Cameron Shorter

Presenting at GeoNext conference

2012-01-27T11:46:00.001+11:00

I'm speaking at the GeoNext conference, and will be answering audience questions on the topic of:

"Where to start with Geospatial Open Source Software, and how to build a business around Open Source products".

Speakers at the GeoNext conference are covering topics around emerging geospatial business trends, which are being driven by such things as mobile phones, commoditisation of data, and web 2.0 principles such as crowd sourcing. It is running in Sydney, Australia on 29 February 2012. More details here: http://geonext.com.au/
If you will be coming, then let me know and come and say hello.

Big Spatial & Open Source week in Canberra, Australia

2011-11-11T14:10:00.001+11:00

Next week, 14-18 November 2011, is a big week for Spatial and Open Source Technologies keeping our staff at LISAsoft super busy.

Tue-Thu 15-17 Nov: Spatial@Gov Conference:
Tuesday at Spatial@Gov is an Open Day to meet vendors. You can register for free at: http://www.cebit.com.au/2011/conferences/spatial-at-gov/registration. Wednesday/Thursday will be for presentations. Two presentations highlight LISAsoft's work - DSE's PLM geospatial data processing chain using Open Source tools is being presented, along with a Gazetteer presentation from Australian National Data Service (ANDS) which highlights a LISAsoft gazetteer client. LISAsoft has a booth at Spatial@Gov and James, Jody, Juliet and myself will all be there. Make sure you see us. (I'm arriving Wednesday morning). If you haven't got a ticket, then give me a call and I'll meet you outside.

7:45am Thu 17 Nov: OSGeo Breakfast:
We are having an informal gathering over breakfast where you can meet others of us interested in Open Source Geospatial Software. We will have demos of software available to look at. Register here: http://www.meetup.com/osgeo-aust-nz/events/40778042/

Mon-Fri 14-18 Nov: Open Source Developers Conference:
OSDC is two days of mini-conferences followed by three days of presentations on Open Source Software. LISAsoft's Jody Garnett is leading a developer workshop on GeoTools, the leading java based open source spatial library used by most java based open source spatial applications, as well as by many proprietary applications too. Introduce yourself to Jody if you see him floating around.

Mon/Tue 14/15 Nov: GeoNetwork Users Workshop:
This workshop will hear brief presentations from many of the Australian agencies who have deployed GeoNetwork, the leading open source metadata storage and publishing system.
The University of Woolongong's SMART Metadata Management and Discovery System, which is being developed by LISAsoft, is being presented. The system is based upon GeoNetwork, GeoServer, Bonita for workflow and a Postgres database. Look out for James Sewell who is one of our developer/architects on this project and who will be attending on Tuesday.

Call for interest in OSGeo-Live 5.5

2011-11-02T12:51:00.000+11:00

We are starting to build the 5.5 OSGeo-Live DVD which will be released in March 2012, ready for the Spanish FOSS4G, FOSSGIS Germany, GISRUK in England and the MapWindow/FOSS4G Regional Netherlands Conference, among others. We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to OSGeo-Live, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.

Which project version?
Could each installed project please update our status sheet to note the expected version to be installed on OSGeo-Live 5.5. Status sheet.

Key Priorities for next release
Disk Space
    We have reached our DVD size limits, and need to be creative about saving space

Package Updates
    Update and test latest stable software releases

Quickstart Reviews
    We have Project Quickstarts, but most haven't gone through comprehensive review

Testing
    With Quality being a key focus area for us, we need lots of help with testing.

Key Milestones

    07 Jan 2012 Feature Freeze
    04 Feb 2012 User Acceptance Test (all Apps installed and working)
    25 Feb 2012 Final ISO sent to printers
... full schedule

About OSGeo-Live
OSGeo-live is an XUbuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability

2011-10-01T06:43:00.000+10:00

Here is an excellent article which covers the current best practices on website usability, along with the latest tools which support usability testing: 22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability. It covers the following topics:
1. User Task Analysis

Learnability:
Intuitiveness:
Efficiency:
Preciseness:
Fault Tolerance:
Memorability:
Affordance:

2. Readability

Ease of Comprehension:
Legibility:

3. Site Navigability

Information Architecture (IA):
Findability:
Efficiency of Navigation:

4. Accessibility

Cross-Browser/Cross-Platform Compatibility:
Color Choice:
Use of HTML Accessibility Features:

5. Website Speed

Webpage Response Time:
Webpage Size:
Code Quality:

6. User Experience

Fulfillment:
Usefulness:
Enjoyment:
Positive Emotions:

Image Source: http://9.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/user-task-analysis-tools/intuitionhq.jpeg

LISAsoft is hiring Developers, Project Manager & Sales Person

2011-09-14T14:45:00.000+10:00

Lots of Open Source
Lots of GeoSpatial Maps
Lots of Cutting Edge Technology

It seems that LISAsoft's formula of being geospatial systems integrators, making use of open standards and integrating open source with proprietary applications is working for us, as we we need more people.
We are looking for a range of roles, from junior to senior developers, a project manager, and a "technically savvy" sales or pre-sales person. Job descriptions are available here:

Project Manager: http://www.seek.com.au/Job/project-manager/in/sydney-cbd-inner-west-eastern-suburbs/20620506 (Sydney, Australia)
Junior Developer: http://www.seek.com.au/Job/junior-software-developer/in/sydney-cbd-inner-west-eastern-suburbs/20666353 (Sydney, Australia)
Senior Developer: http://www.seek.com.au/Job/java-web-application-developer/in/sydney-cbd-inner-west-eastern-suburbs/20666427 (Sydney or Melbourne, Australia)
Technically Savvy Sales: Contact me if interested

image source: http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/652287/7607658/2009/04/intern-technical-programmer.jpg/w/150

OSGeo-Live 5.0 released - the Open Source Geospatial DVD

2011-09-07T22:21:00.001+10:00

OSGeo-Live Desktop

Version 5.0 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection has been released.
OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software.
The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive.
A DVD or USB of OSGeo-Live is being distributed to every delegate at the upcoming international conference for Free and Open Source Software, http://2011.foss4g.org.

Homepage: http://live.osgeo.org

Highlights

47 Quality GeoSpatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured
Quality free world maps
One page overviews and quick starts for all applications
Overviews of key OGC standards
Translations for Greek, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese

Browser Clients

OpenLayers 2.10 - Browser GIS Client
Geomajas - 1.8 Browser GIS Client
Mapbender 2.7.2 - Geoportal Framework
MapFish 2.2 - Web Mapping Framework
GeoMoose 2.4 - Web GIS Portal

Crisis Management

Sahana Eden 0.5.5 - Disaster management
Ushahidi 2.1 - Mapping and Timeline for events

Databases

PostGIS 1.5 - Spatial Database
SpatiaLite 2.3.1 / 2.4 beta - Lightweight Database
Rasdaman 8.2 - Multi-Dimensional Raster Database
pgRouting 1.05 - Routing for PostGIS

Desktop GIS

Quantum GIS (QGIS) 1.7.0
GRASS GIS 6.4.1
gvSIG Desktop 1.11
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) 1.2.2
Kosmo Desktop 2.0.1
OpenJUMP GIS 1.4.0.1
SAGA 2.0.7
OSSIM 1.8.6 - Image Processing
Geopublisher 1.7 - Catalogue
AtlasStyler 1.7 - Style Editor
osgEarth 2.0 - 3D Terrain Rendering

Navigation and Maps

GpsDrive 2.11 - GPS Navigation
Marble 1.0.2 - Spinning Globe
OpenCPN 2.5.0 - Marine GPS Chartplotter
OpenStreetMap Tools - JOSM, Merkaartor, Gosmore, Osmarender
Prune 12 - View, Edit and Convert GPS Tracks
Viking 9.9.94 - GPS Data Analysis and Viewer
zyGrib 5.0 - Weather Forecast Maps

Spatial Tools

GeoKettle 2.0-RC1 - ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) Tool
GDAL/OGR 1.8.0 - GeoSpatial Data Translation Tools
GMT 4.5.2 - Cartographic Rendering
Mapnik 0.7.1 - Cartographic Rendering
MapTiler 1.0beta2 - Create Map Tiles
OTB 3.10 - Image Processing
R Spatial Task View 2.12.1 - Statistical Programming

Web Services

GeoServer 2.1.1
MapServer 6.0.1
deegree 3.0
GeoNetwork 2.6.4 - Metadata Catalog and Catalog Services for Web
MapProxy 1.1.1 - Proxy WMS & tile services
QGIS Server 1.7.0 - Web Map Service
52°North WSS 2.2.0 - Web Security Service
52°North WPS - 2.0 RC6 - Web Processing Service
52°North SOS - 3.2.0 Sensor Observation Service
TinyOWS 1.0 - WFS-T Service
ZOO Project 1.0.0 - Web Processing Service

Data

Natural Earth 1.3.1 - Geographic Data Sets
OSGeo's North Carolina, USA Educational dataset
OpenStreetMap - Sample extract from OpenStreetMap

Geospatial Libraries

GeoTools - Java GIS Toolkit
MetaCRS - Coordinate Reference System Transformations
libLAS - LiDAR Data Access

Credits

Over 80 people have directly helped with OSGeo-Live packaging, documenting and translating, and thousands have been involved in building the packaged software.
Packagers, documenters and translators include: Activity Workshop, Agustín Díez, Aikaterini Kapsampeli, Alan Boudreault, Alexandre Dube, Alex Mandel, Andrea Antonello, Andrea Yanza, Angelos Tzotsos, Anne Ghisla, Anton Patrushev, Argyros Argyridis, Astrid Emde, Brian Hamlin, Bruno Binet, Cameron Shorter, Christos Iossifidis, Dane Springmeyer, Daniel Kastl, David Terrativa, Diego González, Dominik Helle, Eike Hinderk Jürrens, Eric Lemoine, Etienne Dube, Fran Boon, François Prunayre, Frank Gasdorf, Gavin Treadgold, Gérald Fenoy, Hamish Bowman, Haruyuki Seki, Henry Addo, Hernan Olivera, Howard Butler, Ian Turton, Jackie Ng, Jan Drewnak, Javier Sanchez, Jesús Gómez, Jim Klassen, Jody Garnett, Johan Van de Wauw, Jorge Sanz, José Antonio Canalejo, Judit Mays, Klokan Petr Pridal, Kristof Lange, Lance McKee, Lars Lingner, Lucía Sanjaime, Mage Whopper, Manuel Grizonnet, Marco Puppin, Mark Leslie, Massimo Di Stefano, Mauricio Miranda, Mauricio Pazos, Michael Owonibi, Mike Adair, Milena Nowotarska, Nathaniel V. Kelso, Ned Horning, Nobusuke Iwasaki, Oliver Tonnhofer, Òscar Fonts, Otto Dassau, Pedro-Juan Ferrer, Pirmin Kalberer, Ricardo Pinho, Ruth Schoenbuchner, Samuel Mesa, Sergio Baños, Simon Cropper, Simon Pigot, Stefan A. Tzeggai, Stefan Hansen, Steve Lime, Thierry Badard, Thomas Baschetti, Trevor Wekel, Valenty Gonzalez, and Yoichi Kayama.

Sponsoring organisations:

LISAsoft provides sustaining resources and staff toward the management and packaging of software onto the Live DVD. http://www.lisasoft.com
Information Center for the Environment at the University of California, Davis provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo Live project. http://ice.ucdavis.edu
The DebianGIS and UbuntuGIS teams provide and quality-assure many of the core packages. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGIS

Launch of Australian Open Technology Foundation

2011-09-02T21:49:00.001+10:00

Another positive step toward the Australian Gov 2.0 agenda will be the launch of the Open Technology Foundation on Wed 14 September 2011.

The Open Technology Foundation (OTF) is an authoritative peak body for the Australian and New Zealand public sector focused on advancing the uptake of open technologies in Government.

My understanding of the goals of the OTF is that they wish to provide support services to government agencies in deploying open source and standards based systems.

US Defence purchasing emphasises Open Technology Development

2011-08-09T10:17:00.010+10:00

The United States secretary of Defence has released the guide, Lessons Learned & Best Practices for Military Software. It provides some of the most practical software purchasing guidelines for governments to date, and strongly emphasises the use of Open Standards, Open Source, and associated development practices.
Below are some highlights from the paper:

Definition of Open Technology Development:

OTD is an approach to software/system development in which developers collaboratively develop and maintain software or a system in a decentralized fashion. OTD depends on open standards and interfaces, open source software and designs, collaborative and distributed online tools, and technological agility.

Key Benefits:

Increased Agility/Flexibility: Because the government has unrestricted access and rights to the source code developed with taxpayer funds, ...
Faster delivery: Because developers only need to focus on changes to, existing software capabilities instead of having to redevelop entire systems, ...
Increased Innovation:...
Reduced Risk: creating new capabilities from scratch is riskier than re-using existing capabilities...
Information Assurance & Security: ...
Lower cost: The first cost to fall by the wayside with OTD is the monopoly rent the government pays to contractors ...

Wise spending:

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said “The gusher [of money] has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.” DoD needs a more efficient software development ecosystem – more innovation at lower cost. OTD squeezes financial waste out of the equation by reducing lock-in and increasing competition.

Innovation is fleeting:

... sole possession of the software gives the U.S. a distinct advantage over its adversaries. However, technological advantage is usually fleeting. Often there is a commercially-developed item available to the public that begins to perform similar functions. As it matures, other organizations begin using this non-GOTS solution, potentially rendering the GOTS solution obsolete. Such cases often impose difficult decisions, as the government must determine if it will pay the heavy asymmetrical cost to switch, or if it will continue “as usual” with its now-obsolete GOTS systems.

Sample questions provided for:

Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) ...
Request for Information (RFI) ...
Request for Proposal (RFP) ...

Success Checklist:

Community first, technology second. Often the military will focus on creating technology solutions when stakeholders aren't onboard or are non-existent. ...
Default to open, closed only when required.
Your program is not special. ... Search for existing IT projects and industries and use their solutions.
Set simple rules about how to share and how to access GOTS. ...
Intellectual rights. Using open source software licenses greatly simplify rights management for the government.
Negotiate and demand unlimited rights in software and source code. Government purpose rights are basically crippled license scheme that should be avoided.
Do not create new software licenses, use existing licenses – they are understood in commercial industry and have been approved by corporate counsels.
Greatly limit co-mingling of government-funded software with privately-funded software (especially if it is patented). If co-mingling is required develop in a modular fashion and require unlimited rights.
[Don't] co-mingle export-controlled and classified software with other software. Developers should instead devise a “plug-in” architecture (where possible) that allows use and sharing of software not restricted by export controls or classification.
Limit incorporating proprietary (especially non-OTS) components that incur licensing fees, especially if the system is designed to depend these components.
Plan and fund management of the project's community and maintenance of source code as an O&M transition element.
...
Use/modify/create open standards, in that order. Verify that the standards used are open; a simple test for openness is to determine if the standard is implemented by open source software.

