GWF2013 program

Tentative program for Geospatial World Forum 2013
Intro: For this years OSGeo track on GWF we looked for an optimal blend of succesfull opensource usecases and some substantive talks to enlarge insight in business concepts around open source software in the geospatial sector. You'll notice there is a slight focus on metadata use. Since metadata is one of the major players in making geospatial data accessible. And data is what we've seen a lot of last year. About every week some country or city announced a new open data portal. And a vast amount of open data is location oriented. Providing new opportunities for Enterprizes to create appealling apps.

This is the tentative program as will be published in preliminary materials. Feel free to comment if you have any ideas (or missing important subjects/persons)

11:30-13:00 - Session 1
 * Paul van Genuchten (Geocat)
 * Chris van Lith (B3P)
 * Marjan Bevelander (IPO)
 * Claude Philipona (Camp to Camp)

13:00-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-16:00 - Session 2
 * Markus Neteler (FEM - Grass)
 * Andrew Ross (Eclipse - locationtech)
 * Arnulf Christl (Metaspatial)
 * Hannes Reuter (Isric)
 * Just vd Broecke (Osgeo.nl)

Markus Neteler

Markus Neteler received his degree in Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology from the University of Hannover, Germany, in 1999 where he worked as a researcher and teaching assistant for two years. From 2001-2007, he was a researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) (formerly ITC-irst), Trento, Italy. In the period 2005-2007, while preserving the work of FBK researcher, he worked as the same figure for the Centro di Ecologia Alpina of Trento (Italy). Since 2008, he works at the Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM) - San Michele all'Adige (Trento, Italy), as the coordinator of the GIS and Remote Sensing unit. His main interests are remote sensing for environmental risk assessment and Free Software GIS development, especially GRASS GIS (of which he is the coordinator since 1999). He is co-author of two books on the use of the free software GRASS GIS and several scientific papers on GIS.

Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross is director of Ecosystems at the Eclipse Foundation, Inc and President of the Free and Open Source Learning Centre. Before he worked as an instructor at Carleton University and as Director of Engineering at Ingres.

Abstract:

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), modeled loosely on the Apache Foundation, was founded in March, 2006. The OSGEO has been incredibly successful and has grown rapidly to support 25 or so projects, some in incubation, 20 chapters worldwide, and a national conference, FOSS4G, which last year in Denver attracted about 900 participants.One of the most important developments in open source software is the rise of the open source foundation driven by a several needs, among which one of the most important is the need for corporate engagement. These non profit legal entities offer projects important benefits that are difficult for a project to fund on its own including providing a host for managing fiscal and intellectual property shared resources such as trademarks and shared copyrights, governance, and a liability firewall for community participants. These foundation encourage trust in the long term stability of the projects they support and, most importantly for enterprise software, they encourage corporate participation. A number of people advocating for open source geospatial software have seen the need for services and facilitates to enable corporate engagement. The Eclipse Foundation provides services to reduce friction for organizations to re-use and contribute to open source projects. This supports business developing products and services that depend upon open source and in turn, the open source projects benefit from re-use, investment, and increased credibility. Based on this thinking the Eclipse Foundation with a team of representatives from notable companies and open source projects has initiated what is now officially known as the Eclipse Foundation LocationTech Working Group along. The LocationTech Working Group is intended to complement the important role the OSGEO and to fill an important gap in the enterprise geospatial market and provide benefits to the broader open source community. In this presentation the motivation for, business benefits, and an overview of the structure of the LocationTech Working Group will be presented.

Arnulf Christl

Arnulf Christl is director of Metaspatial specializing on secure geospatial data access. He currently consults to the Ordnance Survey Great Britain on its enterprise scale service architecture. He is a member of the OGC Architecture Board coordinating international standard development. Until 2012 he was president of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) which he co-founded in 2006. He developed the architecture of the eContent+ project ESDIN for a consortium of 12 European National Mapping Agencies. He has a thorough background in agile management and has guided a diverse selection of teams through the changes that are required for successful implementation.

Abstract:

The term "Open Data" touches a broad range of aspects concerning data access, ownership, copyright and licensing but it is neither well defined nor clear cut. As a result there is a lot of potential for misunderstanding depending on who uses it in which context. At the same time Open Data has become a core term used in data policies which calls of a much clearer definition. Increasingly businesses are looking into how Open Data can be leveraged to create added value. To bring clarity into this situation the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) maintains a white paper on Open Data in the geospatial context. It contains a clear definition of the terms, puts them into context and offers an additional set of criteria to more precisely define the scope of Open Data. It can be split into three major types:


 * Factual data collections where values should not be modified (e.g. temperature measurement, speed control data).
 * Authoritative data which is part of a legal framework and system.
 * Community processed data which is created and maintained in an open and transparent consensus process.

Finally the presentation will give examples of commercial uses of all three types of Open Data.

Chris van Lith

Chris van Lith is experienced in translating technological opportunities into viable commercial products: first in industry (chemical, life sciences), now in information technology (internet). In '83 he graduated on his masters in chemical technology at university of Eindhoven. Currently he's director of the Opensource Geospatial Innovation company B3Partners.

