Intergeo 2009

Introduction

Intergeo is the world’s largest event and communication platform for geodesy, geoinformation and land management. The trade fair and conference cover all the key trends that crop up along the entire value-added chain – from geo-based information surveys and data processing to integrated applications.

This year's Intergeo trade fair and conference takes place in Karslruhe, Germany from September 22nd to 24th. OSGeo will again operate it's Open Source Park.

Press Information

News from the Open Source World

The Open Source community will present itself at the Intergeo trade fair on the joint platform OSGeo-Park and give a thorough overview and insight on current development. The area will be split into distinct sections, on one side the commercial service provider, on the other community projects. The third part is a presentation area for service providers, community and users to give presentations on hot topics, new applications and Open Source based solutions. The booths are funded by the commercial service providers and the German Ministry of the Interior (BMI). The software projects of the OSGeo-Park serve all sectors of the geospatial market ranging from traditional desktop GIS, through SDI components, geoportals, sensor web enablement down to spatially enabled databases for vector and raster data.

The community section is reserved for projects. This gives you the chance to discuss technical issues with developers and power users in depth. The Intergeo is always a hot spot to discuss the development road map of individual projects with core people involved in development – an option that is unique to the Open Source world.

The OSGeo-Park will showcase many productive environments from all areas of interest, in many cases with the possibility to directly talk with users, developers and project coordinators. The capabilities and the potential of software can best be appraised by inspecting real world application examples. One such example is the Pollution Release and Transfer Registry (PRTR) of the German Federal Environment Agency (http://www.prtr.bund.de). It is an information platform showing the locations and emission data of large industrial polluters in German which nicely fits into the mission statement of INSPIRE based on OGC standards. The most interesting aspect beyond the fact that it runs completely on Open Source software is the backdrop map. It is based on the crowd sourced spatial data of the OpenStreetMap project – for a federal state level information system this is a premiere.

Software News

3D software moves from innovation to diffusion and real world applications start to take off. The open source software deegree 3D implements geospatial information processing for 3D data management, access and portrayal. The OGC web services of the package allow for flexible spatial data infrastructure integration for 3D building, city and terrain models including textures. OSSIM is another 3D project from OSGeo and has recently graduated from OSGeo incubation. It provides advanced geospatial image processing for remote sensing, photogrammetry, and GIS and. The software Rasdaman is a specialized server for multi-dimensional raster data of unlimited extent. It is now also released under an Open Source license and has recently applied for OSGeo Incubation. Another news for raster data management is that the proven spatial extension PostGIS now also started development on raster storage and handling in PostgreSQL using SQL. The software Mapbender has been further optimized with metadata for INSPIRE, monitoring and security facades and now also includes the OpenLayers JavaScript library as an optional viewer component. In combination with MapServer as map and geometry service (OGC WMS und WFS) and GeoNetwork as catalog service the full SDI stack is now available as proven OSGeo Projects. The project 52North implements OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) services to integrate real time sensor data into SDIs, a functionality currently primarily needed by water boards and early warning system operators. The two projects gvSIG (Java) and Quantum GIS (C++) have further established themselves as comprehensive desktop GIS solutions. Both packages come with user friendly front ends and the potential for extensions. In the case of gvSIG the extension is provided by the project Sextante whereas Quantum GIS is powered by the continuously maintained and extended GIS GRASS.

Organization and Governance

In fall 2008 the German based association FOSSGIS e.V. has become the official OSGeo Local Chapter for German speaking communities. The project OpenStreetMap (OSM) up to date has no legal background in Germany but some organizational backing has already been taken on by FOSSGIS e.V. (GPS rental, representation at shows and fairs, etc.). In the long run this will help to leverage the enormous potential of OSM in Germany even better. The FOSSGIS conference 2010 that will take place from March 2nd to 5th in Osnabrück, Germany also heavily focuses on OSM data, issues and governance.

The potential of open source software can best be appraised by seeing productive environments and solutions. The OSGeo Park at Intergeo is the best platform for you to meet with the community, commercial service providers and users at the same time in a professional environment to learn about changes, news and ready-to-go solutions. The non-profit and heavily volunteer-dependent mother organization OSGeo offers stable development platforms and governance structures for a growing number of geospatial software communities. OSGeo's representation is continuously growing and with over 40 local chapters on all continents of the world truly global. All of these developments once again underline the success of the combination of commercial services and community run open source software.

Further Information

Fortunately this event does not take place at the same time as FOSS4G 2009.

If you have inquiries, are interested in joining organization or want to operate a booth for your Business please contact the Event Owner Stefan Giese, InMediasRes. --Arnulf Christl 09:15, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Find all information about the Intergeo 2009 trade fair and conference at the Wiki web site of the German Language OSGeo Chapter: http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/Intergeo_2009