Annual Report 2008 Compiled

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Compiled version of 2008 Report

Executive Reports

Working on this article directly in SVN:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/journal/volume_5/en-us/annual_report/executive/editorial.tex

Courtesy copy:

Welcome to this special edition of the OSGeo Journal. We use this Annual Report as an opportunity to share some of our inspiring activities and progress during 2008. A lot happened in 2008 and projects continue to be very busy in this first half of 2009. This document brings together some of the highlights from software projects, various committees, globally distributed local chapters, sponsors and our annual FOSS4G conference event.

In this issue we have nearly 60 reports from dozens of different authors and communities working in and around OSGeo. I would like to thank those who were able to contribute an article for this publication. Your input helps show the diversity of work going on under the OSGeo banner.

Also, we owe a big thank you to the sponsors who help to keep OSGeo operating. It was an exciting year as we had several new sponsors join in 2008, including Astun Technology, Borealis, Camptocamp, IGN France, GeoCat and PCI Geomatics. Additional new sponsors are still needed to maintain our operations - if you are interested, please contact me.

Of course none of this would be possible without the involvement of countless volunteers: project steering committees, directors, developers, educators, local chapters, users, advocates and many more. This report is a testimony to the fruit of your labour - thank you very much.

Enjoy the articles and best wishes for 2009!

Tyler Mitchell
Executive Director, OSGeo
Williams Lake, Canada
tmitchell AT osgeo.org

Board of Directors Report 2008

Document being compiled in SVN directly in LaTeX:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/journal/volume_5/en-us/annual_report/executive/news.tex

Document being compiled in SVN directly in LaTeX:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/journal/volume_5/en-us/annual_report/executive/finance.tex

Committee Reports

Conference Report 2008

FOSS4G 2008 - South Africa

FOSS4G 2008 was a very succesful conference by all accounts. This is a preliminary report and there is lots more scattered about the OSGeo wiki, the conference website and the Web at large. We succeeded in attracting 550 attendees from 40 countries to the bottom end of Africa, which was no mean feat considering the cost to get there and the economic downturn that was about to become a freefall. We filled a week up with 16 3h workshops, 20 90min labs, and loads of presentations and BoFs and of course plenaries with guest speakers and lightning talks. It was the first time FOSS4G had an academic track and this was well subscribed and popular. The programme and all abstracts were published in hardcopy and general and academic proceedings with full papers and presentations were published on separate CDs, each with an ISBN. We also hosted an OpenStreetMap mapping party in Hout Bay and an outreach programme in local schools and for geography teachers from across South Africa. The social event at Moyo in Stellenbosch was a huge hit, the conference food rocked and even though Cape Town weather was behaving a bit like northern Europe or America, we had some glorious days where attendees made the best of Table Mountain and many other local attractions, and many stayed on for longer tours around the country.

Half the attendees were local, which has given a huge shot in the arm for FOSS GIS in South Africa and started the stirring motions that will change the local GIS landscape forever.

Rounded financials:

  • Income: R3100000
  • Expenses: R2900000
  • Profit: R226000

(R24000 income oustanding to date)

As agreed, the profit will be split three ways, with R75000 going to each of OSGeo, GISSA and a South African GIS education fund.

Education and Curriculum Committee

  • Contact name: Charlie Schweik

Overall, the OSGeo education and curriculum committee's goals are to: (1) build and maintain a social network of educators at all education levels; and (2) build and maintain a system for the storage or linkage to geospatial educational content. As we will note below, there are mixed feelings in the committee about the degree to whether a third goal should be a focus on the sharing or development of geospatial curriculum recommendations.

Key Accomplishments

  • Continued expansion of our educational inventory

Our key accomplishment for 2008 was the continued growth in our inventory of educational material on the OSGeo wiki (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Educational_Content_Inventory). Our inventory grew to 47 submissions in multiple languages with submissions from all over the world. This year we hit the nice problem of having a wiki inventory page that reached the wiki length limit.

  • Creation of an online searchable database for educational content

This “problem” led to our second key accomplishment (thanks largely to Tyler Mitchell), who developed a new educational inventory system that is a web-database application. We now have an online mechanism that allows the user to search for educational material based on software type, language, or topic keywords (see http://www.osgeo.org/educational_content). This system also has an easy to use input form to the database which allows new entries to be added, or the ability for a user to edit an already existing record (see https://www.osgeo.org/node/add/edu-content).

  • Live-DVDs

In addition to the above, several of our committee members worked to help produce “live-DVDs” for use in various situations, and also for distribution in the FOSS4Geo conference in South Africa. More information on these efforts can be found at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc and http://blog.ominiverdi.org/index.php?/archives/57-Ominiverdi-with-OSGEO-Edu.html.
There are also several members who are actively working on a “Free GIS” textbook (currently written in Spanish), with much of the authoring being done by group member Victor Olaya Ferrero, Universidad de Extremadura, in Spain.

  • Subversion system for new derivative work

We also established a subversion system on the OSGeo server in an effort to develop a library of the “source” of these tutorials, so that we could establish a “new derivative work” system. Specifically around the idea of software-related tutorials, the situation could easily arise where some new user or educator wants to take an existing OSGeo inventoried tutorial and modify it in some way. Translations of a tutorial into another language is one example. Updating a tutorial for a more recent version of the software it describes is another. For this reason, we established a subversion-based repository to maintain the source of some of our educational material. As we will describe in the “Areas for Improvement” section below, this system has not been used by our members.

  • Continued growth in our OSGeo edu listserv subscribers, from 111 in October to 139 currently.

Areas for Improvement

  • Keeping momentum going in the group

The most significant challenge is keeping the committee active and moving forward. My sense (Schweik, the edu chair speaking) is that we have a very engaged group, with a core group who care about what we are collectively trying to do and are committed to helping it move forward. The challenge we have is how to get more people to contribute to the groups' collective efforts. I have been reflecting on this, and think two issues are particularly important.

First, our group is made up entirely of volunteer contributions. Consequently, two concepts are key to keep the group moving forward. The first is the concept of user-driven innovation, raised by Eric von Hippel (2005, Democratizing Innovation) in his discussions of open source software collaboration. This concept is meant to capture the motivations of people to voluntarily contribute to an open source collaborative effort when the effort is on something they personally need and want for their own work or other personal situation. A great incentive to contribute to something is personal need. The more we as a group can connect people with similar needs and interests and match that to group goals the more progress we will make as a group. For example, if we can somehow “match up” two, three or four people world wide who have a need for a set of educational material in some open source geospatial domain, and help them to collectively act, the more likely it will be that we will see continued contributions.

The second important concept is what Yokai Benkler (2005, The Wealth of Networks) refers to as “task granularity.” In short, finer-scaled (easier to do) tasks will be more likely done by volunteers than coarse-scale (more difficult, time consuming) tasks. This concept explains why Wikipedia has made more advances than Wikibooks, or why microblogging applications like Twitter seem to be gaining traction. To the extent we can identify fine grained tasks to move our group forward, the more progress we will make. From this standpoint, contributions of educational modules is more likely than contributions of full courses, for example.

This insight into the value of fine scaled tasks leads me to realize that it is more likely we will continue to get contributions for educational material if we make the posting of this material very easy. The web-based input form that Tyler Mitchell developed to our searchable database makes it quite easy for a contributor to post information about material they have developed and link to it (assuming their content is on the Web somewhere). The idea that some in our community will make the added effort to learn how to submit their source material into the Subversion system is perhaps, in retrospect, wishful thinking. This is a coarser-scaled task, requiring many associated with our group to learn how to use Subversion, and then to take the effort to place their content on this system. Subversion may be easy for programmers, but it is not something non-programmers commonly use. My sense right now is that asking educational material contributors to post their “source” in Subversion may be too coarse a task to ask of these volunteers. My conclusion from this is that if we want to move to a system where we enable new derivative works to occur, it will probably require a decentralized system where one person contacts the author of some work we have inventoried, and they work it out between them how the source code is shared. But we should all encourage people undertaking new derivatives to share them with the OSGeo community via our inventory Web system once they are developed.

  • Forge connections to the OSGeo Local groups

One way we might be able to harness the incentive of user-driven innovation is through the closer linkage between our education effort and local OSGeo groups. It seems natural that these local OSGeo groups will devote some of their efforts toward educating people in their geographic areas about open source geospatial technologies. For example, in the regular (bi-annual ?) physical, face-to-face meetings of local chapters, I could see opportunities for presentations or tutorials on some recent advance in open source geospatial technologies. It should become almost second nature to share any educational content developed for such meetings with the rest of the OSGeo educational community. Somehow we as a group need to figure out a way to push for this to happen.

  • Improve communication of individual edu members on what they are planning to do over the next year

A second way to harness the user-centered innovation incentive is by creating a better system for communicating what we (individuals associated with the OSGeo education group) are working on or planning to work on over the next year. What I have learned from my empirical work studying Sourceforge.net open source software projects, is that software projects that continue to be successful in terms on ongoing collaboration involve small teams (an average or 2-3 people). The key is to connect the few people on the planet who have the same educational content needs and who can see benefits in collaborating and sharing each others end-products.

  • Better communication between the OSGeo edu committee and OSGeo software groups

Finally, I continue to wonder why we don't have a better connection with the software groups affiliated with OSGeo. In my view, the software groups should be very interested in working with us, since through education their tools will be promoted. At the very least, any educational material that they develop on their products should be inventoried in our system. Moreover, they may have a need to find people to help develop educational material on their product, and therefore having a periodic “conversation” with the members of our group on their educational needs couldn't hurt. We need to strive to develop a more direct dialog with these groups.

  • Unclear as to whether we as a group should be trying to develop GIS-related curriculum recommendations

At the October 2008 meeting at FOSS4Geo in Cape Town, there was some interest in the second education BOF meeting to develop guidelines for open source geospatial curricula. However, there was some mixed reactions as to whether this is something we should pursue. There are already some well established organizations doing this kind of thing, and in hallway conversations later I heard some with strong feelings that this is not an initiative this group should pursue. This remains an open question that perhaps this group should revisit.

In short, over recent months the activity and dialog within our group has diminished. That in part is because I have been distracted in my own work and perhaps haven't encouraged and engaged the group enough. But we continue to inventory material, and there is a core group who has continued to meet at the last two FOSS4Geo conferences and have developed some fairly strong “social capital.” I am personally very appreciative of the people in this group who have, through the posting of their material or their active participation in the listserv discussions helped to “lead by doing.” Over the next six months, I will be working to pursue the ideas listed above. I hope others in the group will step up and help to take a leadership role in moving some of the above ideas forward, or by taking on something they think is important that we should be doing that I haven't listed here.

Opportunities to Help

  • Contribute relevant educational material into our educational repository
  • We need people to help us develop a "new derivative" work system. We need examples of material taken by others, modified, and given back to the community. This could be in the form of translations of material, updates of old material for new software releases, etc.
  • Contributions to the FreeGIS book effort
  • Help this group develop better communication with OSGeo local groups, software groups, and data group
  • We need people to step up and take on the tasks above, that is, take on some group leadership for our subtasks
  • Please join us!

Outlook for 2009

Given the above, we should stay focused on the effort of building educational material for all kinds of users (K-12, higher education, or other educational situations) and work toward building a system where new derivatives can be made from old, perhaps out of date, material. Our goal should be that the OSGeo educational repository becomes the first place people look to for open source geospatial educational materials.

