSS4G-2009

We would welcome more assistance with FOSS4G-2009. If you'd like to help, subscribe to the mailing list and please introduce yourself.


Outlook for 2009

  • There is a lot of momentum building for the use of open source spatial software in the Australian and New Zealand regions:
    • FOSS4G-2009

FOSS4G-2009 will generate a lot of interest among key decision makers in industry and in government. The current economic climate will only underscore the benefits of using FOSS4G.


    • CSIRO - Spatial Information Services Stack

The CSIRO's SISS project is expected to have a significant and positive impact on the use of FOSS4G software within Australia.

The principle outcome of the SISS activity will be the packaging and maintenance of a Spatial Information Services stack containing selected FOSS4G software. The stack will be based on open standards developed and adopted nationally and internationally and will be configurable so that private database schemas can be mapped to the community agreed information standards. This stack will be made available to government departments to install within their own environments.

SISS is actively developing core support for formal application schemas (i.e. any data standards specified with GML, such as GeoSciML, or the emerging INSPIRE specifications) within GeoTools and Geoserver, and currently has two developers full time. The project is targetting Geoserver 2.0 for core release build support for this function which has been available as a community module in Geoserver 1.6.

SISS is also working with the GeoNetwork community.

See: http://www.pfc.org.au/pub/Main/NeAT-2/NeAT_SISS_Defn.pdf

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