Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

I imagine I’m not alone in having parents and grandparents who don’t really understand what I do for a living. “I work in computing and do stuff with maps” is the easy approach (in fact it’s easier now that I don’t have to tag on the bit about being an archaeologist but not actually digging, and no it’s not like Time Team or Indiana Jones). Sometimes people ask why we don’t just “do everything with google maps”, which is the cue for a sit down and a longer chat about how (deep breath) you can’t do *everything* with google. So far, so good…

This all changed a couple of weeks ago, when, to my surprise I got elected to the Board of Directors of OSGeo. Cue shock, and great rejoicing (and in my head at least, tearful Oscars-style acceptance speeches). Mr Archaeogeek thinks this is cool enough to tell parents, grandparents, family friends etc. I do too, don’t get me wrong, but…

How to explain what it means to people who don’t use computers all that much, let alone know about gis, or open source or OSGeo?

There have been a few good articles on how to explain why you work in open source (the “how do you make money?” argument), but I feel like I need to go further back and explain about software licensing. I don’t think that most people really understand the difference between the way software is sold/licensed, and most other products, so I’m working on a car analogy that explains why open source software needs to exist. It goes something like:

“Can you imagine, that if you brought a car, and something went wrong with it, you couldn’t lift up the bonnet and take a look? Or if you did need to take it to a garage you had to use the one the car salesman told you to use? Or after 2 years they told you that they wouldn’t support your old car any longer, and you had to buy a new one? Or you couldn’t insure more than one person to drive it, but had to buy a new car for each person? Well that’s sort of what closed-source software is like”

(Note this is an analogy-in-progress)

Once that’s out of the way, then I can get on to gis, and hence to OSGeo, and all is fine!

Woefully out of date now, here’s a quick run down on the OSGIS 2011 conference, 3rd in that series, held at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences in Nottingham over the 21st and 22nd of June.

The 21st was a day of workshops, under the banner of Interoperability and the OGC. My new colleague, Matt, and I did a workshop on using Ordnance Survey Open Data and Mastermap with Mapserver and PostgreSQL, using the OSGeo Live DVD. You can see a slightly edited version of the workshop below, or on slideshare. I have to admit that most of the kudos must go to Matt for creating some super scripts to make the initial data processing *much* easier, and to some of my other colleagues for their efforts in styling the data once it’s in Mapserver. The scripts and a small subset of the open data are available here- you’ll have to supply your own Mastermap!

Day Two was all about the talks- and I was impressed by the standard. The focus of OSGIS has always leant slightly towards the academic, so the stand-out talks for me were the ones that demonstrated that you can do real spatial analysis with open source GIS. There were also some very good papers on mapping in the developing world. Two of my ex-colleagues from Oxford Archaeology also did a joint paper showing how the use of open source software has progressed there- that was really good to see- it was nice to know that the baton had been passed on when I left! I gave people an introduction to the OSGeo:UK local chapter, which is also available on Slideshare here, and we had the chapter AGM. It’s extremely gratifying to see the numbers of people willing to hear about, and get involved with, the local chapter. I was going back through the reports I’d given in previous years, and the numbers of people signed up to our mailing list steadily creep up, year on year- we’re now well over the 100 people mark! (BTW, if you’re interested, our website is here).

All in all it was a really good couple of days. Next year the conference will be running from the 4th to the 5th of September, so for anyone that can’t make FOSS4G and wants to give OSGIS a try, now’s your chance!

A short case study into flexibility, collaboration, and why open source software is so damned cool:

At my new place of employment, we’re doing a lot of work with Ordnance Survey Mastermap data, so one of my colleagues built a quick python wrapper around the ogr2ogr script to easily pop the data into postgresql, or shape file, or whatever support format you like. This is now available on Github (caveat- it doesn’t do change-only updates yet- we’ll keep you posted on that). After a chance comment on the OSGeo:UK mailing list, our friends at Faunalia, who do great things with Quantum GIS, ported the code into a QGIS plugin.

So- in the space of one week, QGIS gained itself a Mastermap loader, through a simple bit of collaboration. Nice work guys! (Nothing to do with me, I was on holiday). Can you get that sort of flexibility, rapidity and collaboration with (insert your favourite proprietary package here)? I doubt it…

So, I’m late to the game and only just learning about the coolness that is python. To be honest, for years the need to keep the indents in the code neat and tidy put me off, but I figured I’d better have a proper look at some point. I spent some time over Christmas going over some tutorials (more below) and more recently I’ve chosen a python-based approach to problems where previously I would have used a different method. So far so good though no doubt my efforts will make grown coders weep…

These are just a few links that I have found really useful- the first is a very good tutorial for new python users who are particularly interested in Geoprocessing, whilst the others deal with more specific problems.

• Geoprocessing with Python using Open Source GIS. This is a full online course, with examples and assignments to try (and solutions, thank goodness). There is a couple of week’s work here to complete the full course.
• Using Psycopg2 with PostgreSQL. This allows you to work with postgresql databases in python (disclosure- other drivers are available). I found this straightforward enough to pick up and use in a real-world situation pretty much immediately.
• Connecting to an OpenOffice spreadsheet with Python. There is plenty of documentation about OpenOffice and Python, but again I found I could get going immediately with this particular link.

If anyone has any other resources for python beginners, particularly around Open Source GIS and PostgreSQL, feel free to add them in the comments.