With that goal in mind, for the rest of 2009, our group will:

  • Continue our work migrating content from our old wiki-based educational inventory page to the new database-driven and searchable system with the goal of eventually decommissioning old wiki page.
  • Work to grow the number of members associated with the education group;
  • Continue inventorying new educational content stored or linked via our established repository. I hope this leads to identification of some key material to be included on the next Live DVD, and that we continue to build a system where translations of material are completed.
  • Strive to achieve some “success stories” where new derivatives of some educational content are created from some of our already inventoried older content;
  • Strive to help Victor Olaya Ferrero in his effort to develop the Free GIS textbook;
  • Work to develop an inventory of data for various parts of the world that sits, side by side, with our educational inventory (in conjunction with the OSGeo data committee); and,
  • Develop and maintain stronger connections between educational committee and other OSGeo groups, such as the OSGeo local chapters, the data group, the live DVD group, and specific software projects.

Public Geospatial Data Committee

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: David Bitner

Summary

The Public Geospatial Data Committee has been fairly dormant committee of OSGeo over the course of 2008. The primary role of the committee has been as a forum for geodata related activities through the use of the mailing list. Early efforts at strategic planning and creation of catalog have become stagnant due to lack of engagement by a large enough group to really make a difference. In order to grow beyond the current committee activities, the Geodata Committee needs volunteers to lead individual activities such as getting an operable catalog and repository off the ground.

Key Accomplishments

  • Representation at FOSS4G2008
  • Support of Open Street Map, Open Aerial Map, and the Flight Gear Scenery Project
  • Forum for Geodata related discussions through the year

Areas for Improvement

  • More engagement by members of the community
  • Clear mission and direction that make it clear to members and outsiders who we are and what we do
  • Work with others with similar goals so as not to reinvent the wheel
  • Partner with those who need support of our resources
  • Work more closely with Education Committee and education datasets
  • Define clear areas where volunteers can be engaged

Opportunities to Help

  • Leadership
  • Strategic Planning -- without clear direction, it is hard to know where we can put peoples efforts to work
  • Cataloguing work - both on software setup side (GeoNetwork) and collecting metadata for public data sets
  • Open Geodata Licensing success stories - writing about how your organization or project has moved to an open licensing approach, sharing decisions with others

Outlook for 2009

  • Continued forum for public geodata related issues

Incubation Report 2008

Working directly in SVN:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/journal/volume_5/en-us/annual_report/committees/journal.tex

Working directly in SVN:

http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/journal/volume_5/en-us/annual_report/committees/marketing.tex

SAC

  • Contact name: Howard Butler

Key Accomplishments

Areas for Improvement

  • get more active members into SAC

Opportunities to Help

Outlook for 2009

Website Committee

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Christopher Schmidt

Summary

The primary role of the committee is to update and maintain the web sites of OSGeo. Despite a low activity the main web site and the wiki have been actively maintained and the language translations augmented. Due to its role, the level of activity is generally justified, new translators/maintainer are always welcome.

Key Accomplishments

Areas for Improvement

  • More translators would benefit the general efficiency of the site
  • Define clear areas where volunteers can be engaged

Opportunities to Help

  • Leadership
  • Translations

Outlook for 2009

  • Continue discussions for site improvements
  • Keep on going

References

  1. ↑ http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/UserMap_Documentation

Software Project Reports

deegree

Key Accomplishments

  • The deegree Project Steering Commitee (PSC) was instantiated in January.
  • deegree 2.1 demo packages have been released in January, including OGC reference implementation for WMS 1.1.1 and 1.3.0 and WCS 1.0.0.
  • The coordinate reference system component has been completely redesigned to meet the requirement to be highly configurable.
  • Release management was formally installed and a release manager appointed by the PSC.
  • deegree applied for OSGeo incubation and started the incubation process in May.
  • Third deegree day successfully took place in Bonn in June with about 80 participants (http://deegreeday.deegree.org/archive).
  • Work on the next major version (deegree 3) started.
  • deegree 3 alpha has been released, containing SOS as a first ready-to-run demo.
  • deegree 2.2 stable has been released in December.

Areas for Improvement

  • Extend and improve documentation, create tutorials
  • Increase involvement of the community
  • Increase the number of contributors (code)
  • Reduce the number of pre-releases within one release cycle

Opportunities to Help

  • Test release candidates at an early stage
  • Provide or improve documentation (e.g. QA by native speakers)
  • Contribute to tutorial production process
  • Actively contribute to deegree 3 development
  • Share experiences with deegree

Outlook for 2009

  • Release management to be refined
  • A new build mechanism based on ant/ivy to be established
  • deegree 2.3 to be released, including improved iGeoPortal GUI
  • deegree iGeoDesktop preview to be published
  • Fourth deegree day will be held on May 26th/27th, together with a local OpenStreetMap outreach activity
  • More deegree 3 alpha versions to be released, including demo packages for SOS, WPS, WCS, WFS and WMS
  • OSGeo incubation to be continued

FDO (Feature Data Objects)

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Greg Boone

Key Accomplishments

The following releases of FDO were made available in 2008:

  • FDO Open Source 3.3.0 Released - March 2008
    • Bug fixes from 3.2.3 release
    • Addition of the FDO Expression Engine
    • Addition of the PostGIS Provider
    • Continued development and release of the KingOracle Provider
    • Alpha Release of the SQL Server Spatial Provider
    • The complete roadmap and features of FDO 3.3.0 can be found at: http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/milestone/3.3.0.

Development of FDO 3.4.0

  • Major development efforts were undertaken in 2008 towards the release of FDO 3.4.0, which was released in beta form in January 2009.
    • Bug fixes from 3.3.2 release
    • Implement Support for a SQLServer Spatial FDO Provider. FDO RFC:12[1]
    • Implement Support for a SQLite FDO Provider. FDO RFC:16[2]
    • Migrate FDO to support Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. FDO RFC:18[3]
    • New GetSchemaNames, GetClassNames commands, and DescribeSchema Hint. FDO RFC:23[4]
    • New ExtendedSelect command and Scrollable Reader. FDO RFC:26[5]
    • Add X,Y,Z and M Expression Functions. FDO RFC:28[6]
    • Redefining Expression Function EXTRACT. FDO RFC:29[7]
    • Enhanced 64-bit support. The FDO API and many of its providers where modified to be fully compilable/executable in a 64 bit runtime environment. We have still do not officially release a 64 bit Open Source build, but this should be addressed in 2009.

Areas for Improvement

  • A public build system for FDO would provide the community information on the state of trunk and access to daily builds of trunk.
  • Linux based builds of FDO remain more difficult than they should be. Additional work is required to the build system of FDO to make it fully FGS viable.
  • The generation and release of an official 64 bit build would be of great benefit to our user community.

Opportunities to Help

All contributions and help is welcome, but in particular:

  • Develop a new FDO provider for your currently unsupported format
  • Refine the website navigation and site structure.
  • Develop and refine help and documentation, in particular a getting started tutorial.
  • Enhance the Linux build system and complete the FGS package work.
  • Testing and quality bug reports.

Outlook for 2009

FDO 3.4.0 will be released early 2009 and development of 3.5.0 will start in parallel. The scope of 3.5.0 has not yet been decided.

Expected Major 2008 Milestones:

  • Final Release of FDO 3.4.0: March 2008
  • Continued testing and enhancements to the PostGIS Provider
  • Continued development towards a service pack release of FDO 3.4.0 and beyond
  • Continued development of new Data Providers for FDO

GDAL/OGR report external at http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/AnnualReport2008

GeoNetwork opensource Report 2008

GEOS

  • Contact name: Paul Ramsey

Key Accomplishments

  • Completed all code review and administrivia necessary to complete the Incubation process. Working on achieving a requisite amount of project activity to receive Graduation.
  • Completed the 3.1 release cycle, which brought some great performance features to the community
    • Faster predicates
    • Faster unions
    • Single-sided buffering
    • Thread-safety
    • More bug fixes and platform support

Areas for Improvement

  • GEOS continues to struggle without sufficient maintenance resources, so activity and progress are relatively slow
  • JTS has added some important improvements to speed and reliability of buffers and unions that would be good to port forward

Opportunities to Help

  • General bug fixing and maintenance, simply learning enough of the code base to be a helpful contributor
  • Documentation in-code remains somewhat weak. The C-API could use a complete Doxygen set

Outlook for 2009

  • The community is not shrinking and GEOS continues to garner corporate interest
  • The possibility of becoming the "GDAL of geometry" remains, with an associated increase in development time

Project Name

  • Contact name: Jody Garnett, LISAsoft

Key Accomplishments

  • We have graduated from the OSGeo incubation process. This is a major accomplishment given the maturity of the GeoTools library and the complexity of the questions raised over the course of our incubation.
  • We move moved key project resources (svn repository and maven artifact repository) to OSGeo hardware

community questions

  • GeoTools 2.5 is the first releases made under OSGeo copyright
  • GeoTools 2.5 represents the deployment of a new feature model - this is the end of a four year RnD effort with collaborators from around the globe
  • We are very pleased with the success of our change proposal process introduced in 2008 it has reduced the amount of time spent in IRC in planning activities
  • We have found the time to talk to other Java development communities (an area we listed as needing improvement in 2007). The OSGeo metaCRS and standards list has been instrumental in making these connections.
  • We have attracted several valued contributors active in both their own modules and on the user list
  • We are especially pleased with the ability of the user list and user guide to answer
  • The GeoAPI project (which we use as a source of stable interfaces) has renewed its mandate, as such we will continue to monitor our involvement

Areas for Improvement

  • The success of the change proposal process has reduced the usefulness weekly IRC meetings
  • The library is meeting the needs of our core contributors at the moment - while this offers a great motivation for QA activities it presents a source of friction with our traditional research driven development history
  • Several popular modules (such as oracle-spatial) do not currently have a module maintainer and are listed as unsupported
  • Our style interfaces are based around the SLD 1.0 specification; we would like to update these interfaces to match the Symbology Encoding 1.1 specification in order to offer several improvements such as buffers based on real world ground units
  • The user guide remains weak in the area of styling and rendering documentation
  • We are caring a large technical debt (mostly visible in the form of deprecated methods) that is the source of confusion on the user list
  • We need to define procedures around the use of distributed version control systems

Opportunities to Help

Our user community has been very vocal about the need to construct swing widgets around the geotools library. If this is an area that is of interest to you please volunteers. There are also several unsupported modules that are in need of a friend; if you find yourself with the time and ability to adopt a section of code we would love your support.

Outlook for 2009

GeoTools is starting 2009 with a renewed vigor - key contributors are emerging from the work that has gone into making GeoTools 2.5.0 such an amazing release.

There are several exciting modules that are expected to reach supported status this year. The imageio-ext-gdal module allows access to a host of GDAL supported raster formats. The jdbc-ng modules represent our second generation Database access implementation built around prepaired statements.

The community is looking at simplifications that can be made as the shape of GeoTools 3.0 is defined. Take part in this and other activities in what promisses to be an exciting year for the GeoTools project.