Federal government and the DoD policy documents:

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) M-04-16’s Software Acquisition. This memo simply states that the existing federal policies on software acquisition apply equally to both proprietary and open source software. Note that there is no preference for proprietary software over OSS.
DoD CIO’s Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS) of October 2009. This policy memo specifically notes that “There are positive aspects of OSS that should be considered when conducting market research on software for DoD use”. It even states conditions under which “Software items, including code fixes and enhancements, developed for the Government should be released to the public (such as under an open source license)”.

License Selection Criteria:

When picking an OSS license, keep the following criteria in mind:
1. Use an existing OSS license;
2. Make sure it is actually OSS. certified as OSS by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and as Free Software by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
3. Use a GPL-compatible license. Most OSS is released using the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or version 3. This does not mean that all OSS must be released using the GPL, but choosing a license incompatible with the GPL (both versions) is very unwise.
...
6. Use a common OSS license.

This article is released under the CC-By-SA 3.0 License.
Image sourced from Open Technology Development paper.

Project Overviews & Quickstarts for New Zealand's SDI Cookbook

2011-07-18T06:19:00.008+10:00

New Zealand's Geospatial Office (NZGO) has been making excellent progress toward developing a national Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). A few of weeks back, NZGO released their first version of a Spatial Data Infrastrastructure (SDI) Cookbook, which “has been developed to provide guidance for the early stages of implementing a national SDI”.
Its sections cover:

Data Stewardship and Custodianship Responsibilities
Introduction to SDI Standards
Making Data Accessible: Characteristics of a Provider Node
Making Data Able to be Found: Characteristics of a Catalogue Node
Using Data Efficiently: How can my Organisation use a SDI? - Participating in a Spatial Data Infrastructure

NZGO has invited vendors and open source projects to populate the final section 6, “How Existing Systems and Products can Contribute to the SDI”. For section 6, it is interesting to note that NZGO has decided to follow the same documentation sourcing process we use for the OSGeo-Live DVD project. For OSGeo-Live, we source consistent Project Overviews and Quickstarts from close to 50 geospatial open source projects. NZGO wanted something similar for the SDI Cookbook, also sourced from multiple projects, but extended to include proprietary applications as well. So NZGO approached us at LISAsoft to tailor the OSGeo-Live documentation sourcing process for their SDI Cookbook purposes. As such, we have provided templates and writing guidelines for Project Overviews and Quickstarts, which makes it easy for projects to author quality and consistent documentation. These have been included in a Request for Information (RFI) that NZGO has sent to vendors, and the resulting responses are intended to be included into NZGO's SDI Cookbook. LISAsoft will also be providing the OSGeo-Live documentation in the format requested by the RFI.
I'm excited to think that the resulting SDI Cookbook has the potential to become a very valuable resource not just for New Zealand, but for other countries as well. But what I'm particularly interested to see is where this SDI Cookbook will go from here. How will the Cookbook be updated and maintained as technologies improve? Will community feedback be collected? If so, how will it be applied and resourced? How will NZGO balance broad crowd sourced information verses quality review cycles? Will the Cookbook be extented into other areas, such as training? Will other countries collaborate with New Zealand in extending and maintaining the Cookbook, or will rival Cookbooks be developed? These are some of the questions I've been raising with NZGO, and which I believe will determine whether the SDI Cookbook will become wildly successful, or will just briefly be a useful document for a while in New Zealand.

Image Source: http://magicalmusings.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cookbook-color1.gif

Memoirs of a Cat Herder - Coordinating OSGeo-Live volunteers

2011-06-17T07:02:00.010+10:00

Presented at the GeoRabble forum.

I’m about to share some insights into how to build a successful open source community.

Actually, a bit more than that - also how to tap into, and coordinate the expertise of seventy-odd world leading developers, packagers, technical writers, project managers, marketers, translators and educators. And have all these people volunteer their time for free.

Because we have actually done all this - in building the OSGeo-Live project. At its core, OSGeo-Live is a DVD pre-configured with close to 50 geospatial Open Source applications, along with accompanying data and documentation, available in multiple languages. It is used in workshops and is handed out at conferences all around the world. I think I'm safe in claiming that in 3 years, OSGeo-Live has grown into a highly successful project, and that we have a learned a number of key lessons worth sharing.

We started OSGeo-Live in 2008 with the aim of building a DVD of geospatial open source which was to be handed out at the international conference for free and open source software for geospatial, or FOSS4G. The FOSS4G conference provides an attractive international marketing pipeline that we could offer projects. And as some of us were on the FOSS4G organising committee we were able to say, "if you get your application installed on OSGeo-Live, then we will hand this DVD out to all attendees at this highly targeted conference".

We laid out a very clear vision of our target deliverable - namely a stable release of Open Source and accompanying marketing documentation. This clear and simple goal helped us many times by providing a framework to test the multitude of decisions that are inevitably encountered in such a project.The process of building our first version of OSGeo-Live involved installing geospatial applications on a base ubuntu distribution. We followed install instructions, configured applications, resolved dependencies and conflicts, asked questions on email lists, and finally, after much hard work, we produced our first release for the 2008 FOSS4G conference. This was a very important first step as it showed that we had the commitment to follow through and deliver.

However, it also highlighted a number of our failings. We had followed a fully manual install process, so when the next ubuntu release came out, we had to start the installation process again, from scratch. This was completely unsustainable. We needed to automate the install process, and we needed projects to show us how.

But our first calls for help from projects was embarrassingly underwhelming. You see, the perceived learning curve for a developer to learn the intricacies of packaging was considered unacceptably high and volunteers were not stepping up.

To fix this, we got one of our packagers to write an example install script along with clear, step-by-step instructions. We then went back to developers with the message of "if you can spend a couple of hours writing a short install script which looks like this, then we will market your application on the OSGeo-Live DVD".

Small effort / High Value. And this worked! 28 projects packaged their applications for our 2.0 release.

We followed the same process with documentation, as our first round of documentation was mostly written by developers and as such was quite ... variable. So the Australian Office of Spatial Data Management stepped up and sponsored one of LISAsoft's technical writers to create a template Project Overview, along with writing instructions. We then asked projects to write the documentation, and the technical writer followed up with documentation reviews, then all the documents went through our publishing pipeline in order to produce consistent, quality material. So by applying a template / write / review / publish process, we were able to achieve significant efficiencies by allowing experts to focus only on the bits they do best and thus reduce the cost of contributing.

Another key to our success is that OSGeo-Live doesn't provide free rides for projects. If a project's community doesn't write installers and documentation, then they don't gain the marketing value of OSGeo-Live. This creates the business incentive for projects to help. It also frees up the core OSGeo-Live team to support a multitude of projects.

And by multitude, I mean 50 odd, and 70 odd volunteers, which becomes a project management challenge for a flat organisation structure like ours. To reduce swamping everyone with emails, each project nominates at a contact person to liaise between their project and OSGeo-Live. We use a wiki, issue tracker, email lists, and Google Doc spreadsheets and follow standard project management processes of managing a schedule and tracking status.

The simple statement of "if you want your application on the next release, it needs to be packaged this week" has been a motivating trigger for many of our volunteers to get started.

But the key motivator, along with the fun aspect of working on open source, is that there is a strong business case for each of our contributors to be involved.

Application developers get valuable marketing, and get their documentation reviewed and translated.
Our packagers' jobs are a lot easier because domain expects now take ownership of a large part of the packaging task.
By just sponsoring documentation review, The Australian government's Office of Spatial Data Management gained a 5 to 1 return on investment when creating Project Overviews
Translators gain quality source documentation and marketing pipeline.
LISAsoft, who build geospatial systems using Open Source, have increased public acceptance of Open Source, by helping coordinate OSGeo-Live.
For only the cost of printing, conference and workshop organisors impress delegates by giving them a free, comprehensive DVD of software.
Likewise, the OSGeo Foundation is gets comprehensive, translated documentation of projects which can be put on its website.

Everyone is a winner!

So if come back to my opening statement of "what is required to tap into, and coordinate the expertise of seventy-odd world leading experts, and have them volunteer their time for free?" I guess I'd say:

Start with a clear and compelling vision,
Have a publicly recognised commitment to follow through on the vision,
Ensure that every participant gets more out of the project than they put in,
Avoid giving away free rides,
Use templates and processes to facilitate domain experts working together,
Reduce all barriers that may prevent people from contributing, in particular, by providing step-by-step instructions,
Set a schedule and work to it,
Talk with your community regularly, and promptly answer queries,
And most of all, have fun while you are doing it. Because believe you me, it is hugely rewarding to share the team camaraderie involved in building something that is much bigger and better than you could possibly create by yourself.

Australian Government defines Policy for Opening Public Sector Information

2011-06-01T11:31:00.003+10:00

Australian Government are continuing their Gov 2.0 agenda, by releasing policy defining the Principles on Open Public Sector Information. It focuses on ensuring that "data be freely available, easily discoverable, understandable, machine-readable and reusable".

The principles are:

Open access to information – a default position
Engaging the community
- ... consult the community in deciding what information to publish ...
Effective information governance
Robust information asset management
Discoverable and useable information
- ... published in an open and standards-based format and is machine-readable
- attach high quality metadata ...
Clear reuse rights
- ... the default licence condition should be the Creative Commons BY open license.
Appropriate charging for access
- ... agencies to facilitate public access to information at the lowest reasonable cost.
Transparent enquiry and complaints processes

Press Release: http://www.oaic.gov.au/news/media_release_principles_public_sector_info.html
Policy: http://www.oaic.gov.au/publications/agency_resources/principles_on_psi_short.pdf

Image Source: http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/trinity-college-library-dub.jpg

Secrets of Mashup Design

2011-04-24T17:13:00.001+10:00

This presentation covers high level design tips for building Mashup Websites, presented to surveyors, business people and other members from the Australian Surveying and Spatial Science Institute. It profiles readers and how they interact with web pages, the technical strengths and weaknesses of mashup technologies, which leads into defining best practice for building mashup websites. You can see the full 18 minute presentation below, and at: http://cameronshorter.blip.tv/file/5068745/

A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies

2011-04-01T16:28:00.003+11:00

The Australian government have released a draft of their revised Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies. You can add comments on their blog until 15 April 2011. This guide outlines 3 principles:

1. Agencies will be required to insert a statement into any Request for Tender that they will consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software.

2. Australian Government agencies will require suppliers to consider all types of available software (including but not limited to open source software and proprietary software) when responding to agencies' procurement requests.

3. Australian Government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate.

Image source: http://www.mspmentor.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/open_source.gif

OSGeo-Live 4.5, the Open Source Geospatial DVD, released

2011-03-28T09:21:00.008+11:00

Version 4.5 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection has been released. OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive.Highlights:

45 Quality GeoSpatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured
Quality free world maps
One page overviews and quick starts for all applications
Overviews of key OGC standards
Translations for Greek, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese

Packages:

52º North SOS (Sensor Observation Service) 3.1.1
52º North WPS (Web Processing Service) 2.0 RC6
AtlasStyler (Feature Style Editor) 1.6
deegree (Web Services) 2.3
GDAL/OGR (GeoSpatial Data Translation Tools) 1.7.3
GeoKettle (Business Intelligence) 3.2.0-20090609
Geomajas (Browser GIS Client) 1.8
GeoNetwork (Metadata Catalog) 2.6.3
Geopublisher (Electronic Library Manager) 1.6
GeoServer (Web Service) 2.1rc1
GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) 4.5.1
GpsDrive (GPS Navigation Software) 2.11
GRASS GIS (Fully featured GIS) 6.4.0
gvSIG Desktop (Desktop GIS) 1.10
Kosmo Desktop (Desktop GIS) 2.0
Mapbender (Geoportal Framework) 2.7
MapFish (Web Mapping Framework) 2.0
MapGuide Open Source (Web Service) 2.2.0
Mapnik (Cartographic rendering engine) 0.7.0
MapServer (Web Service) 5.6.6
MapTiler (Tiled Map Publishing) 1.0beta2
Marble (3D desktop globe) 0.9.5
MB-System (Sea floor mapping) 5.2.1880
OpenCPN (Marine GPS navigation) 2.3.1
OpenJUMP GIS (Desktop GIS) 1.4.0.1
OpenLayers (Browser GIS Client) 2.10
osgEarth (Terrain rendering toolkit) 2.0
OpenStreetMap (Tools for mapping the world) 3751
OSSIM (Image Processing) 1.8.10
OTB - ORFEO Toolbox Library (Image Processing) 3.8.0
pgRouting (GIS Tools) 1.05
PostGIS (Spatial Database) 1.5.2
Prune (GPS Track Editing) 10-1 Lucid
Quantum GIS (Desktop GIS) 1.6.0
QGIS mapserver (Web Service) 1.6.0
Rasdaman (Multi-Dimensional Raster Database) 8.1
R Spatial (Statistical Programming) 2.12.1
SAGA (Desktop GIS) 2.0.5
Sahana (Disaster management) Eden 0.5.3
SpatiaLite (Spatial Database) 2.4
uDig (Desktop GIS) 1.2.0
Ushahidi (Crowd Sourced Event Mapping) 2.0.1
Viking (Manage and plot GPS data) 0.9.9
ZOO Project (Web Processing Service) 1.2.0
zyGrib (Weather forecasting) 3.9.9.1

Credits:

Over 60 people have directly helped with OSGeo-Live packaging, documenting and translating, and thousands have been involved in building the packaged software.

Packagers and documenters: Alan Boudreault, Alex Mandel, Alexandre Dube, Andrea Antonello, Anton Patrushev, Astrid Emde, Brian Hamlin, Bruno Binet, Cameron Shorter, Dane Springmeyer, Daniel Kastl, Eike Hinderk Jürrens, Eric Lemoine, Etienne Dube, Fran Boon, François Prunayre, Gavin Treadgold, Gérald Fenoy, Hamish Bowman, Haruyuki Seki, Henry Addo, Ian Turton, Jody Garnett, Johan Van de Wauw, Jorge Sanz, Juan Lucas Domínguez Rubio, Judit Mays, Klokan Petr Pridal, Kristof Lange, Lance McKee, Manuel Grizonnet, Mark Leslie, Massimo Di Stefano, Michael Owonibi, Nathaniel V. Kelso, Pirmin Kalberer, Ricardo Pinho, Sergio Baños, Simon Pigot, Stefan A. Tzeggai, Stefan Hansen, Thierry Badard and Trevor Wekel

Translators: Aikaterini Kapsampeli, Angelos Tzotsos, Anne Ghisla, Argyros Argyridis, Astrid Emde, Christos Iossifidis, Daniel Kastl, Haruyuki Seki, Javier Sanchez, Jorge Sanz, Lars Lingner, Marco Puppin, Massimo Di Stefano, Milena Nowotaska, Nobusuke Iwasaki, Otto Dassau, Ruth Schoenbuchner, Thomas Baschetti, Valenty Gonzalez and Yoichi Kayama

Sponsoring institutions:

LISAsoft provides sustaining resources and staff toward the management and packaging of software onto the Live DVD. http://www.lisasoft.com

Information Center for the Environment at the University of California, Davis provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo Live project. http://ice.ucdavis.edu

The DebianGIS and UbuntuGIS teams provide and quality-assure many of the core packages.

