FOSS4G 2015 - John Jason Fallows

FOSS4G is happening right now in fabulous Seoul Korea. Online I see the occasional calls for “what is going on” and “are they recording video”. I am not quite sure if they are recording video and publishing the video online. As for what is going on let me try writing a short blog post.

But first the links:

FOSS4G 2015 | SEOUL 2015
Useful Online FOSS4G Program – click for descriptions of the presentations!
My Flickr foss4g 2015 album and foss4g group – does anyone still use flickr for these things?

Workshops

The first two days, as if often the case, was devoted to hands on workshops. There was a number of GeoServer workshops this year … but they were in a funny order:

GeoServer Performance was our first workshop offering a chance to bench mark GeoServer and explore the impact environment, configuration, styling and data preparation have on performance. This was a fairly advanced workshop, assuming GeoServer knowledge so we could focus on getting the most out of GeoServer.
Being a full day workshop we were looking at a nine hour day! I would like to thank everyone who attended (especially for the questions). The workshop materials will be available online shortly.
Beyond GeoServer Basics was Tom Ingold’s chance to shine with an intermediate workshop for those who have tried out GeoServer and want to take it to the next level.
I also got to enjoy Andrea Aime’s GeoServer Beginners workshop

So what was odd here was the progression from advanced, to intermediate to beginners workshops in the program. Still everyone had a great time, and I really liked seeing the students who brought along their own data, or who were running off to benchmark their servers after the class.

Exhibit Area

The exhibit area is nice and bright and cheerful – and draws from both the FOSS4G conference (think t-shirts and smiles) and the Smart Geospatial Expo 2015 conference (thing suits) which is running concurrently.

The Boundless table is moving a lot of LocationTech – providing a great opportunity for outreach. This is a great opportunity to meet everyone, catch up with open source colleagues and make plans with new ones.

Activities we are highlighting this week:

GeoServer 2.8-RC1 is out! Thanks to Kevin from the Victoria office
The gsconfig is now set up for collaboration and we are enjoying working with the GeoNode community on this one. The gsconfig project is a python wrapper on the GeoServer REST API.
In a similar fashion the qgis-geoserver-plugin is in the process of being set up – please talk to Victor for more details.
Gabriel’s vector tiles community module for GeoServer is available, and makes for an impressive demo.
Composer is out of beta and included in OpenGeo Suite 4.7 – stop by for a demo and see what our development team has been hard at work on.
GeoGig continues the long slow march through LocationTech incubation. We have our first round of incubation feedback and are rewriting out local storage from BerklyDB to sqlite.
Stay tuned for more …

FOSS4G Day 1

I snuck in late to the keynote, which consisted of a couple of addressed from local politicians. One in particular struck an odd tone (at least for me). The national mapping agency had a long thought out presentation (which circle crop diagrams) showing how to fit open source into their procurement model. Sadly this still seemed to be taken from the perspective of “open source is not supported” (he should come by the boundless booth).

There are a number of approaches seeing success world wide. Australia has had a strong open data push (with open source software sneaking in once the door is “open”). I would like to see governments join software foundations, double check their policies allow civil servants can take part in and start open source projects, and in general be part of the community rather than feel excluded.

I expect this represents a failure in FOSS4G world wide outreach. It is a good thing we are having the conference here and I hope the local community can these ideas further into the Korean government.

Talks:

New Geoprocessing Toolbox in uDig Desktop Application Framework (Minpa Lee (Mango System inc.), KiWoong Kim)
Was totally impressed with the wide range of functionality on display, indeed I hardly know where to start. I must catchup online and congratulate Minpa Lee for his hard work.
OpenAerialMap: A Distributed Commons for Searching and Hosting Free Imagery (Kate Chapman). A talk so popular Kate had to do it twice – the session was running ahead of schedule, so people who arrived on time were disappointed to see they missed it. Kate did an excellent job, both times, of describing what this initiative is working towards. I liked the story of the QGIS plugin produced out of a HOTS diversity initiative. There was a number of good (i.e. hard) questions on policy from the floor.
How Simplicity Will Save GIS (Vladimir) – inspiring story of leaflet development (perhaps the same talk as foss4g-na?) Animated GIFS (well internet cats) are always a nice touch. Sadly this one was cut short on time.
Turning Data into Information with Geo-Ontologies (Justin Lewis (TerraFrame), Nathan McEachen). A quick crash corse in ontologies to set the stage for “geo” (a state is a member of this class of features). the demo was very impressive, ended up coming a cross as a smart version of CartoDB.
ISA Server – An Indoor Spatial Data Server (Ki-Joune Li (Pusan National University), Taehoon Kim, Joonseok Kim). Indoor GML application running in the the limitations of GeoTools (Complex feature read-only, no 3d operations- just data structure). They managed to bridge to a C library for the extra spatial functionality. Made a point of hunting this crew down for the GeoTools BOF as they are doing some impressive work.
Using Spark in Weather Applications (Tom Kunicki (The Weather Company), Charles Maalouf). Tom once again breaks my head with sheer volume of data the weather company processes on a daily basis. A couple strong takeaways on the difference between Hadoop and Sparc scalability – and yeah 18 billion requests a day with all those cell-phones checking the weather. Should make a map to take a picture of the sky and tell the user if it is raining.
Citizen science and Smart cities, the evolution of GIS (María Arias de Reyna (GeoCat bv), Jeroen Ticheler). A real find this conference has been the enthusiasm of María and learning more about the GeoCat team in Spain. The demo of GeoNetwork really shows how far the application has come, and how much easier it is to use now.
PostGIS Feature Frenzy (Paul Ramsey (CartoDB)). Paul is a force of nature at these conferences, and I learned a few thins in this mad dash through PostGIS goodness.
State of GeoServer (Jody Garnett (Boundless)) – so much to say, I will just have to put up the slides.
Temporal Maps leading to new views in Spatial Analysis (Andy Eschbacher (CartoDB)). Andy did a great job of explaining what Torque does as a project, and demonstrating functionality. I wanted to ask a few more technical/community questions but that will have to wait for another time.
Visualizing geographical data made extremely easy by SLD Editor!(Hanna Visuri (National Land Survey of Finland)). Hanna was here for her first foss4g and her first day speaking! This was her second talk of the day, showing the crowd an impressive SLD editor written with Node.js.