Grasslogo vector small.png

GRASS GIS

Key Accomplishments

Major software releases:

  • GRASS 6.3.0 released - a technology preview (announcement)
  • GRASS 6.4.0 prepared and release candidates published (details)
  • Work on GRASS 7 started
  • Integration of GRASS into the OSGeo4W installer now active and productive
  • In total 22 TB of downloads from grass.osgeo.org in 2008: (detailed statistics; not including downloads from mirror sites)

Users and developers:

  • New developers acquired: 5 to main archive, 12 to AddOns repository.
  • More than 1000 subscribers in the grass-user mailing list
(470 in grass-dev, many more in the other GRASS mailing lists)

Books and book chapters:

Visibility at conferences and workshops:

Areas for Improvement

  • An automated build environment, especially for the OSGeo4W installer is desired
  • Development of a framework for efficient and semi-automated translations of the 400+ module help pages
  • Unrelated to the GRASS development: a SVN history "annotate" ability for Trac source code browser would be helpful

Opportunities to Help

Outlook for 2009

  • Vector topology speedup
  • Overhaul of raster library
  • Partially addition of parallelization (mostly using openMP)
  • Cartography GUI extension programmed
  • Further participation in Google Summer of Code (we hope)
  • Stability on MS Windows leading to incredible gain of new users
  • Move/removal of web-svn documentation to our MediaWiki site; move/removal of development material from MediaWiki to our TracWiki site

gvSIG

Key Accomplishments

  • The community portal (http://www.gvsig.org) allowed to publish:
    • User documentation (in several languages)
    • Tehcnical documentation (at this moment only in Spanish)
    • A catalog of contributions (new extensions, non-official gvSIG releases, more documentation, etc.)
  • gvSIG mailing lists have grown in subscribers (more than 2300, see numbers below) and a new mailing list has been created for the the Italian community
  • The project source repository has been published at http://subversion.gvsig.org for gvSIG and gvSIG Mobile
  • A new public FTP repository has been published at ftp://gvsig.org
  • Releases of gvSIG extensions and releases during 2008:
  • International events where gvSIG project has been officially represented:
    • TopCart, Valencia, Spain
    • Primer simposio GIS Educación en América Latina, Quito, Ecuador
    • II Jornadas SIG Libre, Girona, Spain
    • FOSSGIS2008, Freiburg, Germany
    • Primo incontro degli utenti italiani di gvSIG, Trieste, Italy
    • XXII International Geodesy Students Meeting, Valencia, Spain
    • AGIT, Salzburg, Germany
    • 1er encuentro Geomática Libre, Mérida, Venezuela
    • FOSS4G2008, Cape Town, South Africa
    • Open Source World Conference, Málaga, Spain
    • Intergeo, Bremen, Germany
    • Latinoware'08, Foz de Iguazú, Brasil
    • Jornadas para las Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales de España, Tenerife, Spain
    • III Congreso de Software Libre de la Comunitat Valenciana, Alicante, Spain


gvSIG Commons

Aiming to produce reusable components not only for gvSIG software but also for other Java FOSS projects, gvSIG project is releasing some products as independent sub-projects at the gvSIG Commons initiative. At this moment the Open Scene Graph Virtual Planets project is releasing versions and is published also at the SVN (http://subversion.gvsig.org/osgvp)

4th gvSIG Conference

The 4th gvSIG Conference was a succesful event with more than 600 delegates where gvSIG developers and users presented their last year experiences. In the same context (the Valencia Conference Centre) a OGC TC/PC meeting and the first Spanish Eclipse Day took place.

There were 9 workshops to show last gvSIG features as well as more than 30 presentations and plenary sessions.

Hall of the Valencia Conference Centre

Hall of the Valencia Conference Centre

Plenary session

Conference Hall (Photo by Jorge Sanz) Session (Photo by Camino Rodero) Session (Photo by Verónica Navarro)

Downloads

These are approximate numbers about gvSIG releases downloads during 2008 (as of 17 of December of 2008):

Releases
Version Binaries Sources (no SVN)
1.9alpha 1186 0
1.1.2 56.504 30.380
1.1.1 41.791 757
1.1 50.647 2.238
1.0.2 17.700 0
Mobile 0.1 3.387 3978
Pilots and extensions
Pilots Downloads
jCRS 1.869
Raster 12.791
3D 3.679
Synchro 963
Publishing 738
Documentation
Manuals Downloads Courses Downloads
1.0 2.036 0.3 1.731
Mobile 2.501 1.0 2.070
Mobile install 4129 1.1 8.759
1.1 32.142 Extension dev. 1.588
1.0 install 740
Scripting 527
Metadata 1.760
Roadmap 5.317

Other statistics

Known countries where gvSIG is beeing used
  • gvSIG GUI translated in more than 20 languages
  • Mailing lists subscribers:
    • Users: 1255
    • Developers: 618
    • International: 521
    • Italian: 160
  • Known countries with registered users: 42
  • Known countries where gvSIG has been downloaded: 59

Areas for Improvement

gvSIG project needs to:

  • Open the bug tracking system
  • Open the gvSIG project organization to the community
  • Stablish a fixed release schedule (like Ubuntu Linux)
  • Create more technical documentation in English

Opportunities to Help

  • Test gvSIG and report bugs and annoyances at mailing lists
  • Write use cases and report them
  • Offer services (development, training) with gvSIG
  • Propose new features and discuss them on the mailing lists
  • Help us joining the testing team for a more formal work
  • Help us and join the translation group

Outlook for 2009

  • Start a new organization to strength the project and allow new companies, universities and public administrations to participate actively on the project management
  • Start a community-driven formal testing
  • Release a stable version of gvSIG with new features:
    • Refactored data access (hopefully without users taking account of it)
    • New symbology support
    • Raster analysis (classification, principal components analysis, mosaic, etc.)
    • Network geoprocessing
    • Topology creation, editing and validating
    • 3D support
    • And others: LIDAR, geocoding, reports and charts, WPS,...
  • Release a stable version of gvSIG Mobile with new features:
    • Refactored core with gvSIG desktop compatibility
    • Full editing
    • Custom forms
    • Phone ME support (finally a trully free JVM for PDA!)
    • GPS library
    • OpenMoko and Android versions

Mapbender

  • Contact name: Christoph Baudson

Key Accomplishments

  • refactoring of core code
    • subsequent replacement of frame architecture by AJAX approach
    • subsequent replacement of procedural code by object oriented code following design patterns
  • various security updates
  • higher quality of releases due to changes in release cycle
  • interoperability: basic OpenLayers output, GeoJSON support
  • a total of four development sprints with a huge variety of attendees
  • incorporation of new developers
  • increased IRC traffic

Areas for Improvement

  • unit testing
  • update process
  • build process
  • SRS handling

Opportunities to Help

Outlook for 2009

  • Enhanced interoperability
  • More intuitive administration interface
  • further refactorings in order to
    • increase extensibility and stability
    • lower the barrier for external developers

As per: http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2008/07/end-of-life-for-community-mapbuilder-we_29.html

Community Mapbuilder has retired

We, the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, have agreed that the time has come for the Community Mapbuilder project to gracefully retire. We will release a final, stable 1.5 version of the software, and afterwards there are no planned enhancements to Mapbuilder. The web pages and code will be kept alive, a few bugs might be fixed and we will likely continue answering user queries, but we expect Mapbuilder will gradually fade away into history.

Why?

Mapbuilder is a stable, feature rich, standards compliant, fast, webmapping framework with a strong developer community. Why has it come to the end of its life?

The browser based webmapping space has become crowded and other webmapping clients have increased in functionality and attractiveness to users. In particular, Openlayers is simpler to use, has attracted an incredibly strong developer community, has good quality control and development processes, and has developed most of the webmapping functionality previously only offered by Mapbuilder. Basically Openlayers is attracting the majority of the users and developers that previously would have used Mapbuilder. One day someone will write a compelling paper on the history of the two similar projects and analyse the key differences and decision points which led to one project out shining the other.

But we are not crying

Well, maybe we feel a twinge of loss for the Mapbuilder project we started years ago, but in the bigger picture, we see the retiring of Mapbuilder as a good thing. It will allow the greater web mapping community to consolidate and rally around the remaining webmapping tools – in particular, around Openlayers.

There has been significant collaboration between the Mapbuilder and Openlayers communities over the last couple of years. Mapbuilder has incorporated Openlayers as its rendering engine and features have been shared between projects. In many cases, developers from both projects worked on the same codebase (in Openlayers), then ported up to Mapbuilder. This was a deliberate move toward the merging of the two developer communities and most of the Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee have contributed to the Openlayers codebase.

So in essence, by changing our allegiance from Mapbuilder to Openlayers we take with us some of our code, we replace some features with equivalent Openlayers features, we take our community with us, and we gain an existing, robust and welcoming community. We loose a little and gain a lot more. What should Mapbuilder users do?

Users have a few options. You already own the source code, so you are welcome to continue maintaining and extending the Mapbuilder code for as long as you like. At some point, users will likely want to upgrade, and at that point we suggest considering Openlayers for your application. It now provides the majority of the functionality that was previously only offered by Mapbuilder. What about Mapbuilder's standing with OSGeo?

Loosing a graduated project might seem like an embarrassment for OSGeo, however, I'd argue it is a strength. It shows two projects growing together under the OSGeo umbrella and eventually merging into a stronger, more focused community.

Even so, it raises a dilemma with regards to what should be done with a retired project. Some key OSGeo criteria like “Community Backing” and “Best of Breed Software” will gradually be lost, so OSGeo should stop recommending Mapbuilder. But, OSGeo shouldn’t erase Mapbuilder's history with OSGeo as Mapbuilder has documented valuable lessons learned during the graduation process.

We suggest OSGeo create a new “retired” project category.

Thanks

We, the Project Steering Committee, have derived a huge amount of pleasure building Mapbuilder and working with the Mapbuilder Community. For many of us, Mapbuilder has been a launching pad into a full-filling Open Source and/or Geospatial careers. We'd like to thank all the users, developers and supporters of Mapbuilder we have met along the way.

The Mapbuilder Project Steering Committee, (in order of appearance):

  • Cameron Shorter
  • Mike Adair
  • Patrice Cappelaere
  • Steven M. Ottens
  • Matt Diez
  • Olivier Terral
  • Andreas Hocevar
  • Gertjan van Oosten
  • Linda Derezinski

MapGuide report external at: http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/OSGeoAnnualReport2008

MapServer

  • Contact name: Steve Lime

Key Accomplishments

the top 5-10 key items that the project or PSC accomplished this period

  • Project graduated from OSGeo incubation process in December
  • MapServer 5.2 released in July:
    • Nearly 200 tickets were closed as part of this effort.
    • Notable features and enhancements include:
      • Performance enhancements for large shapefile handling (following Geoserver comparison)
      • Performance enhancements for AGG rendering (an order of magnitude faster in some cases)
      • Rendering improvements:
        • fuzzy label outlines for AGG
        • style-level opacity for AGG
        • quantization and palette support for PNGs and RGBA modes
        • pre-clip label point computation (helps in tile generation)
      • OGC Web Services:
        • WCS 1.1.0 support (RFC-41)
        • SOS 1.0.0 support
        • WFS 1.1.0 support
        • Compliance testing (WMS 1.1.1 ready to certify)
      • proxy and http authentication support for cascaded WMS requests
      • Support for auth cookie forwarding (RFC-42)
      • Direct tile generation for Google Maps API (RFC-43)
      • Native Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support (RFC-38)
      • extent (e.g. shpext, mapext) template tag attribute handling
      • Simplified Template Support for Query Output (MS RFC 36)
  • New website launched in December! Quite an improvement for usability and maintainability over the previous site!
  • We moved from the UMN to OSGeo infrastructure (thanks to UMN for hosting us for all those years!)
  • We finally got a hold of the mapserver.org domain which has become our new home

Areas for Improvement

any weaknesses in process, software, management, etc. that you plan to address or recognize need some help

  • Keeping documentation up-to-date with development remains a challenge
    • Content is spread between the new website and the MapServer trac wiki and it is unclear when to transition between the two
  • The project still doesn't do a great job marketing itself at OSGeo conferences.
  • Google Summer of Code: try to attract some students in the next editions

Opportunities to Help

list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report

  • general website and documentation maintenance
  • multilingual documentation support
  • new coders always welcome, a good way to start is by contributing bug reports and patches
  • experienced users can contribute to the release process by testing the betas and RCs and reporting their results

Outlook for 2009

this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2009 :)

  • MapServer 5.4 to be released in early March
  • Strong presence at the Toronto Code Sprint in March where we will focus on 6.0 release features and performance improvements
  • MapServer 6.0 release sometimes in the fall (hopefully before FOSS4G)
  • Reestablish features lost in the website transition (specifically the gallery section)

MetaCRS Report 2008

OpenLayers

  • Contact name: Erik Uzureau, Chris Schmidt, Tim Schaub

Key Accomplishments

In 2008, OpenLayers had two major releases that demonstrate the majority of our work on the library in this time frame.

