FOSS4G 2009 Integration Showcase

This page is specifically to document the goals and process of the FOSS4G 2009 Integration Showcase. For a more general (and vague) discussion on integration showcases that range from demo cds to rpm packaging and everything in between, refer to Geospatial Integration Showcase.

Goals

The primary goals of the showcase are:

• Provide a working and complete (likely overly complete) spatial data infrastructure to conference participants.
• Demonstrate the reliability and stability of FOSS4G projects by providing a working case-study.

Provide SDI

The hope in providing a working spatial data infrastructure, complete with data, is that presenters, workshop and lab coordinators and exhibitors can all connect to various components of the SDI. This will help them, exhibitors in particular, by demonstrating their products capability to interact with FOSS4G infrastructure. Presenters, workshop coordinator and lab coordinators will have a greater range of data and services to leverage.

Demonstration of FOSS4G

This is more of a touchy-feely goal, but also more important. By showing a complete SDI functioning in a demanding environment, we will gain credibility amongst the nay-sayers that continue to view open source as a bunch of kids sitting in their parents basements coding up crap. This is less and less the case, and at a FOSS4G conference we'll be preaching to the choir to a large extent, but if they can go back to work and point their own GIS systems at the services to show their collegues and managers. Here is where the real value of an integration showcase comes from.

Requirements

This is a tricky point. We have several considerations:

• Stability
• Accessibility
• Predictability
• Performance
• Ubiquity