The Australian Government's Office of Spatial Data Management sponsored reviews of software marketing documentation. http://www.osdm.gov.au

Australian Defence embrace interoperablity through standards

2011-03-01T09:51:00.005+11:00

The Australian Defence Geospatial Strategy 2010 outlines how Defence intends to embrace the use of standards within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for delivering geospatial functionality.

The application of Defence geospatial information and technology standards is vital to achieving a geospatially networked force. In order to allow geospatial information to be delivered seamlessly across the network from the strategic to the tactical level the capabilities that Defence acquires in the future must be able to ingest standard data formats. Non-compliance with standards will result in additional costs and delays in the acquisition of systems. Once operational, non-compliant platforms adversely affect interoperability and create an ongoing requirement to convert proprietary data formats into standard data formats resulting in systems that are expensive and unsupportable in the long term. It is important, therefore, that Geospatial Standards, including metadata standards, are collaboratively developed, managed and published across all of Defence.

This move toward standards will be particularly valuable for Australia's long term spatial capabilities as defence initiatives will also benefit geospatial services in government and private sectors.

[Image sourced from the Defence Geospatial Strategy 2010]

Australian government embrace "pro-disclosure" of information

2011-02-24T12:20:00.005+11:00

I've been hearing rumours that many Australian government departments are investigating how to publish their data online. This is justified by an amendment to Australian's Freedom of Information Act, published June 2010, which describes a pro-disclosure culture relating to information.
The changes are explained on the government website:

The objects of the FOI Act are a clear statement of the intention to promote disclosure of information held by government. The objects include to:
give the Australian community access to information by requiring agencies to publish the information, and provide a right of access
contribute to increased participation in government processes and increased scrutiny, discussion and review of government activities
increase recognition that information held by government is a national resource
promote public access to information, promptly and at the lowest reasonable cost.

Source: http://www.oaic.gov.au/foi/what.html#pro_disclosure_culture

Australian government now to actively consider Open Source

2011-01-29T07:23:00.005+11:00

The Australian Government has just released a policy stating that Open Source must be actively considered alongside proprietary Software. It notes:

Australian Government agencies must actively and fairly consider all types of available software (including but not limited to open source software and proprietary software) through their ICT procurement processes.

...

The Government’s previous policy, established in 2005, was one of ‘informed neutrality.’ This meant that agencies took an unbiased position that did not favour open source or proprietary software and procured the solution that was the best ’value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ for their specific requirement. Since then, there has been an increase in the maturity of the open source software products and the use of open source software by governments around the world. In recent years, many governments have revised their policies to increase the adoption of open source software.

This revised Australian Government policy on open source software will ensure that we maintain international best practice and that our purchases of software will continue to reflect best value for money for the Government.

This is a great first step, however, government purchasing practices will continue to inadvertently favour proprietary software until we see guidelines on how to compare the value Open Source and Proprietary Software which includes tools to assess the holistic value of Open Source. This is explained in the article Governments don’t know how to buy free software. A good starting point would be the European Union Guideline for Public administrations on Procurement and Open Source Software.

Goals and schedule for OSGeo-Live 4.5

2010-11-26T07:03:00.003+11:00

We are starting to build the 4.5 OSGeo-Live DVD and want to hear from all included projects, translators, packagers, users, testers or others who wish to help improve OSGeo-Live. OSGeo-Live 4.5 will be released mid March 2011, ready for a number of big GeoSpatial conferences soon after.

Focus on this next release will be on improved Quality and Translating documentation.

Packaged projects - which version?

Could each project please tell us which version is intended to be included. Status is maintained here. Understanding what will, or will not change helps us coordinate reviewers and testers. We will be building from the Xubuntu 10.04 base, which is the same as last release.

If you have a established, stable project which you would like included on OSGeo-Live, then please talk to us about it.

Use Natural Earth dataset for examples

In order to ensure consistency and reduce disk space used, we ask that, where appropriate, examples use the common Natural Earth dataset, as explained here.

Translations

We expect to have main pages, Project Overviews and possibly OGC Standard Overviews translated into multiple languages for this next release. People have already translated much of the documentation into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Greek.

Could all projects please update your English Project Overviews as soon as you can to give translators enough time to translate.

Please contact us if you are able to help with translation, or would like to translate a new language. The process is described here.

Quick Starts

Half the packaged projects had Quick Starts written for the last release (4.0) and we'd like to see Quick Starts for all projects for the next release. One of our users has volunteered to review Quick Starts for usability and help projects capture screen grabs. This is a big job and we'd like to hear from anyone else who'd can help out.

Again, could projects please update Quick Starts early to allow time for review and screen grabs.

User Testing

With ~ 50 applications to be packaged on the next OSGeo-Live, our core OSGeo-Live team have not had time to run all the Quickstart applications. We would really like some help. If you have very little experience with OSGeo software, then all the better, as you would be like a typical first time user of OSGeo-Live.

Running this user testing is one of the best ways to become familiar with the breath of OSGeo Software available. If interested, please join the OSGeo List, and start running Quick Starts as soon as they have been completed by projects.

OGC Standard Overviews

The OGC have already written one page overviews for half the OGC standards and have committed to writing up the remaining standards for then next release. We will be calling on the standards community to help review these standards to ensure they are accurate, clear and understandable.

Key Milestones

24 Jan 2011 Application Overviews ready for Review

31 Jan 2011 Application Feature Freeze

21 Feb 2011 Deliver to User Acceptance Test

14 Mar 2011 Final sent to printers

... full schedule

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-live is an XUbuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and soon to be released USB. You can use OSGeo-Live to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Contact Us?

Website: http://live.osgeo.org

Mailing List: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo

or contact Cameron Shorter directly at: cameronD O TshorterATlisasoftD O Tcom.

EU Guidelines for Public Administrations purchasing software

2010-10-22T09:13:00.007+11:00

The European Union has published excellent, very practical guidelines to support government agencies purchase software. While it is specifically targeted at purchasing Open Source Software, by its own admission, most of the discussion is valid for purchasing Proprietary Software too.
The key message that it describes in business terms, is the importance of using Open Standards in order to adhere to EU purchasing criteria of fair competition, transparency, and long term value for money.
The full guide is available here: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/OSS-procurement-guideline-public-final-June2010-EUPL-FINAL.pdf

Below are some of the highlights I picked out as I was reading it:

Government Business Drivers

Public sector consumers of software have an obligation to support interoperability, transparency and flexibility, as well as economical use of public funds. When it comes to public procurement, the principles applied to the public sector require them to support (and certainly not to harm) competition through their procurement practices.

Pro-Proprietary discrimination

Studies have shown that in practice, much software procurement discriminates between individual vendors, typically in favour of specific proprietary software companies.

E.g. OpenForum Europe, 2008. "OFE Monitoring Report: Discrimination in Public Procurement Procedures for Computer Software in the EU Member States", December. Ghosh, R. A. 2005. "An Economic Basis for Open Standards". FLOSSPOLS project, European Commission.

Proportion of Software Spent

While precise figures for the European public sector are not available, it is worth noting that the share of proprietary packaged software in European software spending is only 19%. Much more is spent on custom built software (52%) and internal software development (29%).

European Commission DG Enterprise, 2006, Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, pp124 (Table 24). Available online at http://flossimpact.eu

Defining Standards

Note that compatibility with previously purchased IT solutions may seem like a very valid technical requirement, but can also be a way of perpetuating the consequences of previous purchasing decisions, perpetuating vendor lock-in and preventing an unbiased procurement based on real organisational needs. Requirements for compatibility with open standards and no proprietary elements, i.e. full compatibility across multiple vendors and producers, increases the freedom of future procurement choices.

Funding drivers for Government

Freed from the obligation of the short term financial cycles of the private sector, public organisations are also obliged to maximise costs effectiveness over the very long term. However, with limited, short-term budget cycles, they need to find a good balance between limiting the initial investments and limiting the overall, long term cost.

Exist Costs

The exit cost is also an important consideration: the cost incurred in migrating to another IT system, which should properly be accounted for as a cost not of the new system being migrated to, but the old system being migrated from. After all, if the old system were based on open standards, migration would not be as expensive, thus the cost of migration is imposed by the current, old system.

...

Software is used to create documents, databases and customised applications that, in the public sector, have a life-time that may be well beyond the originally announced life-time of the procurement procedure for the software. If the software originally purchased makes it difficult to use the documents, databanks and customised applications with similar software from other producers, then there is a high cost in terms of changing from the original software to another software - the exit cost.

...

Buying new software because it is compatible with previously purchased software may seem to save on migration and training costs. But when this software is proprietary, and is not fully based on protocols and standards that are fully and freely supported by other independent vendors, exit costs and associated costs may greatly increase over the long term. The agency's dependence on the proprietary vendor is increased. Thus the apparent short term benefit of compatibility is much reduced when considered over the longer term.

Total Cost of Ownership Studies

Total Costs of Ownership (TCO) is a term often cited in relation to software purchases. However, there are several different methodologies, and few include all the long-term costs involved in software purchases, such as the costs of required regular upgrades, or the exit cost of Guideline on Public Procurement of Open Source Software P. 31 migrating to another software. It is therefore difficult to use TCO studies, or even compare them.
Furthermore, such studies rarely evaluate anything other than quantifiable costs; the benefits of flexibility, independence and transparency while essential to a public organisation, may be qualitative and hard to quantify. Thus, it is advisable to analyse costs and benefits for the needs of the public organisation concerned, over the long term, rather than relying on TCO studies.

Open Source Quality Metrics

A number of EU funded research projects are examining open source quality metrics, such as QUALOSS and SQO-OSS (www.qualoss.org; www.sqo-oss.eu)

Lowering Company Financial Viability for Open Source

The main justification for financial sustainability criteria for software is to ensure that the supplier will be able to provide support as long as the software is being used.
With open source, the availability of the source code assures interoperability, and there is no dependence on the original supplier. If the original supplier goes out of business, the software can still be maintained by others; if others are not maintaining the software, the public agency can hire a third party maintainer. This increased sustainability of open source is justification for lowering the financial sustainability requirements, or lowering their weight in the selection process for tenders for open source software.

Valuing Open Source engagement in selection criteria

Public agencies can also provide indirect support for the development community, by asking tenderers for open source software or services to demonstrate their level of contribution to the appropriate developer community - as part of the selection process, and/or as part of the execution of the contract. In any case, this may be a useful way of determining level of knowledge of the open source software and its community available with the tenderer.

LISAsoft launches training in GeoSpatial Standards and Open Source Technologies

2010-10-07T17:38:00.008+11:00

As reported by Computer World, three out of five technologies predicted to see huge growth in US government over the next four years are “Open Source”, “GeoSpatial” and “Service Oriented Architecture”, as facilitated by the spatial standards from the OGC. The other hot technologies include “Cloud Computing” and “Virtualisation”.

It is not surprising then that Geospatial Open Source technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in job advertisements. As noted by Dean Howell, owner of Spatial Jobs Online and GIS Jobs Australia, “We have had 10 positions recently with specific GeoSpatial Open Source experience required. For each of these we have had limited applicants. We would encourage GIS professionals and job seekers to investigate training in this growing market area.”

However, to date, there have been limited opportunities to obtain structured GeoSpatial Open Source training. This situation is being rectified by LISAsoft who are introducing a range of training courses to address growing demand from industry. Courses cover targeted technical training, as well as a course for Managers and Business Analysts addressing the unique management opportunities and pitfalls introduced when acquiring and using Open Source Software.

Darren Mottolini, a Business Consultant with Landgate explains, “Organisations who manage data infrastructures such as Landagate’s Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP), are joining the world movement toward leveraging spatial standards to share data both between applications and agencies. This strategy minimises duplication of data by allowing efficient sharing of information via standards into any technology platform. Once organisations start using standards, the uptake and use of open source software becomes apparent as it provides an easy base to build common operating platforms across many agencies. SLIP includes a wide range of applications, including many Open Source components.”

“LISAsoft have been providing training in several mainstream open source products for a number of years on request for targeted events”, explains Mark Leslie, one of LISAsoft’s trainers. “In response to positive feedback from these courses, our new training program has now been restructured to emphasis hands-on learning in a collaborative environment. This allows our customers to leave the course with a real, practical knowledge of the subject matter that they can begin to act on right away.”

Cracking ahead at lightening pace are the many advancements in browser based functionality, which now enables tailored “Google Map” type applications to be developed with editing and analysis type functionality that was previously available only in desktop applications. LISAsoft’s course “Web Mapping with OpenLayers” teaches participants how to lever the powerful OpenLayers and GeoExt libraries to build intuitive map based websites.

Providing data to websites is the job of Web Service engines like GeoServer. GeoServer serves maps via OGC standards like WMS, WFS, WCS and more. It is popular due to its intuitive, yet powerful management interface, its conformance to standards, and its robustness. In the “Professional GeoServer” course, participants are taught how to integrate GeoServer with databases, setting up GeoWebCache to provide fast tiled maps, the art of making maps pretty, tuning GeoServer to handle large data volumes, and also how to deploy GeoServer into high reliability production environments.

Spatial data is most effectively stored and manipulated through the functionality of a spatial database, like PostGIS. PostGIS spatially enables the Open Source PostgreSQL database, in the same manner as Oracle Spatial spatially enables Oracle. PostGIS is mature and robust, fast, widely deployed, and is often selected for large systems as it is not license bound when scaling. LISAsoft’s “Spatially enabled with PostGIS” course teaches PostGIS’s geographic data structures and functions, loading data and tuning the database.

Maintaining good metadata records makes data much easier to find, and consequently saves organisations money by ensuring datasets are not purchased multiple times and avoids expensive recollection of existing data. However, GIS managers are challenged by trying to get data generators to fill in and maintain metadata effectively. Australia and New Zealand have been at the forefront of research into metadata, including a range of automated collection and management techniques. LISAsoft’s “Metadata with GeoNetwork” explains how to deploy GeoNetwork, how an administrator can tailor GeoNetwork’s metadata entry templates for specific user communities, how to make use of automated data entry techniques, and how to harvest data from external sources.