OpenLayers 2.6 added significant visual improvements, including animated panning of the map and improved popup support for better in-map visualization. In support of our growing international usage, the project now includes a system for internationalization support into the library. We also added a powerful new API for styling client side data, and added support for connecting to MapGuide data sources.

The 2.7 release added improved rendering capabilities and the ability to read OGC standard SLD style documents. "Vector Behaviours", a massive development and the driving feature of the release, allows users to easily extend OpenLayers to support communication with custom data providers through open or proprietary protocols.

Alongside the improvements in the project's codebase, many excellent additions were made to the OpenLayers website. The "Gallery" section, which catalogues different live deployments of OpenLayers, was rewritten to be both easier to use and more visually compelling. It now proudly showcases more than 75 uses of the library, complete with screenshots and detailed descriptions. The Documentation section of the website was also thoroughly revamped. Both the standard library documentation as well as the FAQ sections of the site were migrated away from the wiki and into a more structured, elegant format for presentation. Finally, a "Case Studies" section was added to the website which allows organizations to share why they chose OpenLayers and the experience they've had working with and supporting the project.

Areas for Improvement

  • Documentation, as with any open source project, is always in need of expansion and improvement. With the new OpenLayers documentation site up and running, it is now easier to create documentation.
  • Thorough API review. As we bend towards the 8th release of the 2nd OpenLayers API, there are many who long for a massive spring cleaning session to build a 3.0 version of the library.
  • Improved access to third party services. With the new protocols and formats, it is now possible to easily create tools which allow OpenLayers to communicate with more servers. One target which has thus far been neglected, for example, is ESRI's server products, both in access to map tiles and vector data. It would be great to see the community step up to help support these important targets.

Opportunities to Help

  • OpenLayers is now a member of the OSGeo Project Sponsorship program, which allows organizations to support the project financially through donations to OSGeo. If your organization is using OpenLayers successfully, consider donating funds to the project to help support its continued success.
  • The new Case Studies section needs more contributions. If your organization is or has considered using OpenLayers, share your story with others, and help them to understand why and how you chose to use OpenLayers.
  • Internationalization - We currently have only 15 of the 7,000 living languages translated in the library. The translation process is simple (only 28 strings total).
  • Ticket Review - As always, there are many more tickets with patches waiting review than available developer hours. If you have even a little experience with JavaScript, you can help to try out the new code that developers are writing and offer feedback.
  • Documentation - Efforts continue to improve the library's documentation, and users of the library are the most effective contributors to this. Participate on the mailing lists and share your problems and solutions, then use the tools in the OpenLayers project to convert them into documentation for all users.

Outlook for 2009

2009 brings new leadership to the project's Steering Committee as Tim Schaub takes over the reigns as the new PSC chair.

Efforts are already underway for a 2.8 release which will include long-awaited WFS Protocol functionality, as well as a massive improvement to OpenLayers's vector capabilities which increase performance and interactivity for maps integrating multiple vector layers.

OSSIM

  • Contact name: Mark Lucas

Key Accomplishments

ossim core libraries

The OSSIM core library system is fairly mature and has only scene some minor internal refactoring and bug fixes over the last year. Initial discussions have begun on what is desired for the OSSIM 2.0 library

ossimPlanet

The ossimPlanet application was the focus of most of the development for 2008. A few of the functionality improvements for ossimPlanet:

UAV video geocoding and processing

Support for the MISB standards, the video stream is processed for the internal metadata embedded in the KLV stream. The positioning information is used to place the video geographically. ffmpeg is used for video playback in the 3d environment

Synchronization Support

Communications channels and protocols were integrated to allow multiple instances of ossimplanet to synchronize on data and navigation. External applications can now drive the planet

GUI enhancement

Ability to enable and disable layers, move them around and general GUI improvements

OpenGL Shader support

OpenGL shaders can compare and fuse multiple texture layers in the 3D environment. This includes swiping, masks, blending and arithmetic operations

imagelinker

Minor maintenance on the imagelinker application. Much discussion on the list about major improvements and possibly integrating in with ossimPlanet. Activity has not commenced in that area.

omar

OMAR is an online provisioning and processing system for geospatial assets. It integrates and OSSIM processing engine with relational databases, OpenLayers, and other related web technologies. It is in very active development and is currently staging, indexing and processing large stores of data in prototype evaluations. This will be one of the main areas of focus in the upcoming year.

Areas for Improvement

We are still struggling with the incubation process and will make continual improvements until we get there. Improving communications, quality assurance, testing and build processes is a never ending challenge. We are always looking for ways to expand our community of interest and link up with other projects.

Opportunities to Help

The project is always looking for users, contributors, and testers. We are especially interested in working towards integration with other OSGeo projects. Over the last year we have refined APIs and interfaces to Java to help enable this.

Outlook for 2009

  • this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2008 :)

We have been working towards OSGeo incubation graduation for the last couple of years - brief flurries of activity followed by long periods of inactivity because everyone concerned is occupied with other things. I've recently picked up the task and am trying to address the final comments and reviews so we can get it before the OSGeo Incubator committee. Richard Gould has been our OSGeo mentor and we have been recommended for graduation. We are still trying to track down the status of some minor details and I've moved it up close to the top of my list so we can get everything accomplished.

OSSIM Incubation status: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSSIM_incubation_status

OSSIM Provenance reveiw: http://trac.osgeo.org/ossim/wiki/ossimprovenance

are places to look if you want to find out more.

The PSC tries to meet every one or two months and discuss the overall direction of the program. We are in initial discussions of pulling together ideas for refactoring towards an OSSIM 2.0 baseline.

Garrett Potts (RadiantBlue) and Norman Vine (RadiantBlue) are going to be focused on API and improvements to ossimPlanet for the next couple of months. Some of the improvements they are working on are a new dual queue elevation management system, an improved ossimPlanet API, new manipulators, and better support for overall annotation.

Dave Burken (SPADAC) has been the primary maintainer of the classified plugin for OSSIM. This plugin handles classified data sets and formats and is maintained at the SECRET level. It is used mostly within the US Defense community and a few coalition partners. This plugin has recently been upgraded and a new version was released for those that have access to it. It is open source within the appropriate security communities.

Bill Watkins (RadiantBlue) will be adding Community Sensor Model (CSM) support to the OSSIM baseline, this effort will also refactor some of the code within OSSIM to provide enhanced support for 3D models, LIDAR, and cleaner image to ground and ground to image transformations.

Scott Bortman (RadiantBlue) is focused on OMAR which is getting a lot of attention on several government projects. Omar integrates several open source technologies with an OSSIM processing engine to enable dynamic geospatial processing and viewing on the web. The system is currently indexing very large numbers of (10s of thousands) of geospatial data sets and UAV videos for searches, queries, playback and processing. Rodger Palko and Jeremy Filizetti from SMS Fed are actively supporting development and integration of the OMAR system.

We continue to get long term feedback and support from James Hopper at SAIC, the Optics team at Ball Aerospace (Vance Saunders and co), and the ORfeo toolbox (Jordi Inglada) - all users of OSSIM in their solutions. Also, would like to recognize Massimo Di Stefano from Italy, Bill Clark (Boeing), Phil Lipscomb (SAIC), and Adam Gurson and his crew from IAI for their support.

OSSIM is now being supported by a number of government agencies and international corporations. Many of these projects and customers prefer to remain anonymous, but they all are enthusiastically supporting the open source model and the project by funding key contributors and development efforts. Part of the mission of the OSSIM team is to prove that you can make a living working on open source projects and doing what you love.

As to those anonymous agencies and companies, Al, Willie, Vic, Tom, Martin, George, Jim, Glenn, Fritz, Terry and Sue - thanks for your continued support.

Quantum GIS

  • Contact name: Gary Sherman

Key Accomplishments

  • Two new versions of QGIS where released during 2008: 0.10 "Io" and 0.11 "Metis"
  • Python plugin repositories were established for both official and user-contributed plugins
  • By year end, the 1.0 "Kore" release branch had been established and the version was ready for packaging (release came in January 2009)
  • The addition of Python bindings has continued to prompt community contribution of plugins that extend QGIS in new an interesting ways
  • Paolo Cavallini was added to the Project Steering Committee and assumed the role of Financial/Marketing Advisor
  • QGIS was well represented at FOSS4G2008

Areas for Improvement

  • Packaging releases remains an area with room for improvement. Work is needed to streamline the process for releasing packages on all major platforms, with a specific need for:
    • Debian
    • Ubuntu
    • Windows

Opportunities to Help

  • QGIS is always looking for help in the form of translation, documentation, coding, and bug fixes.

Outlook for 2009

  • The 1.0 API will provide a stable platform for developing plugins and standalone applications based on the QGIS libraries.
  • Additional releases in the 1.x branch will improve the stability and include important bug fixes.
  • Work will continue on the next generation QGIS with new and interesting features and capabilities.

Google Summer of Code 2008 Report

  • Contact name: Wolf Bergenheim

Summary

OSGeo participated as an umbrella organisation for 11 OSGeo projects. OSGeo received 20 student slots. Most of these students completed their project either partially or completely. The goal for OSGeo is twofold: Gain new developers for the projects and produce new code.

About Google Summer of Code

Quoting the Google Summer of CodeTM 2009 site

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 students and 2500 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.


Projects involved

Ten (10) OSGeo projects were involved with GSoC. Together the mentors mentored 20 students. Most of the students were very successful in their projects. The projects involved were:

  1. GRASS
  2. GeoServer
  3. GeoTools
  4. uDig
  5. Mapbender
  6. GDAL
  7. OpenLayers
  8. OpenJUMP
  9. QGIS
  10. Laval University

A few students stayed on and became developers in their projects.

Areas for Improvement

  • More mentors for SoC would help to guarantee a better result.
  • Many students had problems with weekly reports. Ideally the mentors should help motivate the students in this area, Without a progress report it is impossible to gage how the project is going.
  • Participation in the Mentor Summit by two mentors would be good.
  • More communication between mentors would improve mentoring and the student experience.

