Australia/New Zealand Chapter Report 2008

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 Change Interoperability 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

OSGeo-AustNZ prepared a submission for the Victorian Government's Parliamentary Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data.

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

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

Areas for Improvement

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

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 :)