Targeted desktop applications which require mapping can be customised from uDig, a Java based desktop client, which is built upon the widely used Eclipse framework. LISAsoft provide a training course for Java programmers, teaching geospatial concepts, a walkthrough of the Eclipse programming framework, hands on exercises, and a complete tour of functionality from disk to display and printing.

How to build best practice, future proof Spatial Data Infrastructures is covered by LISAsoft’s “Standards based Spatial Data Infrastructure design” course. This course is specifically targeted at architects and spatial data managers responsible for designing, building and deploying spatial systems. It includes practical overviews of the key Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) standards, how to design systems using the standards, when to use the standards, and where standards are still lacking or should be avoided. Attendees will have hands on experience building applications using standards compliant Open Source applications.

Further information at http://lisasoft.com/training

This article was published in the October 2010 edition of Position Magazine.

Script for "How to sell Open Source to Government"

2010-09-27T12:53:00.005+10:00

At the recent Open Source Asia/Pacific conference, I presented on the tricky subject of "How to sell Open Source Software to Government", which can equally be read as "What logic can I use to convince my boss that installing Open Source is a good idea?".

The presentation is recorded on this 25 minute video and the script is copied below.

"Selling Open Source to Government"

In 2005 the Australian Government published guidelines describing how to buy Open Source Software.

Despite the potential benefits, however, government uptake of open source is surprisingly low.

Why is that? Well that is what I'll be speaking about today.

What factors lead to governments favouring proprietary applications?
What factors drive government purchasing decisions?
What are the strengths of Open Source?
How can we ensure that these strengths are recognised by purchasers?
And how do companies like ours successfully sell Open Source to government, anyway?

Hi, my name is Cameron Shorter, and I'm the GeoSpatial Business Development Manager at LISAsoft.

At LISAsoft we have carved a niche for ourself by being experts in all things GeoSpatial,

in GeoSpatial Standards,
in GeoSpatail Open Source,
in Infrastructure and Hardware,

and we do all this locally, here in Australia and New Zealand, and it is worth noting that being local is an advantage for us Open Source companies.

Like many of our staff at LISAsoft, I've been involved in a number of Open Source projects, and led few of them. Most recently, we have been involved in the collaborative development of a LiveDVD containing 42 preconfigured GeoSpatial Open Source Applications along with associated marketing material, and we have been using this DVD at conferences around the world to promote our Open Source applications.

Now, before we can define a formula for success, we need to understand the challenges we face convincing Governments to buy Open Source.

We need to be clear about the value of Open Source, and how to effectively measure that value. Once we know how to communicate the value we can then help government purchasers include selection criteria which foster the growth of these collaborative technologies.

And of course, I'm talk about what we as an industry can do to make our Open Source offerings more attractive to government.

Lets start with what governments look for:

At the root of government accountability is the need to address the Triple bottom line.

value for the Community
value for the Environment
value for Money

This translates down to project selection criteria based around:

Fit for purpose
Value for Money
Low risk

So now lets ask what is so great about Open Source.

You pay for the software development once, and after that, its free, for everyone. Well, it is licence free.
Following on from this: Others are actively encouraged to improve and extend your software, and depending on licence, these improvements are usually given away for free as well.
Next, because the software is available for free, it is hard to apply vendor lock in tactics. Governments can change their support company without being forced to change their software. And this reduces long term project risk.

So far, I probably haven't told you much that you don't already know.

What we need to do now, is explain these strengths of Open Source in government purchasing terms, and introduce practical steps to promote Open Source Software.

Lets start by looking at one of the dark sides of proprietary selling. Namely Vendor dependence, or vendor lock in.

If an agency moulds its business processes around one product, and integrates key applications around the proprietary interfaces to this same product, then the agency becomes dependant upon this product.

This is called vendor lock in, and any government purchaser who has any grey will be able to cite examples of how they have been burnt by vendors who have forced them to pay increased licence fees, or have had forced upgrade cycles, are who have been left hanging with an unsupported product which the vendor has deemed to have reached end-of-life.

The key solution to avoiding vendor lock-in is to build applications upon Open Standards and this is an easy sell to government. Most agencies will support the use of Open Standards, as they see standards as key to reducing medium to long term risk of their projects.

Different sectors have reached different levels of maturity for standards. Our GeoSpatial sector have developed some very mature and widely adopted standards and this has been valuable for creating opportunities for Open Source.

Because once you break the proprietary silos, it then makes economic sense to replace components of the silo, bit by bit, with Open Source equivalents.

So lesson number 1:

Promote the value of Open Standards for reducing vendor lock-in, and hence for reducing long term project risk.

Also, ensure that your Open Source applications are standards compliant.

Now lets talk about some the standard gripes that people have with Open Source.

I'm sure that many of you have heard comments like:

"I like the idea of Open Source, but what other government agencies are actually using these same applications you're recommending to me?"

"We've thought about Open Source, but who do we call, who can we blame, when things go wrong?"

You see, only alpha-geeks purchase software, everyone else purchases products.

And in particular, governments purchase products. Because in order for software to be valuable, it need to address all the implementation and risk requirements that purchasers are looking for:

These include:

Support
Case Studies
Training
Warranty and Certification that the application actually works as specified
And a hefty wad of user documentation

And that brings us to lesson number 2:

We in the Open Source industry need to sell products not software.

If you want government to deploy your favourite Open Source application, make sure there is an established company providing commercial support and training for the software. Presenting at this conference are many of the vendors who provide Open Source products, and also something that we at LISAsoft are launching for the GeoSpatial sector.

Now so far, I've been talking about Open Source applications as if you can take them out of the box and they will work straight away. Sort of like Microsoft Word, or the Open Office suite. And while some applications do fit into that category, most large government purchases require require non trivial customisation in order get new applications to integrate with existing systems. And that is what us Systems Integrators get involved in.

In this systems integration market, emerging Open Source applications are typically pitted against established proprietary applications. Usually both Open Source and Proprietary proposals need to develop new functionality to meet project requirements.

And this is where we it is very important for governments to get project selection criteria right, if they wish to give Open Source a fair chance during selection.

As mentioned earlier, Open Source is free once developed, so Open Source developers need to cover development costs up front. Proprietary vendors can charge less up front, then charge an expensive maintenance fee afterwards.

So lesson 3 is:

Ensure that purchasers evaluate the cost of the project over 5 or more years.

Next, we have already discussed the risk associated with a project being dependant upon an application. Purchasers should consider the full lifecycle of the project, including end-of-life. What will happen if the vendor stops supporting this application, or decides to apply unacceptable licence costs?

Of course, Open Source has an excellent story for these questions. Firstly, licence costs are free, so a stable old application can keep on working in the background without any licence fees required.

Second, governments can change their support company without changing their software. And this keeps the support companies honest.

Third, if my support company goes out of business, there is no licence restrictions to stop me going and hiring another company.

Fourth, your Open Source application is probably standards compliant, so you should be able to replace it with another standards compliant product.

So this brings us to Lesson 4:

Encourage purchasers to consider exit costs when they purchase software.

The next huge benefit of free software, is that once written, it can be used by, and benefit, many more communities than just the sponsoring agency. This is particularly pertinent to government which has thousands of government departments.

An Open Source application developed by one government department, will likely be of benefit to many other government departments. And the application will also likely be valuable to community groups that the government represents.

So Lesson 5 is that governments should assess the value of their purchases against the needs of the whole community, not just against the needs of the particular agency. If this one criteria were widely adopted by government, I predict that the majority of applications purchased by government would be Open Source.

And this is probably where we in the industry can help the most. You see, the Open Source industry is excellent at collaboration. Collaboration, and sharing your workload with external developers is exactly what makes Open Source so successful.

So Lesson 6 is to help governments find like minded agencies who would all benefit from the Open Source solution. At LISAsoft, we have been quite successful with this approach, partly because government agencies are already quite familiar with collaborating with each other to share development of proprietary solutions.

But if we limit our collaboration to just working with organisations that we can engage before we start a project, then we miss the core success factor of Open Source. Namely, if you have useful software, and you give it away as Open Source, then others will use and improve the software, and you, original sponsor, will benefit from these enhancements.

This core principle has been well understood for 20 years or so, and is basis for almost all successful Open Source projects, so why is it that Governments don't use it?

Basically, it comes down to the fact governments do not have the tools to assess the potential value of collaborative opportunities.

Governments need to make use of "Opportunity Management" to assess the value of collaboration.

"Opportunity Management" is the same as "Risk Management" but with the numbers reversed. Instead of identifying what could possibly go wrong, and then applying mitigation strategies to reduce the chance of the things going wrong, with "Opportunity Management", you identify what could possibly go right, and then deploy enablement strategies to give the Opportunity every chance of success.

For instance, I've about to build a super-duper widget which will be useful for governments and communities around world. I expect that if I spend an extra $20,000 Open Sourcing this application, then there is a 90% chance that some of these potential users will join my development team, and extend the application, adding another $300,000 worth of valuable.

So this brings us through to Lesson number 7:

When proposing a Collaborative Opportunity like Open Source, be sure to spell out the value in financial terms using "Opportunity Management".

Of course, Open Source is just one of the uses of collaboration in successful web based businesses.

Tim O'Reilly defined the key design patterns for a successful web business and called it web 2.0. Tim's Web 2.0 defines such things things as crowd sourcing information from your users in order to significantly reduce the cost of collecting and maintaining data.

Now the Australian government has actually been absorbing the lessons of Web 2.0 into government thinking, which they have coined Gov 2.0, and I understand that we will be hearing more about this from Pia this afternoon.

This Gov 2.0 has a focus on taking the collaborative and participatory practices into government in order to make governments more effective at engaging the community.

And this is good news for us in Open Source, because it is legitimising the value of collaborative technologies like Open Source, which makes it easier for us to sell Open Source right across Government.

As discussed earlier, Open Source changes the monetisation points in the sales cycle. Instead of paying a large company for software licences, which is then used to support an overseas software development team, you instead pay local developers and systems integrators to provide support and customisation.

And this takes us to lesson 8. Governments usually wish to promote local industry, and by promoting Open Source, they will also be advantaging the local software industry.

Even Leybourn explained another variant on this message in an earlier presentation, noting that in the business intelligence domain, it is more important to invest in people than in technology, which is one of the reasons why he prefers to use Open Source Software, and use the saved licence fees to invest in a better quality team.

So in Summary,

Promote Open Standards in order to reduce long term risk and break vendor lock-in
Sell Products, not Software
Evaluate value over the full life cycle of the project
Consider exit costs of solution
Consider value to whole of government and greater community
Look for Partners
Use "Opportunity Management" to describe the collaborative value of Open Source.
Open Source promotes local industry
Prioritise investment in people over technology

How to sell Open Source to Government

2010-09-18T18:01:00.006+10:00

Video of the best GeoSpatial Open Source - OSGeo-Live

2010-09-03T10:50:00.002+10:00

Click to Play

Version 4.0 of the OSGeo Live GIS software collection has been released, along with a "teaser" 25 minute video describing the 42 contributing GeoSpatial Open Source applications.

Jody Garnett will be providing a much better, more detailed, 90 minute presentation at the start of FOSS4G next week. Don't miss it!

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. The applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive.

Homepage: http://live.osgeo.org

Video
http://cameronshorter.blip.tv/file/4078371/

Highlights

42 of the best GeoSpatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured.
One page overviews for all projects
Overviews of key OGC standards
Many application Quick Start documentation

Packages

52°North WPS 2.0.0
AtlasStyler 1.5
deegree 2.3
GeoKettle 3.2.0-20090609
Geomajas 1.6.0
GeoNetwork 2.4.3
Geopublisher 1.5
GeoServer 2.0.2
GMT 4.5.1
GpsDrive 2.11
GRASS GIS 6.4.0rc6
gvSIG 1.10
Kosmo 2.0
Mapbender 2.6.2
Mapfish 1.2
MapGuide Open Source 2.2.0
Mapnik 0.7.0
Mapserver 5.6.5
MapTiler 1.0beta2
Marble 0.9.2
MB System 5.1.2
OpenJUMP 1.3
OpenLayers 2.9.1
OpenCPN 2.1.0
OpenStreetMap editors and tools
osgEarth 1.3
Ossim/OssimPlanet 1.8.6
pgRouting 1.03svn
PostGIS 1.5
QuantumGIS 1.5.0
QGIS mapserver 0.7
R geostatistics 2.11.1
Sahana 0.6.4
SAGA GIS 2.0.4
SpatiaLite 2.4
Tilecache
uDig 1.2.0
Ushahidi 1.1.0
Viking 0.9.9
zyGrib 3.9.2
ZOO Project 1.0
Xubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

I'm giving away my discount tickets to "Business centric Open Source conference"

2010-08-19T09:15:00.007+10:00

I'll be speaking on the tricky subject of "How to sell Open Source Software to Government", which can equally be read as "What logic can I use to convince my boss that installing Open Source is a good idea?".
This will be just one of the Open Source for Business presentations at the OSSPAC conference here in Sydney 13 & 14 of September 2010. http://www.osspac.com/
As a speaker, I've also managed to score a few $100 discount passes to the conference which I don't have use for. I'd hate to see them go to waste. Please contact me if you think you can make use of the pass.

OGC Webinar describing advances in GeoSpatial Standards during OWS-7 testbed

2010-08-13T15:35:00.004+10:00

The results of this year’s main OGC testbed for GeoSpatial Standards development will be presented during an Australian / New Zealand time-zone webinar this coming
Friday 20 August 2010 at:

2:00pm: New Zealand
12 noon: Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Hobart
12:30pm: Adelaide, Darwin
10:00 am: Perth

For information and registration, see https://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/100819_ows7_asiapac_webinar.php

Australian and New Zealand has played a key role in this testbed.

LISAsoft, Landgate, Landcare Research and CSIRO extended a Web Processing Service client to address testbed scenarios for supporting standardised algorithm access. Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjNCWnZztmM
LISAsoft and CSIRO tested and recommended improvements for AIXM, an Aeronautical profile of Geographic Markup Language (GML). Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgQmrcZ-1M
LISAsoft defined the schema for the upcoming standard for OWS Context, a standard for storing all layers and other information on a map in a configuration file.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate specifications into OGC's Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release.