Conclusion

Google Summer of Code for 2008 was a success for OSGeo. Although OSGeo did not participate in the Mentor Summit a lot of things were still learned on how to improve things. Hopefully 2009 will be as good or even better.

References

Local Chapter Reports

Africa Chapter

You could say that the major event in the life of the nascent Africa Local Chapter was hosting FOSS4G 2008. Although it’s not a formal local chapter (yet) the criteria for reaching that status are closer to being met. Around 250 new local ‘converts’ attended FOSS4G 2008 and while a BoF called at the conference to initiate formal local chapter proceedings was poorly attended we have enough on the OSGeo Africa list and enough local interest to forge ahead with the process. GISSA (the Geoinformation Society of South Africa, who co-hosted FOSS4G 2008)) has agreed to ‘host’ the OSGeo Local Chapter under its umbrella, so we already have the required infrastructure. We’ll continue calling ourselves the Africa chapter as the list has members from all over the continent, until splinter chapters start forming to cover sub-regions.

We held a very successful first training event: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/AfricaEvents29November2008 and more are planned around the country.

We also plan to organise an OSGeo presence at Africa GIS 2009 (www.africagis2009.org).

OSGeo Aust NZ Logo.png

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

Brazilian Chapter Report 2008

OSGeo BC - British Columbia Chapter

  • Contact name: Martin Kyle

Key Accomplishments

  • one meeting held in July 2008

Areas for Improvement

  • one meeting canceled in February 2008
  • more regular meetings needed

Opportunities to Help

  • volunteers for meeting presentations
  • suggestions for collaborative project

Outlook for 2009

  • some meetings, some presentations, some collaboration

California Chapter

  • Contact name: Landon Blake (AKA The Sunburned Surveyor)

Key Accomplishments

Areas for Improvement

  • Need to work at encouraging more participation.

Outlook for 2009

  • First chapter meeting will be held on February 21, 2009 in Davis, California.
  • Planned attendance & representation at several academic/industry conferences
  • Fundraising to support outreach activities

Cascadia Chapter Report 2008

  • Contact: Aaron Racicot

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Chapter Formation: We officially became an OSGeo Chapter at the

12/12/2008 OSGeo board meeting

  • Integrated existing Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source

(www.cugos.org) into Cascadia OSGeo Chapter

  • Held series of code sprints around the "Road Flaw" project -

http://roadflaw.activetools.org/

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT

  • Get a real website up and move away from Google Groups
  • Try to start moving physical location of monthly meeting to "guest

locations" to attract people from other locations

  • Integrate the CUGOS and OSGeo presence into more regional conferences

OPPORTUNITIES TO HELP

  • Website development
  • Engagement of more local and regional governments into the group

OUTLOOK FOR 2009

We have already planned a great presence at this year's Washington URISA conference (http://www.waurisa.org/conferences/2009_Conference_Index.html ) by hosting a workshop, booth and panel of talks within the program all focusing on Open Source

  • We intend to host a small regional mini-conference and hack fest in 2009
  • We have our eyes on fundraising to help support regional OSGeo efforts
  • We plan to partner with our regional friends in Portland via the PDX OSGIS

group (http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-osgis)

REMARKS

Although we were only officially approved as an OSGeo chapter 20 days before the end of 2008, we have been growing in member numbers as well as "on the ground" activities. As of March 2009 we have 119 members on our mailing list and maintain an attendance of 15-25 members at our monthly meetings. We have members from all aspects of the community and industry participating and look forward to continued growth in 2009. Special thanks to LizardTech for their continued support to OSGeo by providing the Cascadia chapter a monthly meeting space. Please spread the word... Cascadia OSGeo would love to see you at the next monthly meeting on the third Wednesday of every month in downtown Seattle! Sign up to the mailing list at http://www.cugos.org.

China Chapter

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name:
    • Pro.Chen: chenrg at lreis.ac.cn
    • Gao Ang: gaoang at lreis.ac.cn

Key Accomplishments

  • Enhanced OSGeo China Website (in Chinese language).
  • Promote local OSGeo activites every month at OSGeo China Event.
  • 4 local sponsors, ESRI China, 3SNews, Sun China ERI and InfoQ China.
  • Organized "Monthly OSGeo Lecture" at Institute of Geography, Chinese Academy of Science.
  • Bid for FOSS4G 2010 conference with 3 other cities.

Areas for Improvement

  • Give lectures at local universities and promote the reputation of OSGeo.
  • Provide technical help at OSGeo China mail alias for the OS GIS users in China.

Opportunities to Help

  • Launch local sponsorship, which could help us to keep regular activities and visible.
  • Contribute us translated materials of OSGeo.org pages.
  • Become sponsor of the China Chapter and support local activities in financial or event goods and materials.

Outlook for 2009

  • Enrich the local OSGeo China web site.
  • Organize off line activities and lectures for students and researchers.
  • Get more connect with other OSGeo local chapters.
  • Contributes to OSGeo event such as FOSS4G conference.
  • Organize annual local meeting.

The Finland Chapter bootstrapped itself in May 2008 by an email sent by me (Ari Jolma) to various channels. I did this as the organizers of the national GIS Expo had selected "Open Source" as the theme for the 2008 Expo that took place in September. We organized a presence and visibility for OSGeo on the Expo.

Currently we have 31 subscribers to the Finland list at lists.osgeo.org but the list is not very active.

The current plan and mode of operation is to work with the professional GIS association of Finland (ProGIS), which is quite active and organizes seminars twice a year. The topic of the ProGIS spring seminar 2009 is "Free software and GIS".

Francophone local chapter

  • Contact name: Yves Jacolin

Key Accomplishments

  • Géoévénement tradeshow 2008 : april 2008 (open source village, booth, conferences)
  • new board elected : june 2008
  • Legal association : august 2008
  • OSGeo Journal translation
  • IGN (France) - OSGeo-fr meeting : november 2008
  • Nomination of one Quebec local chapter representative as a member (in charge of the free software committee) of the OSGeo-fr board. It contributes to streghten relationships and collaboration with the Quebec local chapter.

Areas for Improvement

  • encourage people to contribute more to translation projects
  • create a marketing package and help people in organizing booth on events
  • attract additional contributors and project managers
  • improve communication in the francophone geospatial community

Opportunities to Help

  • help in translating QGIS documentation and OSGeo Journal: need for translators and proof readers
  • help in organizing OSGeo-fr booth on different events: OGRS 2009, Rencontre Sig la Lettre, Paris Capital du Libre, etc.
  • help in marketing duties: flyer, booth, OSGeo-fr website

Outlook for 2009

  • continue and achieve the set up of the legal association
  • work on new projets: doc translation, datas, etc.

German Language Chapter

  • Contact name: Georg Lösel
  • German Language Local Chapter: OSGeo-DACH

Key Accomplishments

the top 5-10 key items that the project or PSC accomplished this period

Web site: http://www.fossgis.de

  • Former GRASS-Anwender-Vereinigung e.V. (GAV) becomes FOSSGIS e.V. to emphazise the topic of the association
  • FOSSGIS e.V. becomes official German Language Local Chapter involving OSGeo People in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
  • establishment of an own server, to provide services for the community
  • establishment of a strong connection with the German language OpenStreetMap Community, which decided to cooperate with FOSSGIS e.V. instead of founding an own german association

Visibility at conferences and workshops:

Areas for Improvement

any weaknesses in process, software, management, etc. that you plan to address or recognise need some help

  • more acting people
  • support in organisation the annual FOSSGIS Konferenz (Conference Software)

Opportunities to Help

list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report

  • ...

Outlook for 2009

this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2008 :)

  • Hosting the annual FOSSGIS Conference, this year taking place in Hannover (17.-19.03.2009)
  • concept of restructuring and relaunch of the FreeGIS Project
  • Preparation of the 10th anniversary of GAV/FOSSGIS foundation (2000 - 2010)

Greek Language Chapter

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Dimitris Kotzinos
  • The OSGeo Greek Local Chapter was initiated only in November 2007. So we cannot really speak on accomplishments but we are mainly happy that the effort has received a lot of recognition and that the membership is growing (not heavily but steadily).

Key Accomplishments

  • Unfortunately this was a rather slow period due to the lack of intensive involvement of the chapter's initiators and the lack of more people to help.
  • A set of presentations about open source GIS were given at the last National GIS Conference (HellasGI2008), held on Dec 4 & 5, 2008 in Athens, Greece. There will be an effort to collect and publish these presentations collectively online.

Areas for Improvement

  • We still do not have the participation in OSGeo I expected when the effort was started about a year and a half ago. We need to intensify the efforts to increase the membership and the overall awareness.
  • We also need some more media catching events. We are happy to announce that on April 3rd of 2009 a joint event will take place between OGC, HellasGI and the Local OSGeo Chapter about "Interoperability in Geographic Information"

Opportunities to Help

  • In the future we will definitely need some speakers for national FOSS or just simple GIS events.
  • We would also like to demonstrate some cases of successful use of FOSS GIS by the public sector to local government officials.
  • We would like to plan some demo classes on FOSS GIS for students in universities and how these can be integrated in their curricula in order to show that we can achieve the exact same educational result.

Outlook for 2009

  • We are organizing a 1-day event in Athens on April 3rd, 2009 about "Interoperability in Geographic Information".
  • We also plan to organize a local web site (either standalone or as tightly integrated part of the OSGeo, this remains to be decided) that will provide access to free local data and translations of manuals of FOS software in the Greek Language.
  • We also plan to have at least one more special events, depending on availability and funding.
  • We would also be very interested in having the ability to apply for funding as a chapter/organization and we would like to seek help/information from other local chapters that do or plan to do the same.

OSGeo India

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Dr PS Roy

Key Accomplishments

The year 2008 for OSGeo India chapter can best be described as an extremely important and a landmark beginning. The chapter has now a legal stature as a not for profit society, aimed at furthering Open source geospatial goals and objectives. The chapter was formally registered as OSGeo-India in April 2008 with an officiating board consisting of four members and four office bearers. For further details see http://www.osgeo.in.

The year began with a vigorous attempt to reach out to geospatial community, administrators, students and a large number of stakeholders, by planning, organizing and conducting a series of workshops and training programmes in different parts of the country. A second major initiative was an attempt to mainstream use of the Open source geospatial tools for both desktop and web applications.

Workshops aimed at Capacity Building

Sri V Ravi Kumar, Joint Secretary, and Co- chair of the Events committee has taken a lead in conducting as many as eight workshops in North of India (Dehra Dun, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Roorkee, North East India (Shillong), West of India (Goa) and South of India (Visakhapatnam). The details of the workshops are at http://www.osgeo.org/journal/volume4. A similar effort was done with University of Hyderabad too.

In addition, Sponsored workshops by diffferent funding agencies were conducted at Rajahmundry (South India), and Pune (Western India). These are:

Rajahmundry Workshop

The workshop was held for five days for imparting training to officials of various line agencies in use of Open Jump in Rajahmundry. The workshop was part of an activity funded by Mr Vundavalli Arun Kumar, a law maker of India's Lower house, (Parliament) to help develop a GIS for the Rajahmundry Parliamentary constituency. This was followed by a half day programme in June 2008 to reach out to over three hundred officials of various line agencies of the East Godavari district, Heads of Administration, state law makers ( Members of Assembly), Students, Faculty and Vice Chancellor of the Adi Kavi Nannaya University as well.

