Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

So- the last day of FOSS4G for 2007- roll on 2008 in Cape Town (must start saving). Definitely a resounding success!

For me today, the theme was GeoFOSS as a) a business and b) as a community. For the first case, there were several presentations by geospatial consultancies on doing GeoFOSS as a business- what makes for best practices and so on. This seems to suggest a certain maturity in the discipline-an idea that was picked up by Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine in her review of the conference at the close. This was followed with talks by Chris Schmidt of OpenLayers fame and Howard Butler, and also by Tyler Mitchell that focussed on aspects of the open source community.

In reverse- Tyler gave a really good presentation on the work of OSGEO. In particular I was interested in some of his facts and figures: Since it’s inception in 2006 it has grown from 9 projects to 13- these represent 4.6 Million lines of code commited by 182 developers, equating to 1253 person-years of work. OHLOH.net estimates the worth of this code at 69 Million US Dollars. That’s big money! The main point that he made, however, is that OSGEO’s mandate is to support and develop these projects, raise awareness of them, provide infrastructure support- but most of all to reach more users. A worthy cause.

Back to Chris and Howard’s talk. If I felt uncomfortable with anything I heard this year it would be this talk, I’m afraid! Last year I struggled with some of the overt Open Source “nazism” which dictated that if you weren’t a dyed in the wool open source user who shunned all forms of proprietary software then you weren’t worth listening to. If those guys were around this year, I missed them, and I’m glad – this year was a lot more laid back. But, I digress. Chris and Howard did make some very good points around where to get support, and the steps you need to go through to make it easy for people to help you. Basically be concise, polite and gracious. Absolutely. BUT… I do have a few problems with the idea that, as a new user you are committing some kind of offence and will get a permanent black mark against your name if you don’t phrase your question exactly right or somehow know how best to approach people. The point about being new is that you are new, for chrissakes! You don’t know all of this, and to be shunned because you make a simple error first time around isn’t going to help. I understand that developers must get sick of answering stupid questions, and are doing this for the love of it, not the money, in their spare time, and so on, and I admire them immensely for their skill, dedication and enthusiasm but they do need to remember what it’s like to be new to something- even they were beginners once. If people continue to be annoying or lazy then fair enough, but give them chance or you’ll scare them off and the long term effect of that is that people stop using your product. What’s the point of all of your hard work then?

OK- rant over. Highlight of the closing session was the Sol Katz award which went to Steve Lime, father of Mapserver. A brilliant choice- as Mapserver is probably the way most people got into GeoFOSS in the first place. I’ve already talked a little about Adena’s closing review- in which she talked about the growing maturity of the community. I certainly felt that way here, but I’m about to go back to the UK where it doesn’t really feel like that. As an example- I have just been catching up with my RSS feeds, sadly neglected over the last few days and I came across a short review by Ed Parsons of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI)’s 2007 conference in London (caution- this link doesn’t look very permanent to me). They claim to represent the geospatial industry in the UK, and their conference is described as “the UK’s largest dedicated event for the geographic information community” yet in Ed’s review and the information on the conference, the only mention of anything remotely open was Nick Black doing a presentation on OpenStreetMap (he gets around!). Ed even went so far to say that many people hadn’t come across it before, which seems odd given how much press there has been about it. To be fair, there appear to have been a number of neogeography presentations, and I haven’t had a proper look at the programme so I might be wrong but if the number one industry event in the UK doesn’t talk about GeoFOSS then we’ve a long way to go. I’ve had a degree of interest at the conference about working towards a UK chapter, and I managed to hook up with about half of the delegates who come from the UK, so it’s important that we maintain the momentum. Sign up on the wiki if you’re interested, but I’ll keep on posting about developments so don’t touch that dial… (sorry, wrong analogy).

So- many many thanks for a great conference- especially to Paul Ramsey who did a great job as chair and host- Victoria is a wonderful city that everyone should visit, and I’ll forgive him for the woeful lack of seals and otters as long as we see a whole pod of whales tomorrow when we go whale-watching…

See everyone (in a virtual sense) back in the UK on Monday!

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night from Victoria. End of Day Two of FOSS4G, and the now infamous Reception and Dinner. But, in order, for me today was mainly a database and web app day. This morning there were some incredibly useful talks comparing MapServer and GeoServer, then MySQL and PostgreSQL for a range of different situations and loads. Time for much reconfiguring of servers when I get back methinks!