The recently concluded testbed for OGC Web Services (OWS-7) covered: interoperability architectures, enhancements to existing and candidate standards for sensors, video change detection, database synchronization, information cataloguing, web processing services, event architecture and aviation.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/

LISAsoft is a Systems & Software Integration company with targeted expertise in GeoSpatial Standards, Spatial Data Infrastructures and Open Source Software.
http://lisasoft.com

Using Web Processing Services in the OGC's testbed: OWS-7

2010-08-13T14:08:00.004+10:00

LISAsoft, in conjunction with Landgate, Landcare Research and CSIRO, recently deployed and extended a Web Processing Service client as part of the OGC's OWS-7 standards development testbed.
A Web Processing Service (WPS) provides a standard interface for applying spatial algorithms.It is particularly useful for:

Reducing complexity in data processing by providing plug & play algorithms.
Enabling processes to be chained together.
Enabling processing to be deployed once then used everywhere.
Streamlined maintenance. Processes/models are maintained in a central place by the entities who created them.
Taking advantage of high-speed computational capabilities on a central server.
Easy and interoperable access to highly complex processes, such as climate change models.

The following 3 minute video provides a demonstration of the WPS client we developed being used with the OWS-7 scenario.

Tools for developing & validating GML Application Profiles using AIXM

2010-08-13T12:19:00.005+10:00

LISAsoft and CSIRO recently concluded validation of an Aeronautical profile for Geographic Markup Language (GML), called AIXM (Aeronautical Information Exchange Model), as part of the OGC testbed OWS-7.
Results of the project have been summarised in a 3 minute video which covers:

Tools for building and refactoring the AIXM application schema.
Tools for building Schema and Schematron validation rules from the AIXM UML/XMI model.
Tools for validating Web Feature Services and GML against the Schema and Schematron rules to confirm they conform to the AIXM model.

See below for the video:

OGC and OSGeo collaborate on documentation

2010-07-27T18:26:00.004+10:00

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) will develop conforming documentation for key OGC standards and geospatial open source application descriptions. Both sets of documentation will be available online and on the OSGeo-Live DVD, to be released at the international conference for Free and Open Source Software, FOSS4G, in September 2010, in Barcelona, Spain (http://2010.foss4g.org).

“We are happy to work with OSGeo to meet the needs of open source developers,” explained Steven Ramage, Executive Director, Marketing and Communications, OGC, “because wider use of OGC standards increases interoperability, innovation and market growth, and this benefits developers and users of both open source and proprietary software.”

According to Cameron Shorter, coordinator of the OSGeo-Live project,

“OGC standards underpin our GeoSpatial Open Source applications, and hence OGC documentation will greatly enhance the Open Source documentation being developed.”

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a DVD, USB drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux that is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust, open source, geospatial software. The applications can be trialed without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from the DVD or USB drive. OSGeo Live is handed out at conferences around the world, and is regularly used by students in geospatial workshops and tutorials. (http://live.osgeo.org)

About OSGeo
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. (http://www.osgeo.org/)

About the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®)
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 395 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

One week till OSGeo-Live Feature Freeze

2010-06-28T06:54:00.004+10:00

In one week, we will be locking in software versions on this year's OSGeo-Live DVD, which will be handed to every delegate at FOSS4G 2010, as well as many other Geospatial events. At the OSGeo stand at conferences, the OSGeo-Live DVD is by far the most sought after marketing item we have, with delegates consistently asking for extra copies.

So please ensure that all install scripts are pointing at the latest stable software, and if you wish to see your favorite stable OSGeo application on OSGeo-Live, then contact us right now.

Resources

How to get a project on OSGeo-Live
Schedule
- 5 July 2010: Feature freeze
- 2 August 2010: Final delivery for User Acceptance Test

About OSGeo-Live

Building OSGeo Live DVD for FOSS4G 2010

2010-06-12T21:58:00.005+10:00

We have started building this year's OSGeo-Live DVD which will be handed out to every delegate at FOSS4G 2010, as well as many other Geospatial events.

This year, OSGeo-Live will be even sexier, more useful and professional by including:

consistent Application Overviews
Application Quick Starts
A common world dataset
An overview of all applications on the LiveDVD in a presentation at FOSS4G 2010

We want to hear from:

Established GeoSpatial projects who wish to include their project in OSGeo-Live
Workshop leaders or trainers who wish to use OSGeo-Live. We'd like to know how we can help you.
Project representatives please:
- Update application version in application spreadsheet then update your test script to ensure it installs in Xubuntu 10.04.
- Comment on whether our draft templates for Project Overview and Quick Start fit your projects.

Milestones

25 July 2010: Documentation template ready for use
5 July 2010: Feature freeze
2 August 2010: Final delivery for User Acceptance Test

..more

About OSGeo-Live

Contact Us?

Website: http://live.osgeo.org

Mailing List: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo

or contact Cameron Shorter directly at: cameronD O TshorterATlisasoftD O Tcom.

Governments don't know how to buy Free Software

2010-06-12T04:52:00.005+10:00

For the last ten years, web-based communities have achieved significant advancement in productivity by using collaborative work practices, such as open source software, open standards, and organic data sharing.
Open source offers a diverse range of applications which are robust, feature-rich and compliant with current standards. Indeed, the government has publicly recognised its benefits for years. For example, the 2005 release of the Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies notes that “[Open Source] has the potential to lead to significant savings in Government.”
Despite the potential benefits, however, government uptake of open source is surprisingly low. Why? Because government purchasing practices inadvertently hinder the procurement of open source. Government purchasing guidelines favour business models that build closed systems and apply lock-in tactics over the sharing and collaborative business practices used by open source communities.
Development costs for open and proprietary software are similar – the difference is in the sales model. Once written, open source software is free! Gratis! Costs nothing! This does not mean that geek-fairies write beautiful software in the middle of the night out of the goodness of their hearts for no money at all (although that does happen). With the standard open business model, vendors are paid to maintain, improve and support the software. Upon completion, the software is free for everyone to use and improve – including the vendor’s competitors. Consequently, open source vendors tend to charge their first client the full development cost.
In contrast, proprietary vendors are able to absorb initial software development costs because they re-sell product licenses multiple times, effectively spreading development costs across multiple customers. This means that when government agencies only consider the needs of their own agency, and ignore potential cross-agency benefits, proprietary vendors will always have an advantage over their open source counterparts.
Once a vendor has an established product they can charge a premium for the claimed reduction in development risk. Then, once an agency becomes dependant upon an application, possibly due to a dependence on the vendor’s proprietary formats, it becomes commercially favourable for a proprietary vendor to increase license fees. These lock-in tactics don’t apply to open business, as customers can replace their product support, without replacing their products.
For example, let’s consider asset management. In Australia there are 610 local councils and hundreds of state and national government agencies who all need software to manage their assets – they need to monitor, maintain and upgrade their roads, street signs, parks and buildings. Numerous proprietary applications have been sold and customised to support each agency’s specific requirements, which means that in effect, the government has paid for the same functionality, many times over, to different vendors. Moreover, it is usually in the vendor’s best interest to apply lock-in tactics and hamper integration with competing products, further reducing potential collaborative benefits.
Compare this business model with the ParkInfo Asset Management System LISAsoft is building for Queensland’s Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM). ParkInfo uses open standards and is built upon, and will likely contribute back, to open source software. Future government asset management systems will be able to use and extend relevant components of the ParkInfo application. Consequently the ParkInfo application is significantly more valuable to government than a proprietary application would have been.
Unfortunately this significant cross-agency value of open source is usually not considered by government when purchasing software. The open source ParkInfo project was selected over its proprietary competitors purely on the government’s guidelines of fit for purpose, low risk and value for money.
A strong commercial incentive for DERM to open source their ParkInfo code is that external users will likely use and improve the ParkInfo codebase, which in turn will benefit Queensland Parks. The practice of giving code away so that others will improve it is justified financially using “opportunity management”. Like risk management, opportunity management entails identifying potential opportunities, valuing them, then deploying enablement strategies to increase the probability that the opportunity will be realised.
Adoption of open source benefits communities as well. When the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk installed 1,700 school computers with the Open Office suite, parents didn’t need to purchase software licences for their children to do their homework. Similarly, government agencies can make open source software and expertise freely available to community groups and businesses they interact with.
If government purchasing guidelines factored in community and whole-of-government value provided by each purchase, the collaborative value of these developments would lead to a significant increase in the deployment of open standards and open source software due to the collaborative value these development methodologies bring.
Australia would do well to follow the lead of other national governments are who are revamping their purchasing guidelines to realise the benefits of open source and open standards. For instance, in 2009 the UK re-released their Policy for Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use which in summary states:

Government procurement will fairly consider open source solutions alongside proprietary ones and will take into account total cost of ownership, including exit and transition costs.
The Government will, wherever possible, avoid becoming locked in to proprietary software.
The Government will require solutions to comply with open standards.
Where appropriate, general purpose software developed for government will be released on an open source basis.

The UK policy and associated action plan would be a good template for Australia to build upon. I suggest the following inclusions:

Government procurement will consider the cross-agency and community value to government purchases.
Government procurement will evaluate the potential return on investment government would likely receive by Open Sourcing developed code.

There is huge potential for governments to reduce costs and increase community value by embracing the collaborative technologies of Open Source and Open Standards. But in order to achieve this, governments need to make fundamental changes to funding practices in order to recognise the cross-agency value of collaborative technologies.

This article was published in the June 2010 edition of Position Magazine.

Report from OSGeo stand at the Federation of Surveyors conference

2010-04-17T21:35:00.005+10:00

The international Federation of Surveyors conference finished last week in Sydney, attracting well over 2000 delegates and by all accounts was a great success. Congratulations to the organisors.
I spent most of my time at the OSGeo booth promoting Open Source and Open Standards, presented a 15 minute lightening presentation titled "GeoSpatial Open Source for Surveyors", http://blip.tv/file/3503561, and attended some Open Source presentations.
At the booth I was helped by Chris Body (OGC Standards representative at GeoSciences Australia), Darren Motollini (West Australia's Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP)), Gertrude Pieper (FLOSS-Cadastre Expert Group at FAO/FIG Commission) and Lee Hughes from LISAsoft. We were armed with:

An OSGeo Banner
A stack of OSGeo Live DVDs
Some OSGeo fliers let over from FOSS4G 2009
Some 52 North fliers we inherited after FOSS4G
As well as some Open Source Support fliers from LISAsoft.

The LiveDVDs were very popular with everyone we talked to at the stand. I heard reports of people being seen showing the LiveDVD to people they were sitting next to while watching presentations. And we had a number of people coming up to the stand asking for the LiveDVD. I was concerned we were going to run out of DVDs, so I ensured we only had 10 or so DVDs on display at a time.
One of the 52 North fliers had "Open Source" prominently displayed on the front, and people were picking up this flier first, rather than looking at some of the other fliers, which probably would have been more appropriate for their particular use cases. Lesson: People recognise "Open Source" and don't recognise "OSGeo", so marketing material should adjust emphasis to include Open Source in a large font.
There were many surveyors keen to try out open source, who were asking for direction as to which desktop GIS tools they should use. Lesson: There appears to be a relatively untapped market for Surveyors looking for Open Source Software, for anyone prepared to step up and support this industry.

2 International GeoSpatial Standards meetings coming to Australia

2010-04-08T15:54:00.005+10:00

The two key organisations leading the development of geospatial standards internationally—the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee on Geographic information/Geomatics (ISO/TC211)—will be holding their Technical Meetings in Australia in November and December 2010.

This is the first time for over 10 years these two organisations are meeting in the same location, and it is also the first time that OGC Technical Committee has met in Australia. This is in recognition of Australia’s role in contributing to International Standard’s development and the leadership shown in promoting the adoption of these standards.

ISO/TC211 and OGC have developed a range of standards to advance geospatial interoperability, enabling spatial data and information to interact with relevant services and also to interact with other business processes in a seamless and integrated manner. In Australia, the application of these standards is essential in developing such capabilities as national water accounting, the Australian and New Zealand Spatial Marketplace and numerous other government and commercial capabilities.

Any user of spatial capability benefits from the ISO and OGC standards in numerous ways and as an early adopter of many of these standards, Australian organisations have developed considerable knowledge of these standards. Australia has played a role in developing these standards and can continue to play a significant role in their ongoing development. Australia’s influence in this area is acknowledged by both ISO and OGC through their holding of their critical technical meetings in Australia this year.

LISAsoft are proud to be one of Australia's key supporters of OGC standards development through our participation in OGC testbeds and standards writing projects, and welcome the International community to join us in Australia.

“Standards are the foundation of the spatial capabilities we use across government, commercial, research and education sectors. The concept of sharing spatial resources which is undertaken through standards-based interoperability technologies would not be possible without the efforts of ISO and OGC. Standards are usually well hidden from most users of spatial technologies, but it is essential that we understand the role they play and also that the Australian spatial community continues to actively support both their ongoing development and the adoption in our evolving systems. Australia is fortunate to be the location for these significant meetings and will hopefully take full advantage of having this body of knowledge in the country.”

Ben Searle General Manager

Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management

OGC Technical Meeting

Sydney, 29 November – 3 December 2010

Contact: Dr David Lemon

ISO/TC211 Meeting

Canberra, 6–10 December 2010

Contact: Chris Body

OSGeo Live DVD and Virtual Machine released

2010-03-29T19:06:00.007+11:00

The Geospatial LiveDVD team is pleased to announce version 3.0 of the OSGeo GeoSpatial Live DVD and Virtual Machine, code named Arramagong.

From the Arramagong LiveDVD, you can try the best of GeoSpatial Open Source Software(OSS) without installing any applications on your computer. As a royalty free, reference release with fully tested and configured OSS stack, the LiveDVD is ideal for training, demonstration and public outreach.

The LiveDVD is based on XUbuntu 9.10 so it can be run on most computers simply by rebooting the computer with the DVD inserted. The Arramagong LiveDVD also comes with Windows and Macintosh installers for many of the GeoSpatial applications too.

Highlights from this 3.0 release include:

34 of the best GeoSpatial Open Source applications included.
14 new applications added since release 2.0, at FOSS4G 2009
13 applications updated
Formalised testing introduced for all packages as part of the release process
Plus lots of general improvements and fixes

Downloads:

http://download.osgeo.org/livedvd

Packages:

AtlasStyler SLD editor and Geopublisher :: 1.4 (new)
deegree WMS, WFS, WCS and iGeoPortal :: 2.2
GDAL :: 1.6.3
GeoKettle :: 3.2.0-20090609
Geomajas :: 1.4.2 (new)
GeoNetwork :: 2.4.2
GeoServer :: 2.0.1
GMT: The Generic Mapping tools :: 4.4.0 (new)
GpsDrive :: 2.10pre7
GRASS GIS :: 6.4.0rc5
gvSIG :: 1.9 stable
Kosmo :: 2.0 RC1
Mapfish :: 1.2 (new)
Mapnik :: 0.6.1 (new)
Mapserver :: 5.6.1
MapTiler :: 1.0 beta2
Marble :: 0.8.1
MB System :: 5.1.2
Octave Mapping Toolbox :: 3.0 / 1.0.7 (new)
Open Jump :: 1.3
Open Layers :: 2.8 (new)
OpenCPN :: 1.3.6 (new)
OpenStreetMap editors and tools :: JOSM svn1788, Gosmore svn20090624 (new)
osgEarth :: 1.3 (new)
Ossim/OssimPlanet :: 1.8.3 (new)
pgRouting :: 1.04
Postgres/PostGIS :: 8.4/1.4
PROJ.4 :: 4.7.0 (new)
QuantumGIS :: 1.4.0
R geostatistics :: 2.10.1
SpatiaLite :: 2.4.0 (new)
uDig :: 1.2RC1
Unofficial gvSIG Mobile for Linux :: 0.1.6 (new)
Xubuntu :: 9.10

Interested?