Photos http://picasaweb.google.co.in/lh/sredir?uname=ravivundavalli&target=ALBUM&id=5322702651740277681&authkey=Gv1sRgCKnT8rKzrrCJrAE&feat=email

Rajahmundry GIS Project

A key activity of 2008 relates to Developing a GIS for Rajahmundry parliamentary constituency, funded by MP Sri V Aruna Kumar.

Wherein Masters students of Geoinformatics of local Adi Kavi Nannya University,　were trained for six months by staff of Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History to produce dissertations on various topics. The details are:

  • V.L.N. Ramalingeswara Rao - An open source gis for Rajahmundry parliamentary  constituency: with special emphasis on flood information system for rajahmundry urban local body
  • P.Symala Gowri - A utility information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • K.S.R.C. Murthy - Electricity information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • N.Ch.R.V.R Uday Kiran - Water information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • M.Sai Siva Kumar - A Health information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • K. Manohara Vamsi - Education information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • M.Kiran – Crime information system for Rajahmundry urban local body
  • N. Ravi Kumar - A Slum information system for Rajahmundry urban local body.

In addition, a student worked on OSSIM for his dissertation under the guidance of Dr KS Rajan, Treasurer of OSGeo and an Associate professor of International institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H).

Subsequently, using the above data sets, a sample web GIS application was developed with Google maps API both in English (http://www.wetlandsofindia.org/google/sample.htm) as well as in a local language, Telugu (www.wetlandsofindia.org/google/sample_te.htm).

Pune Workshop

The OSGeo-India chapter has conducted 3 day "Open Source Geo-spatial Tools" Workshop in Pune during August 28-30th, 2008. It was also supported by ISG Pune Chapter. The workshop was attended by -30- participants from University Of Pune, Symbiosis Institute of Geoinformatics, CDAC. All the participants were conversant with Proprietary GIS software and were eager to acquaint with FOSS alternatives. The 1st day included the inaugural Address on “NSDI for Development” by Maj. Gen. Dr R.Sivakumar, CEO, NSDI - Chief Guest and later the speeches by G.H.Rao,NRSC, Dr. Ravikumar V,GSI, P.G.Diwakar, ISRO Bangalore on Open Source GIS technology. The afternoon session included demonstration and hands-on practice with OpenJUMP GIS and map composition through Inkscape. The 2nd day was devoted to ILWIS GIS through raster analysis and Web Mapping Applications using Google Maps API and GeoServer. The 3rd day was for using UNM MapServer/ for Web GIS. The participants were shown how one can join the OSGeo as a member and help spread the awareness. The resource persons were from Geological Survey of India, Salim Ali Centre For Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), NRSC, IIIT-H etc.

Ahmedabad Workshop

The OSGeo-India chapter has conducted 1 day "Open Source GIS – Breaking the Barriers" Workshop in XXVIII INCA International Congress for “COLLABORATIVE MAPPING & SPACE TECHNOLOGY” held at Gandhinagar, Gujrat during November 4-6, 2008. The workshop was attended by -10- participants from SAC, ISRO, BISAG, CEPT University and Indian Army. The morning session of the day included demonstration and hands-on practice with OpenJUMP GIS and map composition through Inkscape which was conducted by Dr. K.S. Rajan, IIIT, Hyderabad. The afternoon session of the day was devoted to developing the WebGIS applications using Google Maps Api and Geoserver which was conducted by Santosh Gaikwad, SACON, Hyderabad. The participants were shown how to make use of Open Source GIS tools.

Cochin workshop

A half day workshop was conducted at the National FOSS meeting at Cochin University of Science and Technology on 16 Nov. Dr. S Narendra Prasad, Secretary Osgeo and Ms K Anitha ,Research student presented Open source GIS applications including web GIS using Open source geospatial tools for Rajahmundry and Attapadi respectively. A paper on Engaging Web for better administration was published in GIS India, Dec 08 issue by S Narendra Prasad, coathoured with Santosh Gaikwad and KS Rajan. For details: http://www.gisdevelopment.net/magazine/global/2008/december/50.htm

OSGeo-India's presentation at FOSS4G2008 Capetown Republic of South Africa

The annual event FOSS4G2008 was held between 29th September 2008 to 3rd October 2008. On behalf of OSGeo India chapter a presentation, 'Modus Operandi of a FOSS GIS project in India', by V. Ravi Kumar, Sreenivas N Rao, Narendra S Prasad was presented on 30th September 2008, by V.Ravi Kumar, Joint Secretary and Co-Chairman Events. Abstract and the presentation are available at http://conference.osgeo.org/index.php/foss4g/2008/paper/view/30

A link to photos at the event --http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ravivundavalli?feat=email--

Areas for Improvement

  • The participation by geospatial community in use and adoption of Osgeo tools is still in a miniscule proportion. There is a scope for diffusion of these tools and technologies in various IT related academia, service sectors of Government and private agencies
  • Perhaps more involvement of geospatial groups and associations such as Indian Society of Remote Sensing, Indian Society of Geomatics, Indian National Cartographic Association , will help the cause
  • There is a scope for taking up projects to be funded by various organizations such as Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, to broad base adoption and use of these technologies.
  • There is an urgent need to have a dedicated and trained team to serve as resource group to reach out.

Opportunities to help

More participation by Geospatial resource persons is welcome. Can contact osgeo officials at www.osgeo.in

We are planning to have a national level Osgeo event in late 2009. Volunteers can help. Volunteers can contact thru www.osgeo.in

Outlook for 2009

We plan to have four outreach workshops in different areas of the country and for different agencies. We would like to customise various applications developing training manuals using data sets of user interest.

We would like to promote use of osgeo tools on Linux platforms- especially a debian version such as Ubuntu and BOSS, a Linux version developed by CDAC, India

Israel Chapter Report 2008

Italian Chapter

Key Accomplishments

  • substantial grassroots activities (with 20 events in one year, mostly in Northern and Central Italy)
  • First edition of the GFOSS day held in Pontedera in November (130 participants). The event does not replace the traditional GRASS/GFOSS meeting, typically held in the first months of the year with a focus on research & development and a strong participation of the academic community.
  • media coverage, with presence in radio and magazines.
  • increase in registered members
  • Formal action towards the National Statistics Institute, in response to a tender which presented issues in the possibility of proposing FOSS solutions. This action is being conducted with the support of ASSOLI, another association for the promotion of free software.
  • ECDL GIS: preparation of a test for GIS certification, based on QGIS, for the ECDL Foundation
  • substantial support to the OpenStreetMap project in the first part of 2008 (January-July)
  • liaison to other organizations and institutions (OpenStreetMap, Italian PostgreSQL user group)
  • election of new board (February)

Areas for Improvement

  • OSGEO liaison can be further consolidated (new liaison officer appointed in Feb 2009)
  • some administrative issues still to be cleared

Opportunities to Help

  • not immediately identified. Stay tuned for announcements from our community on the OSGEO mailing lists.

Outlook for 2009

  • Hackmeetings are in the process of being planned. We expect to hold one or two events during 2009.
  • Second edition of the GFOSS day to be held in Bolzano, 11 Nov 2009
  • Interest in providing additional momentum in Italy, and in connection with other European chapters, towards FOSS4G 2010

Japan Chapter

  • Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2008
  • Contact name: Toru Mori

Key Accomplishments

  • Held the 3rd annual conference in November in Tokyo and Osaka, attended 150 active people. Invited Jeff McKenna to give them a speech and promoted OSGeo and its community. Christopher Schmidt and Claude Philipona gave speech.
  • Enhanced local website (in Japanese language).
  • 5 local sponsors, Osaka-city Univercity, Autodesk Japan, Ouyougijyutsu, Mapconcielge and Orkney.
  • Organized "Osaka mini event", invited Helena Mitasova of North Carolina State University, Hiroshi Miura of OpenStreetMap Japan and local geospatial reserchers at Osaka-city University, Osaka in May 2008.
  • Promoted OSGeo activities at GeoMedia Sumitt in Tokyo (December 2008).
  • Organized local board committee consists of 11 most active members.

Areas for Improvement

  • Launched local sponsorship, which enabled us to keep regular activities and visible.

Opportunities to Help

  • Join and express your opinions to our local mailing lists.
  • Contribute us translated materials of OSGeo.org pages.
  • Become sponsor of the Japan Chapter and support local activities in financial.

Outlook for 2009

  • Enrich the local OSGeo web site.
  • 4rd annual conference (currently scheduled in November).
  • Organize off line activities such as face to face meetings and beer parties!

Korean Language Local Chapter

Key Accomplishments

Areas for Improvement

  • OSGeo & FOSS4G are not so well-known to Korean GIS community still yet.
  • Most of our works were done by small key-persons.
  • We are not a legal entity.

Opportunities to Help

  • Successful case of FOSS4G implementations will be warmly welcomed especially in the government area.
  • Need help in translating many materials to Korean.

Outlook for 2009

  • Regular Meeting(March, June, October - FOSS4G2009:Sydney, December). We are now discussing the joint conference with other major GIS society in Korea to promote FOSS4G & OSGeo.
  • Attend GIS Conference as a exhibitor to promote our activities, OSGeo and FOSS4G.
  • Preparing legal entity regsistration

New Mexico OSGeo Chapter

  • Annual Report: Jan-Dec 2007
  • Contact Name: Zack Stauber

Key Accomplishments

Areas for Improvement

  • Still getting chapter website/SVN repository off the ground
  • Need to recruit more members
  • Need to raise awareness of OS applications used by well-known local businesses, utilities, government agencies

Opportunities to Help

  • Once SVN repository is off the ground a member could make a template for project pages, one project per web page
  • Members can upload their own scripts and utilities that to have a home for distribution

Outlook for 2009

  • Definitely going to offer Metadata Manipulator and several other utilities for download on website
  • Will attempt to regularize meetings monthly or bimonthly starting in summer

Ottawa Chapter

Key Accomplishments

  • held semi-regular to regular meetings (depending on season), which included presentations to share experience in particular projects/software, and social/networking to learn what others are doing, job opportunities, opinions on where the community is going, etc
  • WIDE range of participants, including programmers, users, experts, novices, educators, students, program managers, people from government, non-profits, large and small firms; we're encouraged that we continue to attract a trickle of new people coming out
  • presentations and discussions exposed the community to developments in OSGEO/FOSS4G overall projects, including the experiences of attendees to the FOSS4G conference in South Africa, Open Source Boot Camp, and GIS Day events; specific theme presentations on OGC Simple Features, and a new Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada web mapping application
  • booth presence at the GIS Day event at Carleton University, and significant participation in Open Source Boot Camp 6 (Geospatial)
  • local chapter's mailing list traffic really picked up this year in terms of sharing variety of useful information

Areas for Improvement

  • keeping momentum going to have regular meetings is occasionally challenging, but we're still plugging away...