Another session that I saw was on Sextante, which is a spatial analysis extension to gvSIG, a really promising Spanish desktop GIS. If it wasn’t for the fact that it’s only available in Spanish I would be recommending it wholeheartedly, but for those of us who are somewhat linguistically challenged we’ll have to wait until the English version comes out later in the year. It does look great though- and quite easy to add in things like new algorithms and models without having to totally rewrite the extension.

This afternoon I saw a couple of sessions on web apps- one on 3D GIS for the web- really interesting, but as always it comes down to the availability of browser plugins. If someone could explain to me how it makes commercial sense to create a non-free browser plugin I’d be very grateful.

I’m afraid I got a bit of conference fatigue after that, so the next thing that got my attention was the festivities in the evening. The IMAX presentation of Titanica was frankly bizarre- but that was the film rather than the setting. The meal was set in the Royal BC Museum, amongst the displays, which was very cool and very strange. Most enjoyable. Again it was another opportunity to put faces to names- and to meet some interesting new people.  I seem to have promised to attempt an all-nighter tomorrow, as some kind of way of fending off jetlag on the return journey, so I’d better get some sleep…

Thanks to everyone who attended my talk at FOSS4G and/or came up and offered me kind words of encouragement afterwards. I’m pretty overwhelmed in the level of interest in this. I’ve now done something I should have done before my talk, which is create a dedicated page on this site to do with it. At the moment it’s just a description of the project and what software is included- but hopefully soon it will include a link to a version you can download. You can also express your interest in the project there, and I’ll update it when new stuff happens…

Thanks again for everyone’s support!

Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like last year, Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak. 7-dimensional hyperspheres anyone? Of course Autodesk made their big announcement about the acquisition of Mentor and the planned open sourcing of their projection and transformation tools. I wish that meant more to me, but I don’t know much about it…

Paul Ramsey’s Survey of Open Source GIS was another look at the growing trends and developments in the discipline- I look forward to comparing it to last year’s for an overview of what has been going on. Sometimes at the coal face it’s difficult to see the wider picture after all. Following on the subject of trends was Brady Forrest from O’ Reilly Media, who was looking more specifically at trends in neogeography and the geoweb rather than all facets of geospatial software. Then it was my talk on Portable GIS, which I raced through like a train and kind of forgot to mention thatI haven’t actually got t hosted anywhere yet because the package is so big. That seemed to be reasonably well received- I got nice comments and questions anyhow, which is good enough for me, and now school’s out and I can enjoy the rest of the conference.

This afternoon I saw the sessions on Quantum GIS, OpenStreetmap and GDAL/OGR. Bizarrely, I found out that Nick Black, presenting on OpenStreetMap, worked for Oxford Archaeology North recently as a surveyor. It’s a weird thing in our office that people can work for us out on sites in other parts of the UK, and never visit the main offices! Concentrating on his talk though- I had seen Steve Coast talking about OpenStreetMap in the past and have always been a little ambivalent about their claims of greatness- but clearly it is taking off and gaining a lot more legitimacy. I still don’t get how this data can be reliable though. Not in the sense of whether there are mistakes- but how do you know how complete it is? The answer that Nick came back with was that you don’t know the Ordnance Survey dataset is complete, you just hope it is. But the thing I have a problem with is that the Ordnance Survey do at least have standardised survey practices and bench marks for reliability that should lead to relatively consistent data sets. When you are relying on a group of loosely organised individuals, how do you know that people have walked down every alley, tagged every road as a road and not a street or highway or track or path or motorway? If OpenStreetMap could explain that to me then I would be a big supporter of it. I am already keen on using the data in ArcMap with the new plugin, but I need some measure of reliability.

All of this afternoon’s talks were, on one level, to do with community participation- which seems to be the big theme this year. On a purely personal level, I certainly feel more part of the community as I’ve spent a year actually doing things and talking to people. I got to put faces to quite a few names today, which is always nice- though often the faces are nothing like I expect!

Finally I went on a long walk this evening around the Beacon Hill Park, Ogden Point and Fisherman’s Wharf- what a fantastic place! Photos follow shortly on Flickr, although again I must complain about the woeful lack of Otters and Seals…

Oh- if you want a copy of my talk (but not the actual portable GIS yet) then you can find it here