You can find more details about the project on our wiki at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc

Us packagers are keen to help projects make use of the next release of the Live DVD at this year's OSGeo FOSS4G conference, http://2010.foss4g.org. Can you use the Live DVD in your presentations, tutorials or workshops? Talk to us about it.

OSGeo Live DVD joins Google Summer of Code

2010-03-23T08:41:00.004+11:00

Us packagers at the OSGeo Live DVD project are pleased to announce that we have joined other OSGeo projects in offering students the opportunity to get paid and mentored creating great Geospatial Open Source Software as part of the Google Summer of Code program.

From the Live DVD, you can trial the best GeoSpatial Open Source Software without installing any applications on your computer. It is ideal for use in training courses and handing out to people wanting to try GeoSpatial Open Source for the first time.

We are looking for keen developers to help us improve our cross project infrastructure, in particular focusing on quality through the development of systematic testing processes. This will be a great opportunity for students who would like to gain a breath of knowledge across the GeoSpaital Open Source development stack.

More details at:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_GSoC_2010

Does your favourite OSGeo application work on the LiveDVD?

2010-03-05T09:43:00.003+11:00

This weekend, we will be cutting our last release candidate of the 3.0 LiveDVD which is targeted to be handed out at at number of spatial conferences in the April->July 2010 time period.
The DVD is looking really good, we have updated a number of packages, as well as improvement the look and feel.
Our only problem is that us packagers don't have the expertise to verify that each of the applications have been installed and runs correctly, and we are asking for help to document 10 to 20 test steps for each package.
Could we please get some help filling in test steps for each project here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_Testing
We would like people to use the template format here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_Testing#template
Deegree has filled out an excellent set of steps as an example here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_Testing#deegree
We will take any test steps that people can provide us. Feel free to update existing steps, as we are aware that some are based against old versions of the DVD and don't follow the template.
If you have downloaded the one of the 3.0 DVDs, as per: http://download.osgeo.org , then please write test steps from there.
Alternatively, you can write against the click2try 2.0 browser based viewer of the Virtual Machine, as explained here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc#Click2Try:_run_from_browser
Alternatively, use a default install of the software you have on your computer, which should be similar to the LiveDVD install.
Lastly, thanks in advance for your help. Providing these testing steps helps us provide a quality DVD we can all be proud to hand out at conferences.

FOSS4G Registration Metrics

2010-02-27T22:11:00.004+11:00

With excitement building around the 2010 conference for Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial, http://2010.foss4g.org, I think it is timely to share registration metrics from previous conferences (from 2006 to 2009).

Some key highlights from the metrics are:

FOSS4G traditionally attracts ~ 50% of its delegates from the locally hosted country, and up to 75% of its delegates from the local region. This highlights the value of moving the FOSS4G conference around the world as it boosts exposure to local communities. This metric also helps predict attendance numbers based on region population densities. Small nations in the middle of the Ocean, like Australia have less delegates to draw upon, but we should see big attendance numbers coming into Barcelona this year.
Over 80% of people heard about the conference virally, via a friend, email list, blog, etc. Despite us having contra-deals and advertisements with many geospatial magazines, only 1% heard about the conference through a magazine. Lesson for organisors: focus on viral marketing.
3/4 of the delegates are technical.
Half the local registrations come in late, after the early bird registration. In Barcelona with expected high numbers, it might mean that the conference organisors will need to turn away late registrations.

I'd love to see some of these metrics built into map displays. If you are a mapping wizard, you might want to create some fancy maps with these figures. Please let me know if you do, and I'll reference them from this blog.

LISAsoft awarded three innovation grants for SLIP Enabler

2010-02-06T07:40:00.008+11:00

Over the last two years, Landgate has invited proposals for Developer Innovation Grants to build innovative applications that utilises the Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP). SLIP delivers web data services for a wide range of Western Australian and national geospatial data though a standards-based Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The SLIP Innovation Grants are awarded for innovative ideas in the development of commercial applications and new uses of SLIP datasets. LISAsoft is proud to be awarded three of five of this year’s grants.

“LISAsoft’s proposals fitted very closely with our users needs, and we see them providing significant value to the future of SLIP.” Darren Mottolini, Landgate Business Consultant.

Winning Ideas:

PostGIS Shapefile Loader GUI

The current process for appending a shapefile to an existing PostGIS table involves command line tools and scripts. This project will produce a GUI interface for loading a shapefile to a PostGIS database.

Automated Layer Creation

By streamlining the current manual process of metadata collection, agencies will be able to leverage SLIP for high currency data services.

Big Red Basemap Feedback

“Big Red” provides the ability to markup base map information with instructions to create, update and delete features and review update history from a web page. Crowd sourcing will be used to clean and improve datasets.

Would you like to work on innovative projects, using Geospatial Standards, Open Source, and Geospatial Technologies? LISAsoft is hiring. Contact me if interested.

LISAsoft hiring Open Geospatial Software Engineers

2010-01-25T16:42:00.004+11:00

I wondered whether chairing the FOSS4G conference here in Australia would be good for LISAsoft business. I guess the answer must be yes, because LISAsoft has recently won a number of exciting Geospatial Open Standards and Open Source projects, and we are hiring people to help us complete them.
So if you like working with GeoSpatial, enjoy working on cutting edge standards (through OGC testbeds and the like), like getting paid to work on Open Source Software, like the idea of living in the warm, surf loving city of Sydney, Australia, then we might just have the perfect job for you.
We have job adds here:

Feel free to contact me to ask questions about the opportunity if interested.
c a m e r on. sho r ter AT lisa soft . com...

(image from http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3145/2442138291_806d8dfcde.jpg?v=0)

Will there be an OSGeo Desktop shootout at FOSS4G 2010?

2009-12-19T16:55:00.003+11:00

Delegates who voted for the FOSS4G 2009 presentations ranked the OSGeo comparison projects very highly, which is something I suggest hopeful FOSS4G 2010 presenters take note of, because competition for speaking slots will be fierce.

At FOSS4G 2009, 183 quality presentations were submitted, and there was only 85 speaking slots. In 2010 it is likely to be much harder, as there is expected to be 2 to 3 times more delegates and many more hopeful presenters.

In 2009 the community ranked potential presentations, and some of the highest ranked presentations targeted the comparison of popular packages. Unfortunately, there were only a few of these types of presentations.

The presentations were:

Ranked 2: The WMS Performance Shootout
Ranked 8: PostGIS and Oracle Spatial
Ranked 9: There is no alternative to Openlayers...? (discussing OpenLayers vs other AJAX clients)

The moral to the story is that delegates want to see how different projects compare, and to date we have had a shortage of such presentations (partly because they are a lot of work to set up).

However, I strongly suggest that projects start teaming together to put together such presentations for 2010.

In particular, I'd love to see comparisons between:

Geospatial Desktop applications
Geospatial Browser based applications
Geospatial Servers (WMS, WFS, Tiled Services at the very least)

The comparisons could cover some or all of:

performance
robustness
features
ease of setup or use

The tests should not be restricted to Open Source, but be open to proprietary vendors too. (ESRI and ERDAS were invited to participate in the 2009 WMS shootout, and it seems likely they will participate in 2010).

So who wants to participate?

Planning for next year's GIS Live DVD

2009-12-17T06:41:00.002+11:00

We are planning two Arramagong GIS Live DVD releases during 2010 and would like to know what applications and functionality people would like to contribute.

Arramagong is based on XUbuntu and GISVM, and allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is currently available as:

A Live DVD, which is regularly handed out at conferences, most recently being given to all delegates at the 2009 FOSS4G conference.

A Virtual Machine

Within a web browser from Click2Try: http://www.click2try.com/catalog/Web-Development/Geospatial/Arramagong-GISVM/details

The core success of the Arramagong LiveDVD is due to the simple yet powerful build scripts. All that is required for a relevant project to be incorporated into the LiveDVD is to write a bash shell script which installs the application onto an Ubuntu distribution. Hence, our last distribution attracted over 20 developers and from project announcement to a released distribution took under 6 weeks.

The stack of popular GeoSpatial Open Source Applications included on the Arramagong LiveDVD includes:

deegree

GDAL

GeoKettle

GeoNetwork

GeoServer

GpsDrive

GRASS

gvSIG

Kosmo

Mapfish

Mapnik

Mapserver

MapTiler

Marble

MB System

Open Jump

Open Layers

pgRouting

PostGIS

PROJ.4

QuantumGIS

uDig

Milestones

24 Jan 2010: Version 3.0 Feature Freeze

07 Mar 2010: Version 3.0 Final Release

05 Jul 2010: Version 4.0 Feature Freeze

16 Aug 2010: Version 4.0 Final Release (ready for FOSS4G 2010)

Ideas for future releases

Upgrade to Xubuntu 9.10

Should there be sufficient interest, we would like to address the following:

Upgrade packages to latest versions

Incorporate new Geospatial packages

General cleanup

Incorporate help, tutorials, and training material

Apply internationalisation

Interested?

You can find more details about the project on our wiki at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc

Then please contact our mailing list at: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo or contact Cameron Shorter directly at: cameronD O TshorterATlisasoftD O Tcom.

FOSS4G Videos and Presentations online

2009-12-07T06:21:00.004+11:00

Sydney, Australia. 7 December 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

Presentations, videos and posters from the international conference for Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial are now online. So if you missed the conference, or couldn't attend all the sessions, you now have a second chance to participate. In particular, I strongly recommend viewing Paul Ramsey's thought provoking and entertaining keynote speech, " Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts: The Future of the Open Source Economy", http://2009.foss4g.org/speakers/#Paul_Ramsey .

Almost all presentations, tutorials and workshop material has been collected, and we have videos of 2/3 of all the presentations.

Presentations, workshops and tutorials and videos are linked from abstract descriptions at: http://2009.foss4g.org/schedule/ .
Videos can also be found at: http://blip.tv/search?q=fosslc
Posters: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Posters
Ignight Spatial lightening talk videos: http://www.ignitespatial.com/?page_id=181
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/foss4g2009/

About FOSS4G

http://2009.foss4g.org

FOSS4G is an international Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference, which was held in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October 2009. FOSS4G offered presentations, workshops, demos, an install-fest, and a code sprint. It was presented by the world's best Developers, Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals and included the latest geospatial applications, standards, government programs, business processes and case studies. Topics included mobile platforms, location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing, development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services, Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more.

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/
Slashgeo: http://slashgeo.org

(photo: The main presentation hall at FOSS4G, courtesy of Raj Singh)

2009-11-20T17:58:00.002+11:00

I published this article on 27 November 2007, under another blog (which has suffered link rot) so I'm republishing here for archiving.

Federated Geo-synchronization

Standards and tools for reliable data synchronization in Spatial Data Infrastructure and field based data collection.

Overview

This article describes the issues and technical solutions associated with Federated Geo-synchronization.

Lisasoft aims to contribute to these solutions as part of the OGC’s Open Web Services Testbed 5.2.

To strengthen and refine our requirements, we are looking for Agencies which would benefit from solutions identified here. Please leave a comment, or contact me if you are interested.

Technical Problem Statement

As spatial databases become distributed and collaboratively maintained, traditional database transaction models ineffectively handle modern scenarios.

Figure 1 Synchronising databases in a Spatial Data Infrastructure

Users require current data from remote agencies. Data may be stored on a slow or unreliable server or behind an unreliable internet connection.

Updates may come from remote field workers, trusted external organizations, or general internet users. Identities must be confirmed, updates validated and applied, or rolled back to a previous version.

Technical Design

Figure 2 Caching WFS-T in field, local and remote networks

This project will:

Make a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) fast and robust by caching remote WFSs locally.
Provide WFS Synchronization to allow real time data updates between agencies.
Ensure interoperability between agencies and applications by proposing required extensions to Open Standards.
Ensure wide adoption by providing all components free as Open Source Software.
Provide desktop and mobile, field based data collection tools.

Version WFS-T

A Transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T) provides an OGC standards compliant web interface for downloading and updating vector features over the internet. To date the WFS-T standard doesn’t address version history.

Versioned WFS-T enables users to roll back to previous versions, track update history, check differences between updates. A versioned WFS is required to support a cached WFS.

Version WFS-T Development

Geoserver developers have developed a Versioned WFS-T by extending the WFS-T specification to include standard version attributes. As at May 2007, the Geotools version code is complete, but still in alpha state. It requires configuration web pages to ease operator use, packaging into a release and real world testing.

The extensions to the WFS-T specification need to go through the OGC standards process.

Security

Security involves: authentication (to verify who a user is) and authorization (to specify what a user can view or update).

Security Development

Geoserver has prototype authorization and authentication code. Access is provided to the level of WFS. Granular access to a layer or a specific feature is not supported. The code still requires refinement, a user interface and integration with the baseline.

Clients like Udig, Mapbuilder and OpenLayers require security logic. Some of this will be addressed during the Canadian Geographic Data Infrastructure Interoperability Pilot, due to complete October 2007.

Cached WFS-T

A Cached WFS mirrors a remote WFS locally. A Cached WFS-T also caches WFS-T updates when disconnected from the remote WFS.

A Cached WFS-T is used when:

The remote WFS uptime is not guaranteed.
The remote WFS connection is unreliable or unable to handle traffic required.

Cached WFS-T depends upon the Version WFS-T protocol.

Cached WFS-T Development

An alpha version of Cached WFS (read only) is implemented by Geoserver. A friendly user interface is required to bring this to COTS quality.

Minimal development is required to implement Cached WFS-T (with writes) which has a basic conflict management interface.

Business rules for managing updates and conflicts from disconnected clients will be addressed in a second development phase.

Desktop Mapper

Figure 3 JGrass desktop mapping application

Desktop Mapping offers powerful data manipulation and analysis. There are a number of clients available both proprietary and open source with varying levels of functionality and standards compliance.