Opportunities to Help

  • In July we transitioned to new people responsible for booking and chairing the meetings ( Scott Mitchell and Phil Vachon), but may need new volunteer(s) again when Scott goes on sabbatical in 2009 (I'll be out of town more than usual)

Outlook for 2009

  • we have official confirmation that we're welcome to use the flat panel display recently installed in the Fox back room. No more carrying screens and projectors around! So all ideas and volunteers for new presentations are very welcome, and it's even easier / hassle free than before. Remember, we're a friendly group!
  • also successfully tried out Frank's suggested model of getting everyone around the table to introduce themselves (as needed) and then give a quick summary of whatever issue/challenge/interesting tidbit related to OSGEO-related work is currently on their mind; it's a good way of getting relevant discussion and potentially very useful feedback, especially at meetings that don't have any formal presentations

Project Name

Key Accomplishments

  • Chapter Formation
    • 14 Nov 2008 -- Letter of intent sent to the OSGeo Board concerning the creation of the Poland Chapter
    • 19 Nov 2008 -- Letter of intent forwarded to the OSGeo-Board List
    • 09 Jan 2009 -- Poland Chapter approved
  • Web site

Areas for Improvement

  • Accept new members

Opportunities to Help

  • Welcome more people for translation projects
    • OSGeo documentation
    • OSS localizations

Outlook for 2009

  • Chapter meetings and workshops
  • New projects: doc translation, datas, etc.

Quebec Local Chapter

  • Contact name: Daniel Morissette

Key Accomplishments

  • 2008 was the year of the creation of the chapter. We went from a few ideas exchanged at the GeoEvenement in Paris in April to official chapter status at the November 14th board meeting
  • A first meeting was held in June to gauge interest. There was indeed lots of interest: the Reflexions Quebec meeting attracted 42 participants.
  • The Quebec Portal has been created in the OSGeo wiki
  • We established the Quebec Chapter Steering Committee
  • A first "5 à 7" took place in Quebec City on August 29th and attracted about 20 participants
  • A second "5 à 7" was held in Magog on November 6th and attracted over 40 participants
  • Publication (| article, presentation, etc.) on OSGeo-qc and accomplishment/application of open source GIS in the community
  • Presence of OSGeo-qc representatives at GeoCamp 2008, CLLAP 2008 and at a round table on open source geospatial technologies organised by Laval University and AFiGéo
  • Presentation at CIT-S (see Activities of the Quebec local chapter for further details in French)
  • Nomination of one Quebec Chapter representative (Dr. Thierry Badard) as a member (in charge of the free software committee) of the OSGeo-fr board

Areas for Improvement

  • We need to keep the momentum, there is growing interest for Open Source Geospatial software (and data) in Quebec, we should take advantage of that.
  • We need to expand the network by attracting more professionals from the provincial/municipal government and university/CEGEP community
  • We need to work on our objective of maintaining a strong link with the Francophone chapter, and get the Quebec chapter participants to also participate the Francophone community
  • We need to work on our objective of maintaining a strong relationship with other north-american local chapters (Ottawa, BC, US chapters, ...) for the organization of canadian or north-american activities or events

Opportunities to Help

  • Share your success stories in the Quebec Chapter Portal
  • Participate in the local "5 à 7" meetings
  • Present your OSGeo-related project to your peers in a future Quebec Chapter activity
  • Spread the word about OSGeo and the Quebec chapter in your own community
  • Help with the translation efforts of the Francophone Chapter

Outlook for 2009

  • More local meetings (5 à 7) to come in 2009! The first one is planned for March 19th in Trois-Rivières
  • Presence in some GIS events in the province of Quebec and outside the province, starting with an OSGeo stream in the AGMQ Conference of April 30th and the participation to GeoCamp 2009

Romanian Local Chapter

Key Accomplishments

  • Visibility at conferences and workshops:
    • 30-31 May 2008: a general presentation of geo-spatial.org, Romanian in formation chapter and OSGeo was done at the "International Symposium on Technical Geography", in Cluj Napoca - Romania.
    • 16-19 June 2008: a poster with geo-spatial.org activities was presented at the "Evaluating Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) for Environmental Applications" workshop, organized by FP6 CASCADOSS project consortium (http://cascadoss.eu/), in Warsaw - Poland.
    • 24-25 September 2008: general presentation at 16th GIS Users Conference, Iasi - Romania.
    • 11-12 December 2008: general presentation at the "Technologies for the consolidation of the national spatial data infrastructure" conference (http://sdi08.rosa.ro/) held in Bucharest.
  • Meetings:
    • 28 February 2008: meeting in a pub. 17 attendees. City: Bucharest. Details and photos at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=240
    • 30 May 2008: meeting in a pub. 7 attendees. City: Cluj Napoca.
    • 25 September 2008: meeting at the Faculty of Geography - University of Bucharest. Presentations on open source software use (VTP, OpenLayers, Geoserver, PostGIS, Geonetwork, LeoWorks) and free talks. 21 attendees. Photos and details at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=241.
    • 23 October: meeting at the Faculty of Geography - University Alexandru Ioan Cuza. 35 attendees. City: Iasi. Practical introductions to open source webmapping software (OpenLayers, Geoserver), OpenStreetMap Romania presentation and live demos, free talks. Details and photos at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=242.
    • 13-14 December: first real "hands on" workshop on webmapping. 13 attendees. City: Brasov. Details and photos at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=243.
  • Open letter
    • An open letter, signed by 39 GIS users, was sent to the Romanian National Mapping Agency (http://ancpi.ro), asking to support us in replacing the existing transformations between the Romanian coordinate systems and WGS84 in EPSG tables with more accurate (and public) ones. The answer was positive (http://earth.unibuc.ro/articole/raspuns-petitie-ancpi_new) and the new transformations were approved by EPSG board.
  • Translations
    • The important sections on www.osgeo.org were translated to Romanian an published on http://earth.unibuc.ro/osgeo. The translation will be soon moved to osgeo.org.

Areas for Improvement

  • Present the FOSS benefits to companies involved in the geospatial business here in Romania

Opportunities to Help

Outlook for 2009

  • In partnership with the Faculty of Geography - University Babes - Bolyai, Cluj Napoca, we are organizing an seminar on free and open source geospatial solutions. The event will take place between 3-4 of April 2009 and will be hosted by the Faculty of Geography, in Cluj Napoca. The event consist in general presentations and "hands on" workshops. Four type of workshops are planned: webmapping (using Geoserver, PostGIS, OpenLayers, Geonetwork), 3D visualization (using VTP), geomorphological analysis (using SAGA GIS), satellite image processing (using LeoWorks). Seats are available for 30 persons at each workshop. The complete program can be downloaded at http://earth.unibuc.ro/file_download/24339. Other details will be available at http://earth.unibuc.ro/index.php?id=244.
  • Regular meetings during the whole year
  • Become an official local chapter
  • Publish more articles and datasets on geo-spatial.org

South America Chapter Report 2008

Spanish Local Chapter

Key Accomplishments

  • Presenting OSGeo-es at Valencia, Spain, Dec. 2008, at Jornadas gvSIG and at La Habana, Cuba, Feb. 2009, at Informatica 2009.
  • Writing most of the "reglamento"
  • Supporting Libro SIG (the Free GIS Book)
  • Supporting the candidature of Barcelona for FOSS4G2010
  • Shared educational materials on GIS with Free Software.

Areas for Improvement

  • our key initiative (Libro SIG, sharing educational materials) would strongly boost with some sponsoring from interested entities as local governaments or institutions.
  • community support to common initiatives is still under-expressed.

Opportunities to Help

  • list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report
  • Free GIS Book -> help in editing materials in Latex, revisioning contents, sponsoring.
  • Shared educational material -> help in editing materials in Latex, revisioning contents, sponsoring.

Outlook for 2009

  • spread visibility all over latin countries
  • present our initiatives in more key events
  • creating committees

Taiwan Chapter Report 2008

Template:Thailand Chapter Report 2008

Twin Cities Chapter Annual Report 2008

UK Local Chapter

Key Accomplishments

  • Although the chapter was first mentioned in 2006, this was the first year that we started to really do something with it.
  • Mainly through presenting at various conferences, seminars and workshops, membership increased from a notional 3 to approx 50.

Areas for Improvement

  • We need to improve our web presence, and are working towards this by arranging pages on the main OSGeo website.
  • We need to produce printed literature supporting the OSGeo cause and that of the local chapter.
  • We need to keep the momentum going and continue to raise the profile of the group.

Opportunities to Help

  • Sign up at the wiki and come to the conference in June 2009!
  • Identify opportunities for the chapter members to meet up, or present on OSGeo.
  • Help find case studies on succesful transitions to, or use cases for, open source GIS.

Outlook for 2009

  • Official recognition for the chapter (in January 2009)
  • The first UK open source GIS conference, in Nottingham, on 22nd June 2009, in conjunction with the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Science! This should be a great day, with lots of really interesting presentations and workshops.
  • Continuing efforts to raise the profile of open source GIS as a viable alternative for individuals, academics and business use, particularly in the light of the UK government's pledge to use more open source software.

Sponsors (2008)

1Spatial

  • Contact: Steven Ramage

We are possibly not the most obvious supporter of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation since 1Spatial is a commercial organisation selling our own software solutions and services. However, we have invested significantly in using the Feature Data Object (FDO) open source Application Programming Interface (API). We have also worked hard to promote our work in this area using FDO as a data access bridge, for example in our Radius Studio Practitioner Programme and with customers like MidCoast Water in Australia and Transport for London in the UK. We also released a FOSS tool to the community. It allows for simple and efficient management of growing volumes of geospatial data in mainstream databases. This tool enables the management of geospatial data in relational databases, such as Oracle9i, 10g and 11g and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Once again we participated in the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, held last year in Cape Town, South Africa. Crispin Hoult, Managing Consultant at 1Spatial, gave a presentation entitled 'CAD-GIS Integration: Achieving Commercial Reality with Open Source Solutions'. The presentation explored the practical use and exploitation of FDO beyond the Open Source community boundaries. With specific reference to the CAD-GIS integration problem where 1Spatial has used FDO to build data bridges, integrate geospatial data and to also facilitate the convergence of CAD and GIS data sources. This presentation discussed the use of free and open source software (FOSS) with proprietary software (AutoCAD) to achieve greater geospatial collaboration.

In our example FOSS has been married to existing technology and business processes and it was shown that real values could be placed on such a hybrid solution. The example highlighted how such a low-risk, low-cost solution has been developed around FDO. It provides geospatial access to potentially millions of geospatial data users that could otherwise be alienated from corporate geospatial datasets by virtue of their legacy software investment and productivity tool needs.

This was illustrated with a case study from a national utility in the UK. Having commissioned a corporate geospatial solution they found that the drawing office was not considered in the geospatial systems implementation and only an FDO-based platform provided the cost-point and timescales to meet their data access needs.

The growth of OSGeo local chapters all over the World is very encouraging. As an organisation involved in the Open Geospatial Consortium since 1996, we were also very pleased and encouraged to see the news announcement about the joint Memorandum of Understanding, to coordinate open geospatial standards and open source geospatial software and data. 2009 holds some exciting developments in store and we are pleased to continue as an Associate Sponsor.

Although we are a commercial enterprise we work in the UK Public Sector, which has long had an interest in Open Source software technologies. Our software works hand in hand with a number of Open Source software components, so we tend to see our solutions as hybrids.

The UK Government recently came out strongly in favour of Open Source software and published a report and action plan to increase the pace of adoption, ... a real shot in the arm.

http://tinyurl.com/bdujro or http://tinyurl.com/cgoozu

The good news is that this can only help foster further adoption of Open Source, hybrid or otherwise. In the past year we have had considerable success and our platform is in use with over twenty UK Local Authorities and one Police Force.