Abstract: Using standards to protect investments in Open Source GIS

One expects from closed source suppliers that new software versions are either backwards compatible or that a smooth upgrade process is available. Potential users of open source feel insecure in this respect. This presentation will promote the use of standards as an insurance policy against the risk of getting stuck with an abandoned GIS project.

B3Partners offers a comprehensive GIS suite that covers most aspects of a geospatial infrastructure: loading of data (ETL), design of maps, security and a geo-cms for publication. This suite is build completely from open source projects. B3Partners did add wizards and user interfaces to ensure utilization without any programming effort. From the start B3Partners was aware of the risk that one of the underlying projects would no longer be supported. Therefore B3Partners designed an architecture based on building blocks that communicate using standards to minimize aforementioned risks.

The B3P GIS Suite uses well known OGC standards like WMS, WFS and CSW for communication between the building blocks of the suite. One of more important and visible building blocks is the viewer engine. Back in 2008 B3Partners used a Flash engine, but at the time we foresaw that this may become obsolete over time. Therefore we devised an javascript interface for map engines. The Flash engine was embedded using this interface. Later this interface allowed us the embed OpenLayers and now Leaflet could be next. Thus we are changing engines without the need to change the other building blocks. This protects our investment.

Marjan Bevelander

Marjan Bevelander is Senior beleidsmedewerker geo-informatie at Interprovinciaal Overleg. She did het masters in Geographical Information Systems at University of Salford.

Claude Philipona

Claude Philipona is co-founder of Camptocamp SA and professor at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO).

Hannes Reuter

ISRIC - World Soil Information is an independent foundation and the ICSU accredited World Data Centre for Soils (WDC-Soils). It was founded in 1964 through the International Soil Science Society (ISSS) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It has a mandate to serve the international community with information about the world’s soil resources to help addressing major global issues. ISRIC operates on three priority areas: i) soil data and soil mapping, ii) application of soil data in global development issues and iii) training and education

Abstract:

ISRIC has a mandate to serve the international community as custodian of world soil data and information and to increase awareness and understanding of soils in major global issues. ISRIC collects, stores, processes and disseminates global soil and terrain information for research and development of sustainable land use.. To fulfil this role at the global scale ISRIC has developed its web-based FOSS based Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF), which also contains an enterprise database “World Soil Information Services” for storing soil information. Generally, GSIF i) facilitate crowd-sourced, web-based entry, storage and extraction of soil profile data, area-class soil maps and global grids of environmental data, such as satellite imagery, digital elevation maps and climate and land cover maps; ii) support the automated production of consistent, harmonized soil maps at multiple spatial scales; iii) strengthen soil information handling capacity in an interactive and participatory process; iv) provide feedback mechanisms to increase accuracy and user engagement; and to v) provide added-value products and processing chains to local, national, regional and global soil science communities. FOSS is instrumental in a ) development of these components, and b ) in deployment in our training component and its users around the world, where budget and knowledge constraints are limiting capacity building.

Just vd Broecke

Just van den Broecke studied Chemistry and Computing Science at the University of Amsterdam. For 11 years he worked on telecommunications software as an engineer and architect at AT&T/Lucent Bell Laboratories. In 1997 he became self-employed, working from his own company Just Objects B.V., developing and consulting in the field of object technology, Java, multimedia and mobile applications. After having developed several GPS mobile apps and having a lifelong passion for maps, he fell for the beauty of the Geospatial domain. For Just, Free and Open Source has always been 'a way of life'. He has initiated and contributed to numerous open source geospatial projects such as GeoNetwork, the Heron Mapping Client and recently NLExtract, ETL tools for free Dutch geospatial datasets. He attempts to regularly contribute as a mapper to OpenStreetMap. Just is representative of OSGeo.nl, the Dutch Language Local chapter of the international Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org).

Paul van Genuchten

Paul van Genuchten graduated in 99 for his masters in Soil Science at Wageningen University. Just in time to notice the first interactive maps on the web. Fascinated by this phenomena he started developing in the world of web mapping using open source technologies like Mapserver, Postgis and OpenLayers. More recently he focussed on SDI-architectures and metadata implementations for Inspire. Last year he joined GeoCat, the founder of the Geonetwork OpenSource project, where he is a developer and consultant on any Open SDI related matter, with a focus on metadata.

Abstract: Opensource enforces interoperability

Interoperability is good for business, because organizations are less tied to a certain supplier. (OGC) standards are the basis for interoperability, but in practice standards don’t guarantee interoperability. Open source software facilitates the last step in interoperability, due to (i) availability of wide communities discussing features, (ii) the open character attracts people to patch the system and (iii) the business model of open source is for a major part based on software development. Take the metadata Use Case. People looking for spatial data, find data through a catalogue, and want to add this data to a map. OGC has put quite a big framework of standards to support this use case (CSW, iso19115, iso19119). But in the real world there are some 10 server-implementations, and none of them fully supports the way the use-case is implemented in one of the others. In the Open source domain developers automatically start discussions to have the gap fixed, and come up with new standards like DClite4G.