Desktop Mapper Development

A prime candidate for an Open Source Desktop Mapper is UDig and JGrass which are combining forces to provide:

User friendly mapping interface.
Extensive map analysis tools from Grass.
Access to numerous mapping format and data sources from Geotools.
Extensible architecture from Eclipse

Development is required to include:

Embedded cached WFS-T from Geoserver (developed but requires integration and testing)
Embedded data store using H2 (in development)
Access to images in a compressed format like ECW or JPG2000.

More work is required to add:

Business logic, views and reports to manage collaborative editing and information from a versioned WFS-T.

Mobile Mapper

Field operators need to create or update geographic data while in the field.

A typical use case involves:

Download geographic data while in the office
Disconnect from the network
Modify, create and delete features and datasets. Interface with a GPS to collect feature information.
Synchronize changes with local or remote data-stores via Standards compliant WFS-T protocol.

Mobile Mapper - Tablet Development

Figure 4 Ultra Mobile PC with slide down keyboard

A Tablet or Ruggedized PC provides the same operating environment as a desktop PC. So the Desktop Mapper will port directly to the Tablet.

Integration with a GPS is the only extra development required for the Mobile Tablet.

Mobile Mapper - PDA Development

Figure 5 Mapping on a PDA

PDAs are often used for field work because they are cheaper and smaller than laptops. Along with smaller size they are also less powerful and have less storage capacity.

Cut down versions of Windows (Windows CE) and Java (J2ME) run on most PDAs.

Investigation is required to determine effort required to port the Desktop Mapper to the PDA and whether alternative development would be more effective.

Browser Editor

Figure 6 Mapbuilder, a browser map editor/viewer

Browser editors efficiently enable data collection from the public or remote workers.

Browser clients can also publish public map data.

Browser Editor Development

Openlayers and Mapbuilder are working together to produce Open Source, Open Standards Browser Based mapping client. WFS-T editing is supported but needs to include business logic associated with user authentication and access rights.

Open Standards

Multiple agencies tend to run multiple technical solutions. This is fine so long as they interoperate through Open Standards.

The Versioned WFS-T protocol will be presented to the OGC to be formalized as an Open Standard.

Open Source

Free tools reduce entry costs to a Spatial Data Infrastructure which will maximize participation.

Open Source software already provides the majority of the functionality required by this project which means tools can be built for minimal cost.

Deliverables

Essential Deliverables

Essential Deliverables are required to meet immediate customer needs. These phases are low risk as the functionality already exists in tested or prototype code.

Phase 1: Mirror remote WFS locally

Cached WFS (view only). Builds upon Geoserver/PostGIS.
Standard UDig for WFS viewing

Phase 2: Update remote WFS-T from remote or disconnected client

Cached WFS-T (read/write). Builds upon Geoserver/PostGIS. Add simple update business rules.
Standard UDig for WFS-T editing

Phase 3: Security - Role based editing and views

Security added to Geoserver
Role based options available in UDig

Optional Deliverables

Optional Deliverables are nice to have and involve further development with associated risk.

Phase 4: Universal Client for easy install

UDig with embedded database (H2) and Cached WFS (Geoserver)

Phase 5: Universal Client on PDA

Port universal client to PDA

Schedule

OWS 5.1
RFQ (5.1) Issued	May 11, 2007
OWS 5.2
Revised RFQ issued	July 9, 2007
Questions Due & Bidders’ Conference	July 16, 2007 (TBR)
Clarifications Posted	July 23, 2007 (TBR)
RFQ Responses Due	August 3, 2007
Kickoff Meeting	week of September 10, 2007
Interim Milestone	week of November 12, 2007
Demonstration Milestone	week of January 7, 2008
Final Delivery	February 18 – February 22, 2008
Commercialize product, provide support, consulting and customized solutions.	March 2008 – 2009.

Try Open Source Geospatial desktop applications from a web browser

2009-10-16T06:57:00.005+11:00

Sydney, Australia. 16 October 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

The Arramagong/GISVM GeoSpatial Live DVD and Virtual Machine, which includes a stack of popular GeoSpatial Open Source Applications and is being handed out to delegates at the FOSS4G conference, can now be viewed from http://click2try.com from within your web browser!

All you need to do is:

Open this webpage: http://www.click2try.com/catalog/Web-Development/Geospatial/Arramagong-GISVM/details
Follow these steps:

Click the big Try this application now button.
Review the connection test results and fix, if necessary.
Either wait for the application to launch or click the Launch App button.

Login to the Arramagong desktop using the login credentials in the Quick Start guide in the left pane of the window.
You should see the icons for the Geospatial applications on the desktop. You can start and try any application.
To save data, you'll need to apply for a free click2try account at http://www.click2try.com/component/user/?task=register.

About Arramagong

Arramagong is a self-contained live DVD and Virtual Machine, based on XUbuntu and GISVM, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around. A full list of installed packages is at: http://www.arramagong.com/Arramagong/contents.html

As explained by Cameron Shorter, coordinator of Arramagong and Geospatial Solutions Manager at LISAsoft,

"Arramagong allows users to easily try out the robust, feature rich stack of applications offered by Geospatial Open Source. It is a compelling marketing tool for us organisations who support Open Source."

About FOSS4G

http://2009.foss4g.org

FOSS4G is the international Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference, which comes to Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October 2009. FOSS4G offers presentations, workshops, demos, an install-fest, and a code sprint. It is presented by the world's best Developers, Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals and includes the latest geospatial applications, standards, government programs, business processes and case studies. Topics include mobile platforms, location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing, development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services, Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more.

About Click2Try

http://click2try.com/

click2try is an online Open Source application showroom that helps visitors easily evaluate and use Open Source Software from within their web browser. click2try employs a unique, advanced technology framework, built completely on Open Source software, to provide on-demand, multiuser, concurrent access to enterprise-level Open Source software applications.

Upcoming milestones

20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/
Slashgeo: http://slashgeo.org

7 Bridges Walk, after FOSS4G

2009-10-13T18:53:00.004+11:00

Like to walk across seven of the grand Sydney bridges? On Sunday 25 October, after FOSS4G, there will be a 25km, city coordinated, 7 bridge walk. It will be a nice way to see the city (even if you only take on a few sections a catch a ferry back to the start). Details at: http://www.7bridgeswalk.com.au

Tall Ship sailing fun at FOSS4G

2009-10-13T11:45:00.005+11:00

Want to sail Sydney Harbour in a tall ship and promote a safe climate at the same time? Then you will probably want a berth on this ship, sailing on Saturday 24 October, after the FOSS4G event. Details at http://ssec.org.au/350/

350 is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Published by leading scientists only last year, this target is already in the draft global climate treaty for negotiation at Copenhagen in December. But it’s just one option, along with other competing targets that we now know are dangerously weak.
On Saturday October 24th, people all around the world will be speaking with one voice. From the Great Barrier Reef to the Great Wall of China, at over 1500 events in 125 countries, the world will say: 350.
By cruising Sydney Harbour on the Southern Swan, you will help to make a powerful statement to the world’s leaders: we want a fair, ambitious and binding treaty that aims for success: restore a safe climate by bringing CO_2 back below 350.

Arramgong GIS Live DVD - off to printers

2009-10-03T14:43:00.005+10:00

After a hive of activity from a team of 20 or so people, we have a Geospatial Live DVD and Virtual Machine with a comprehensive collection of Open Source Geospatial Software. The Arramagong Live DVD was sent to the printers last week and will be handed out to all delegates at the international conference for Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial, http://2009.foss4g.org.
But probably more valuable than this specific release is the fact that we have automated the building of the LiveDVD so that anyone with a decent internet pipe can build themselves a customised GeoSpatial LiveDVD in 24 hours - a task that used to take months and was consequently a major development barrier.
As LISAsoft discovered when helping build the LiveDVD for FOSS4G 2008, there are a number of barriers to packaging. Ideally, all projects should package their applications in .deb files, aligned with DebianGIS and UbuntuGIS projects. Installing .deb files into a LiveDVD is as simple as:

apt-get install package.deb

However, there is a non-trivial learning curve for packaging applications for debian, and Java packaging is poorly supported, and there has been a knowledge gap between packagers, familiar with packaging, and developers familar with installing their specific application. So only a few of the popular GeoSpatial Open Source applications are easily installed on Linux. Most OSGeo applications need to be manually installed, and hence packaging for the FOSS4G 2008 LiveDVD and the GISVM involved dedicated developers putting in hero efforts to learn and apply the specific install instructions and dependencies for each project individually. It took months.
For FOSS4G 2009 we have been smarter. We asked projects to write a command line installer script for their packages, in line with a provided template. We then strung all the installers together in an automated master build process. This meant:

An installer script is much easier to write than a .deb file, and hence we had many projects contribute.
The automated build process meant we could release and test the Virtual Machines often, and involve the whole community in the testing cycle.

And as a by product, these scripts are the key element Debian packagers require to build .deb packages, so we should expect to see many of these projects appear in the next Debian and Ubuntu releases.
What next?

Include install scripts for more applications
Refine the user experience
Align with OSGeo Education initiatives to provide training for each of the applications, via documentation, videos etc. and have this material included in the distribution.
Target other media, like USB drives.
Support targeted releases for specific purposes. (It is as simple as tweaking the install list if you want to create a targeted distribution).
And I'm sure there are many other ideas. Tell us about them.

Credits
Many people worked very hard to get all these applications in place in such a short period of time. I'd like to thank you all for all the help. (I'd try and list you all, but I'm afraid I'd miss someone).

Australian Government initiative to set up an Open Technology Foundation

2009-10-02T18:49:00.003+10:00

The South Australian Government, through the Office of the Chief Information Officer, have proposed to set up an "Open Technology Foundation" on behalf of Australian government which is:

a collaborative effort between governments, industry, academia, and communities of interest.
committed to the evaluation and where proven, uptake of open technologies, standards and methods.
exists to help governments make better, more cost effective and innovative use of open technologies in order to improve service delivery to citizens.
focused on openness in order to help agencies achieve more interoperability, independence, resilience and flexibility in their ICT operations.

They are currently looking for letters of support for their business plan before Wednesday 14 October 2009. An overview and webcast about the initiative can be found at http://www.cio.sa.gov.au/business/projects/open-technology-foundation .

Supporting governments embrace Open Technologies is an effective way to reduce government spending and I strongly support this.
In particular, Open Technologies facilitate cost savings by spreading development and maintenance costs between multiple agencies, both nationally and internationally. However, uptake of Open Technologies is often hindered by specific project purchasing guidelines which focus on immediate deliverables. People are not paid to spend the extra effort required to make an application easy to share. I suggest the business plan also focus on the development of purchasing guidelines which encourage Open Technologies and collaborative approaches.
Steve Schmid, the key person behind the initiative will be leading a FOSS4G in Government Birds of a Feather session at the FOSS4G conference in just over a week. Look out for him if you are going to the conference.

Rush on Geospatial Open Source Workshops at FOSS4G

2009-09-23T21:09:00.002+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 23 September 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

Many FOSS4G workshops are close to full, with one workshop already at capacity. http://2009.foss4g.org/workshops/ People wanting to learn about Geospatial Standards, Geospatial Open Source Software and Business Cases should sign up soon to avoid disappointment.

Also, in Open Source tradition, there is a breadth of other exciting activities to sign up for:

Wed evening: Ignite Spatial - 5 minute talks about anything spatial
Birds of a Feather - register a discussion topic
Live DVD - beta version is ready to test
Saturday afterwards: Code Sprint
Demonstration Theatre still a few slots free
InstallFest - sign up if you will be there
OSGeo Annual Meeting
Volunteers - do you have a space set of hands that can be put to good use
Benchmarking 2009 - the famous WMS shootout
Posters
Monday: FME User meeting

About FOSS4G

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at: http://2009.foss4g.org/about_us/

Mark is trialling Sydney entertainment for us

2009-09-11T14:58:00.004+10:00

One of the perks of running a conference is that you are occasionally given free tickets to shows, or harbour cruises or the like, in the hope that we might write a blog like this and tell all our international friends to go see the show.
So Mark Leslie, who has been flat out sorting out workshops and other things, has volunteered to check out the "Wicked" musical currently running in Sydney. Thanks Mark.

What windows installers should be on the FOSS4G Live DVD?

2009-09-06T11:14:00.002+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 6 September 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

The Arramagong Live DVD / GISVM email list has been running hot last week, with ~ 15 people helping write install scripts for projects in order to meet our feature freeze deadline tomorrow, Monday 7 September.

The list of linux projects currently being packaged for the FOSS4G LiveDVD are:

PostGIS ,GeoServer ,Mapserver ,GRASS ,Qgis ,gvSIG ,uDig ,Open Layers ,GeoNetwork ,Open Jump ,Deegree ,GpsDrive ,mapnik ,MB System ,pgRouting ,52 North Sensor Observation Service ,Mapfish ,Marble.

Our next steps are:

Package up the windows installers for the Live DVD. Please tell us what installers are available, and where they are located, by updating the following ticket: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/424
Write introductory documentation for all projects
Test the image and iron out any issues we find before users find them. (I'm hoping communities will step up and test their favourite applications starting next week.)
Plus lots of little things

Details for getting involved are at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc and we hang out at irc://freenode.net#foss4g

Live DVD Timeline

Date	Date	Milestone
7 Sep 2009	in 1 day	LiveDVD Feature Freeze
11 Sep 2009	in 1 week	LiveDVD Beta Release
18 Sep 2009	in 2 weeks	LiveDVD Final Freeze
20 Sep 2009	in 2 weeks	LiveDVD Final Release & sent to printers

About GISVM

GISVM is a Free(dom) and ready to use anywhere Geographic Information System Virtual Machine. Based on the amazing Virtualization technology it can be used on almost any operating system environment and is intended to be a hassle-free installation option for anyone that needs a ready to use GIS solution.

About Arramagong Live DVD

The Arramagong Live DVD provides a stack of most of best Geospatial Open Source software, pre-configured with sample data. It is based on the XUbuntu linux operating system and also contains windows installers. A FOSS4G 2009 release of Arramagong will be given to all delegates at the FOSS4G conference. It has been built by LISAsoft in conjunction with the Open Source Geospatial community.

About FOSS4G

Upcoming FOSS4G milestones

14 Sep 2009, Final program available
21 Sep 2009, Poster Submission closes
20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at: http://2009.foss4g.org/about_us/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-2-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

More about Australia's Digital Regions Initiative

2009-09-04T18:33:00.005+10:00

I attended a briefing about Australia's Digitial Regions Initiative which is co-funding projects to help regional education, health, and disaster response projects. (previous description).
The key take home points for me were:

The Expression of Interest, due 14 September 2009, is aimed at identifying potential projects, and giving parties the opportunity to find each other and collaborate on the final proposal, to be lodged by 14 October.
I asked whether it was in scope to propose an Open Street Map style application, which facilitates community collection, cleaning, and collaboration around spatial and attribute data. This was certainly considered in scope, if the value to communities could be demonstrated. Value is based upon the number of people serviced, the value presented to each person, and whether the service is filling an existing gap.
The initiative is expecting to fund 50% of multi-million dollar projects. However, smaller projects will be considered, so long as they can demonstrate appropriate value. External funding sources (and I'm specifically thinking about co-funding with international government programs) would be acceptable.