The iShare data integration and publishing platform enables a local authority to make the most of its own data, extracting it, transforming it and publishing it both internally and externally. It can serve the call centre through CRM integration and citizens through a rich mix of information, maps and transactional services on an authority’s website.

In many cases the adoption of MapServer and Postgres/PostGIS has happened despite the prevalence of MapInfo or ESRI at a particular authority. It is the cost/benefit balance combined with customers wanting a complete solution, not a piece of technology, that wins through every time.

So there you have it widespread acceptance of Open Source technology running at the very heart of our solutions. In 2008 our deployment for South Tyneside Council won the NLPG Exemplar Award for Best Business Process Transformation and in the SOCITM ‘Better Connected’ 2009 survey three of our sites were in the top twenty. We can’t think of a better endorsement than that.

Autodesk

Throughout 2008, Autodesk was proud to maintain our strong support for the OSGeo community through active development of the MapGuide Open Source and FDO projects, the contribution of new technology such as CS Map, and our sustaining sponsorship of the Foundation.

MapGuide Open Source is becoming an even more mature and open platform for developing sophisticated web-mapping applications thanks to community-driven technology integration with Fusion, OpenLayers, and MapGuide Maestro. We also welcomed CamptoCamp’s support in developing the first MapGuide Open Source Live CD.

We are also especially pleased to see FDO Open Source playing a significant role democratizing access to information. Development around FDO providers grew at a rapid pace, with new ones created for KML, Microsoft® SQL Server Spatial® 2008, IBM® Informix Dynamic Server, SuperMap, PostGIS, SQLite and GE® Smallworld.

In August 2008, we announced donation of source code for the CS-Map coordinate system technology to the OSGeo community. Making CS-Map open source allows open collaboration between CS-Map, PROJ.4, and other open source coordinate libraries under the MetaCRS project. We thank Norm Olsen for his continued efforts and the MetaCRS community for coming together around this technology.

Lastly, we congratulate OSGeo on holding a vibrant and dynamic FOSS4G 2008 conference in Cape Town, South Africa, and for promoting open source geospatial software as an important option for developing nations and the region.

On the code side, 2008 was quite an active one for us. First, we plunged head first in the Openlayers world in a bid to replace our current web mapping platform. Our "UI" forays led us into using MapFish and now GeoExt (well, we're following that project for now) and we plan to release a JavaScript web mapping engine for our information system soon. Borealis has been using MapServer and PostGIS for a few years now, but 2008 was also an opportunity for us to experiment with other pieces of very interesting software like GeoServer, FeatureServer and MapFish Server.

On the community side, Borealis became an OSGeo Associate Sponsor in 2008 and we were thrilled enough by that move that we went on to help create the Québec local chapter of OSGeo, which was officially launched late in 2008. We organized the second OSGeo-qc informal "beer and talk" meeting in Magog, our corporate home, and it was a big success. Another informal OSGeo-qc meeting was organized in Trois-Rivières in March 2009 and it looks like OSGeo-qc will be thriving in the coming months, something we're quite happy about.

For the third consecutive year, Borealis attended the FOSS4G conference in 2008. For the first time though we had a commercial booth. As a provider of geospatial data management and integration services to the mining, oil & gas and energy industries, we found the booth handy as a meeting place with the many interested parties we met in Cape Town. Our roots in the FOSS geospatial community are now deep enough that we feel we are ready for a more tangible commitment to the community. We are considering giving a presentation at FOSS4G 2009 and maybe even some code we're cooking will find its way back into some of the OSGeo projects. We're looking forward to continuing our commitment to OSGeo and help provide geospatial FOSS solutions that meet the highest expectations.

Camptocamp - The Open Source Base Camp

  • Contact name: Claude Philipona


Based in Switzerland and France, Camptocamp is an active editor and integrator of Open Source software specializing in Geospatial solutions, Business solutions and Infrastructure solutions. Our company offers a complete software service package including R&D, consulting, customized project development, training (certified training institution) and support. Our team consists of highly qualified and quality-driven professionals, who inspire, master and challenge Open Source solutions.

The involvement of Camptocamp and its employees in the development of Open Source projects is a constant commitment. As a company, we strive to make a difference by contributing to Open Source key communities and our engineers are committers and/or members of several projects committees (GeoExt, GeoNetwork, PostGIS, MapFish, MapServer, OpenLayers, Spatial Data Integrator, and Udig, to name a few).

Key Accomplishments

Throughout 2008, Camptocamp was pleased to witness the growing interest in MapFish by the community of users and developers. Subsequently, the MapFish community applied for the OSGeo incubation in September 2008. In collaboration with OpenGeo, Camptocamp also initiated the GeoExt project in order to offer a standardized library for ExtJs-based GeoWidget. This project has experienced swift success and is garnering great interest within the geospatial community.

Several large customer projects started -or were completed- by our teams in 2008, providing the opportunity to improve and extend several pieces of software, undeniably bringing significant contributions to Open Source software such as GeoNetwork. The most relevant projects were: 1) GeoCat.ch II: the development of the next generation geospatial catalog on behalf of the Swiss government, in collaboration with Geocat B.V and the BRGM, 2) GeoNetwork: used for the GeoSource project, a metadata catalog for local government agencies, built in collaboration with the BRGM.

Another important accomplishment for Camptocamp in 2008 was the development of a customized spatial data infrastructure solution on behalf of the UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency), using several Open Source components (Spatial Data Integrator, MapFish/OpenLayers, GeoNetwork) and enabling the integrated management of geographical information for camp mapping and UNHCR data.

Seminars, workshops, training sessions and demo events to promote the use of Open Source geoinformatics in GIS projects are regularly organized in France and Switzerland by our team of experts. Camptocamp is proud to support collaborative developments of open geospatial technologies and to be an active player in the promotion of OSGeo and FOSS in Europe. With OSGeo Francophone chapter, we organized the Open Source Village at the Geo Evènement conference in Paris, France. Our company is also a loyal participant to several national and international conferences as an exhibitor and/or a speaker.

Camptocamp believes that the synergies and joint efforts within the OSGeo to built community-led projects are great opportunities to show that high-quality Open Source GIS tools can be developed by all and be available to all.

FirstBaseSolutions Report 2008

GeoCat Report 2008

French Geoportal

  • Contact name: Didier Richard
First draft for the Annual Report - Still needs to be re-read by IGNF people.

Key Accomplishments

IGN France is the Mapping Agency of France, in charge of acquiring, maintening and delivering reference datasets for France mainland and overseas territories.

Launched in november 2006, the French Geoportal project (See [8]) aimed at :

  • providing a 2D/3D integrated viewer of French datasets ;
  • enabling access to these datasets through an API ;
  • downloading of datasets ;
  • many more objectives ...

Project news can be found over there : [9]

Most, but not all, of the software components for the Geoportal project comes from the Open Source Community :

  • Vector datasets (more than 10 millions of objects) are stored in postgreSQL/postGIS databases;
  • Image datasets (more than 10 tera-bytes of data) are tiled to be served by a TMS like service.

The API is based on OpenLayers and has been released in April, the 25th 2008. The chosen licence is BSD. It uses a key for giving access to datasets. See the API web site for more information : [10].

In July 2008, IGN France became of sponsor of OSGeo. In September 2008, we have been participating to FOSS4G in Cap Town. In the end of 2008, IGNF and the OSGeo french-spoken local chapter met in order to ease collaboration between the two organisations. As a matter of fact, using Open Source components has drove IGN France to enhance and participate in debugging those components more actively than before :

  • PROJ4 : addition of IGNF catalogue of CRS, generalization of plate-carre projection and addition of Gauss-Schreiber projection (all inputs have also been pushed to PROJ4JS);
  • GDAL/OGR : mainly addition of a new vector driver (Geoconcept Export) and amendments to support changes made to PROJ4;
  • Geotools : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch sent to Geotools's referencing developer;
  • GeoServer : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch not yet sent, on-going french translation contribution;
  • MapServer : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch sent to MapServer trac [11];
  • OpenLayers : the API is built on top of OpenLayers. We have made a lot of developments, but we cannot contribute to the project because of the CLA and legal international outcomes.

Areas for Improvement

The overall Geoportal process is quite cumbersome and a lot of improvements are in our 2009 TODO list :

  • improve speed when computing the tiles cache : we have started rewritting the warping engine of GDAL. As soon as it is stable enough, it will be handed over to the GDAL/OGR project for assessment;
  • improve WMS speed for vector datasets : we have made benchmarks for serving vector datasets through Geoserver. We have to find out ways of tuning it correctly in order to conform with INSPIRE (European legal framework - See [12]);
  • find a way for serving raster datasets with WMS/WCS : still the key issue is performance !
  • try to have one CLA (CCLA and ICLA) for all OSGeo projects to facilitate contributions of organisations like IGNF (Governmental Agency).

Opportunities to Help

Mainly, we will need help for having a common CLA for OSGeo projects.

Besides this main area, technical issues will be solve by direclty talking to OSGeo projects teams.

Outlook for 2009

This project is a 5 year project. 2009 will be the year for consolidating the infrastructure and collecting requirements for the next 5 year project ...

INPE Report 2008

2008 was a good year for Ingres' Geospatial project. For those that are not familiar, Ingres was one of the first RDBMSs to add spatial support. The work was contracted and unfortunately though Ingres owned the rights to distribute the binaries, it did not own rights to distribute the code. This fact, combined with new industry standards created motivation for our geospatial project.

In 2008, we completed work to implement the 2D point data type in our new project. As well, we contributed updates to the GEOS project to fix some bugs and improve thread safety. One of our developers, Charles Thibert, is now a GEOS committer.

In 2009, we look forward to completing the first phase of our geospatial project and providing OGC Simple Feature Specification 1.1 compliance. We would like to thank the community for their support and interest, and thank OSGeo for nurturing a great community and ecosystem.

Thank you.

Andrew Ross

Director, Engineering

Ingres

LizardTech is happy to continue to be a sponsor and supporter of OSGeo. We rely on a number of open source libraries in our products, which allows our developers to focus on the things we are experts at -- while resting assured that all the stuff we aren't experts at is being well taken care of.

PCI Geomatics

PCI Geomatics is a world leading developer of hardware/software systems for geo-imaging solutions. Since 1982, we have specialized in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis, cartographic production, automated production systems, image management and on demand mapping solutions. Our advanced systems address a wide variety of industry applications including the environment, agriculture, security and intelligence, aerospace & defense, and satellite receiving stations.

PCI Geomatics regards OSGeo to be beneficial to the geomatics industry and became an Associate Sponsor in 2008. In addition, PCI Geomatics also participated as a Silver Sponsor at the OSBootCamp event in June, at Carleton University in Ottawa.

"PCI Geomatics uses a number of open source tools and software in its development process. We do this because our programmers often know the tools and the software that is made available for specific applications is usually the best. PCI Geomatics has frequently contributed to the open source community and will continue to do so. We believe OSGeo is the appropriate geospatial organization to work with and they have a strong local (Ottawa) presence."

Due to our activities and involvement with OSGeo, PCI Geomatics has contracted Frank Warmerdam to create an Open Source implementation of its PCIDSK file format with eventual inclusions into GDAL. The PCIDSK implementation will be both 32 and 64 bit implementation, provide read/write access to all data types and multi data, as well as provide thread safe asynchronous access to raster data.

We look forward to a continued relationship in 2009.

WhereGroup Report 2008

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