Catching up
Comments(4) It’s funny how you can have a fairly quiet time of things, then suddenly everything happens in one week…
So Monday was the first Open Source GIS conference in the UK, affectionately known to it’s friends as OSGIS 2009. The event was sold out in advance (150 people) , and seemed to be well received, though it was hectic, with two streams and workshops going on through most of the day. I quite enjoyed the quick-fire aspect of the talks, with most being limited to 15-30 minutes. Perhaps my favourite was from Rob Booth, who talked about using Open Source for Spire- the UK Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA) SDI. While there were issues with scaling, the flexibility, response and community/developer support were all big plus points in choosing that solution. This is a good counter-example to bring up whenever anyone says that open source is just for the little guys.
We had the first AGM of the OSGeo UK local chapter after the conference, and many thanks to those hardy souls who stayed around for it. The main point of discussion was whether the chapter should become an ‘organisation’, in the voluntary sense, which would allow us to have a bank account and various useful things like that. We also discussed putting a bid together for FOSS4G in 2011, and decided that 2012 would be a better bet, it being Olympic year and all that. Mateusz had some really good points to make about using social networking to get people involved, and the idea of having informal get-togethers outside of the big conferences. So- we now have a linkedin group, a facebook group and some tools for helping people plan meetups will be following shortly. Lunch-time pub get-togethers were very popular. Can’t imagine why… join the groups though- the more the merrier!
So- to next year. Bigger, better, and shinier. There’s a date for OSGIS 2010 already, and plans are afoot to spread it over 1.5 days, with an afternoon of workshops either before the main event or after it. See you there!
Hi Jo,
I attended the workshop you ran in the afternoon on tools for the GI lifecycle and had a question about one of the slides which mentioned “Versioning” as part of an open source toolkit of some description.
I’d be interested in any information you have on this – is this versioning in the same way as ESRI’s ArcServer versions workspaces? If so where is this implemented, as far as I can see PostGIS doesn’t support anything of this nature so curious as to what your slide was referring to here.
Thanks,
F.
Hi Fraser,
Versioning is now available within geoserver. I haven’t played with it (yet) but have seen a really good demo of it, showing transaction history and roll-back support within postgresql/postgis databases (though having just tried to find the link for the stuff I’d seen previously, I can’t). So, it’s not really postgis that does the work, but you have a specially configured postgresql database and then need the versioning extension within geoserver. You can also do some versioning things with the later versions of OpenLayers, using the WFS-T protocol, but again I haven’t had chance to try it out yet. It’s on my list though!
Thanks for stopping by
Jo
Jo, I would like to know more about the Versioning of postgresql/postgis databases with Geoserver extension.
That would greatly help if you can do a post on it in the future.
Another topic – USB-GIS I have been using it on an 8GB USB stick – flawless.
Is there a bigger version [Portable GIS 2?] ready?
As Mapperz would like to do a blog post on it
Hi Mapperz,
Regarding Geoserver/Postgis versioning- it’s something that I *really* need to find the time to set up and try, and I’ll certainly report on it when I do.
Portable GIS 2- will hopefully be going out to a select band of testers this weekend, and (assuming it doesn’t require vast amounts of additional work) will be released shortly afterwards. I’m sort of hanging on waiting for the new release of PostGIS and PgAdmin so I can update the PostgreSQL to the latest stable versions, but if they don’t come out very soon I will release it anyhow, and then an update.
Jo