The Easy steps to get your project on the FOSS4G Live DVD

2009-08-29T22:15:00.002+10:00

The Arramagong Live DVD, GISVM, and OSGeo Live-Demo projects are collaborating to create a set of simple, automated install scripts for a wide variety of Free and Open Source GIS projects, and we're calling on each project to help us write a script for their software. Projects that can write their install script this week will be included on The Arramamgong Live DVD which will be given to all delegates at the FOSS4G conference.

The scripts should cover the installation and configuration of each project into a base Xubuntu 9.04 system. Separate scripts can optionally cover data, demos and tutorials. As a bonus, these scripts are exactly what packagers require to bundle your project into Debian and Ubuntu, so you will be taking the first steps toward getting your project into a Linux distribution.

The base version of the FOSS4G2009 GISVM/Arramagong Live DVD can be trialled as a VMWare virtual machine and downloaded from: http://download.osgeo.org/livedvd/Arramagong_GISVM_FOSS4G2009_alpha1.7z

Timeline

Date	Date	Milestone
7 Sep 2009	in 1 week	LiveDVD Feature Freeze
11 Sep 2009	in 2 weeks	LiveDVD Beta Release
18 Sep 2009	in 3 weeks	LiveDVD Final Freeze
20 Sep 2009	in 3 weeks	LiveDVD Final Release & sent to printers

Packaging Howto

For projects already packaged for Ubuntu or DebianGIS, an install script will likely be as simple as:

install_mapserver.sh

#!/bin/sh
apt-get install cgi-mapserver

Projects that haven't been packaged yet are slightly more complicated:

install_udig.sh

#!/bin/sh
#################################################
#
# Purpose: Installation of udig into Xubuntu
# Author:  Stefan Hansen 
#
#################################################
# Copyright (c) 2009 Open Geospatial Foundation
# Copyright (c) 2009 LISAsoft
#
# Licensed under the GNU LGPL.
#
# This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
# by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2.1 of the License,
# or any later version.  This library is distributed in the hope that
# it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, without even the implied
# warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
# See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details, either
# in the "LICENSE.LGPL.txt" file distributed with this software or at
# web page "http://www.fsf.org/licenses/lgpl.html".
#

# About:
# =====
# This script will install udig into Xubuntu

# Running:
# =======
# sudo ./install_udig.sh

TMP="/tmp/udig_downloads"
INSTALL_FOLDER="/usr/lib"
DATA_FOLDER="/usr/local/share"
UDIG_FOLDER="$INSTALL_FOLDER/udig"
BIN="/usr/bin"
USER_NAME="user"
USER_HOME="/home/$USER_NAME"

## Setup things... ##

# check required tools are installed
if [ ! -x "`which wget`" ] ; then
echo "ERROR: wget is required, please install it and try again"
exit 1
fi
# create tmp folders
mkdir $TMP
cd $TMP


## Install Application ##

# get udig
if [ -f "udig-1.2-M6.linux.gtk.x86.tar.gz" ]
then
echo "udig-1.2-M6.linux.gtk.x86.tar.gz has already been downloaded."
else
wget http://udig.refractions.net/files/downloads/branches/udig-1.2-M6.linux.gtk.x86.tar.gz
fi
# unpack it and copy it to /usr/lib
tar -xzf udig-1.2-M6.linux.gtk.x86.tar.gz -C $INSTALL_FOLDER


## Configure Application ##

# Download modified startup script for udig
if [ -f "udig.sh" ]
then
echo "udig.sh has already been downloaded."
else
wget https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/livedvd/gisvm/trunk/udig-conf/udig.sh
fi
# copy it into the udig folder
cp udig.sh $UDIG_FOLDER

# create link to startup script
ln -s $UDIG_FOLDER/udig.sh $BIN/udig

# Download desktop icon
if [ -f "uDig.desktop" ]
then
echo "uDig.desktop has already been downloaded."
else
wget https://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/livedvd/gisvm/trunk/udig-conf/uDig.desktop
fi
# copy it into the udig folder
cp uDig.desktop $USER_HOME/Desktop
chown $USER_NAME:$USER_NAME $USER_HOME/Desktop/uDig.desktop


## Sample Data ##

# Download udig's sample data
if [ -f "data-v1_1.zip" ]
then
echo "data-v1_1.zip has already been downloaded."
else
wget http://udig.refractions.net/docs/data-v1_1.zip
fi
#unzip the file into /usr/local/share/udig-data
mkdir $DATA_FOLDER/udig-data
unzip data-v1_1.zip -d $DATA_FOLDER/udig-data


## Documentation ##

# Download udig's documentation
if [ -f "udig-1.2-M5.html" ]
then
echo "udig-1.2-M5.html has already been downloaded."
else
wget http://udig.refractions.net/files/downloads/branches/udig-1.2-M5.html
fi

if [ -f "uDigWalkthrough1.pdf" ]
then
echo "uDigWalkthrough1.pdf has already been downloaded."
else
wget http://udig.refractions.net/docs/uDigWalkthrough1.pdf
fi

if [ -f "uDigWalkthrough2.pdf" ]
then
echo "uDigWalkthrough2.pdf has already been downloaded."
else
wget http://udig.refractions.net/docs/uDigWalkthrough2.pdf
fi

#copy into /usr/local/share/udig-docs
mkdir $DATA_FOLDER/udig-docs
cp udig-1.2-M5.html $DATA_FOLDER/udig-docs
cp uDigWalkthrough1.pdf $DATA_FOLDER/udig-docs
cp uDigWalkthrough1.pdf $DATA_FOLDER/udig-docs

As we are still bootstrapping the packaging project, and as we are very short on time before feature freeze, manual steps can be included as comments in each install script, and can be automated by a project member, or packager at a later date.

Packaging details and examples can be found at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GISVM_Build

And help is available on the Live-Demo mailing list via Cameron Shorter, Stefan Hansen, Ricardo Pino, Hamish Bowman, Alex Mandel, Massimo de Stefano and others.

About GISVM

About Arramagong Live DVD

About FOSS4G

Upcoming milestones

14 Sep 2009, Final program available
21 Sep 2009, Poster Submission closes
20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at: http://2009.foss4g.org/about_us/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-2-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

Digital Regions Initiative - Australian Government funding opportunities

2009-08-26T13:30:00.003+10:00

The Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is offering to co-fund government programs under its Digital Regions Initiative.
Among other things, this would be an idea way to fund projects which support crowd sourcing of map features to efficiently support emergency and disaster response targets.
Quoting from the EOI:

The Digital Regions Initiative will support projects which will deliver innovative and sustainable services such as those that will:
boost innovation in healthcare by enabling services such as remote consultation, diagnosis and treatment in areas where there are specialist skills shortages
extend digital education services to enable more regional, rural and remote communities to access improved educational opportunities
increase the use of digital technologies to improve emergency and disaster response both within and across state and territory borders.

LISAsoft would be happy to help government agencies on a technical level in putting together a response for the EOI, due 14 September.

FOSS4G conference: Draft program available

2009-08-22T07:33:00.002+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 22 August 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

An early draft of the FOSS4G program has been released in response to some delegates wishing to book flights and accommodation early. While there may still be some minor changes to the program, we are not anticipating many presentations to move from one day to another.

Details at: http://2009.foss4g.org/schedule/

OSGeo Friendly countries to live in

2009-08-16T07:32:00.005+10:00

Yves Jacolin has sliced FOSS4G website hits to determine the number of FOSS4G attendees per million people, broken down by country. From this, you can get a feeling for the most OSGeo tolerant populations in the world (distorted around Australia due to the conference location).
So what can we learn?

Japan and Mongolia are the place be in Asia
Chile is the place to be in Latin America
Canada looks preferable to the US. I wonder how much the Canadian GeoConnections program is responsible for Canada's strong OSGeo industry.
There is a lot of interest across Europe, so FOSS4G 2010 should be a crowded event.
Africa seems to have learned all they need to know when FOSS4G attended Cape Town last year, and won't be heading to Australia in force.

Sign up for FOSS4G bonus activities

2009-08-14T18:55:00.003+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 14 August 2009. http://2009.foss4g.org

The FOSS4G conference is famous for its community driven, extra-curricular activities and wiki pages are now open for community members to define these activities for 2009. So if you want to get more out of FOSS4G than just listening, if you have a topic you want to discuss, a message you want to share, a product you want to show off or you want to network with like minded people, then please consider adding your name to one of the following activities.

Birds of a Feather

Semi-organised meetings between people with specific shared interests. If you have a discussion topic or project in mind and want to coordinate a BoF session, please add it to our working list. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_BirdsOfAFeather

OSGeo AGM

OSGeo's Annual General Meeting which will hear reports from Local Chapters and OSGeo Committees. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meeting_2009

Installfest

At the start of the conference, community members will be helping delegates install a wide variety of FOSS software on delegates laptops. Add the name of your project and yourself to the wiki if you will be attending. See also the Live DVD. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_InstallFest

Posters

Limited poster boards will be on hand for the duration of the conference. Add your proposed project and contact details to the wiki so we can determine how big posters should be, and how many we can accept. Monitor poster discussion on the foss4g email list. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Posters

Demo Theater

Ten minute product presentation slots will be running during morning tea and lunch breaks. These presentations are being offered first to sponsors, then to community members. Contact the coordinators if you wish to be involved. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Demonstration_Theatre

Live DVD

A Linux based Live DVD, with windows installers, will be provided to all delegates. This disk will further be available for use at conferences and marketing events around the world long after FOSS4G. This is a huge marketing opportunity, but is currently under-resourced; there is a chance we will be left using the same DVD produced for the 2008 conference. If you are a good community organisor, or a wiz technical geek, please help out with this activity. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Live_DVD

Code Sprint

Saturday after FOSS4G: Passionate programmers + pizza + caffeine + whiteboards + wireless = great software advancements. Add a project you wish to work on, a coordinator, and goals for your code sprint. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Code_Sprint

The Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP)

A demonstration of standards based interoperability between Open Source and Proprietary geospatial applications based on a Climate Change Scenario, being coordinated by the OGC. Contact Raj Singh if interested. http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome

Volunteers

Want to help out with all the extra little jobs, or need volunteers for specific activities? http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Volunteers

About FOSS4G

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, coming to Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October 2009, attracts presentations from the world's best Developers, Policy Makers, Sponsors and Geospatial Professionals in the area of geospatial applications, standards, government programs, business processes and case studies. Topics include mobile platforms, location based applications, crowd sourcing, cloud computing, development, spatial standards, integration of cross-agency data, Spatial Data Infrastructures, Sensor Webs, Web Processing Services, Integration of Open Source and Proprietary Software and more.

http://2009.foss4g.org

Upcoming milestones

14 Sep 2009, Completed program available
20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at: http://2009.foss4g.org/about_us/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-2-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

Australian Gov 2.0 roadshow

2009-08-13T14:09:00.003+10:00

In line with initiatives from other nations, the Australian government is investigating how to:

make government information more accessible and usable — to establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information;
make government more consultative, participatory and transparent — to maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community;
build a culture of online innovation within Government — to ensure that government is receptive to the possibilities created by new collaborative technologies and uses them to advance its ambition to continually improve the way it operates;
promote collaboration across agencies with respect to online and information initiatives — to ensure that efficiencies, innovations, knowledge and enthusiasm are shared on a platform of open standards; and
identify and/or trial initiatives that may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish the above objectives.

The Gov 2.0 taskforce are calling for comments on their issues paper at: http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/07/18/help-us-finalise-our-issues-paper/ and will be on a roadshow around Australian capital cities over the next few weeks. Details at: http://gov2.net.au/roadshows/

$180 million dedicated to the Australian Coorperative Research Center for Spatial Information

2009-08-07T17:13:00.005+10:00

PRESS RELEASE

Key Australian industries will gain access to new data, technologies and services through the funding of a major research program in spatial technologies, announced by Senator Kim Carr today.

With a total budget of $180 million, the new Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI-2) involves over 100 organisations including from government and the private sector coming together with universities in an eight-year joint venture.

“The new CRC SI will help us to remain internationally competitive and capitalise on rapid growth in the spatial industry. The CRC Program’s investment in this industry will deliver tremendous benefits to the nation.” Said Mary O’Kane, Chair-elect of the CRCSI-2 Board.

“Through this funding the CRC Program has recognised the tremendous potential spatial information offers to the Australian economy,” said CEO Dr Peter Woodgate.

The spatial information industry currently contributes an estimated $12.6 billion to national GDP. Direct outcomes from the CRCSI-2 are expected to deliver a further $305 million to the nation if emerging developments can be leveraged for Australian industry. The wider benefits are far larger.

Over 90 end-users, mostly small and medium companies, will participate in the program to direct and speed delivery of research outcomes.

“Our end-users give us a tremendously strong picture of the technology and services the marketplace needs,” said Dr Woodgate.

The CRCSI will deliver benefits to several industry sectors including:

Health – Preventative medicine policies will be improved through the way in which spatial information can show patterns of disease which are otherwise undetectable. CRCSI-2 will spatially analyse data for early detection of colo-rectal cancer and childhood leukaemia.
Energy and utilities – Unmanned air craft will monitor powerlines with laser scanners to get timely, accurate knowledge on the condition of power infrastructure which will improve safety and reduce costs for consumers.
Sustainable urban development – Planning, transport costs and “living affordability” in our cities and towns will be assisted by spatially understanding what makes good urban areas work.
Agriculture and climate change – Farmers will have more precise information to guide the planting, treatment and harvesting of crops due to spatial precision agriculture. Scientists and land managers will be able to monitor landscape changes more closely, particularly important given the widespread effects anticipated from climate change.
Defence – research into new imaging technologies for national defence

Though its strong international linkages, the CRCSI-2 will also be targeting overseas markets to deliver new technologies and services.

“Our fledgling industry will have a great chance to gain international prominence through this initiative,” said David Hocking, CEO of the Spatial Industries Business Association which is also participating in the CRCSI-2.

“Overseas governments are spending big on infrastructure and that is where our 500 members operate.”

“In its first incarnation, the CRCSI helped to position Australia as a world leader in the development and use of spatial information technologies,” according to Warwick Watkins, Chairman of the Australia and New Zealand Land Information Council.

Background

Spatial Information is at the core of a number of platform technologies and services, from traditional surveying to contemporary technologies like GPS and location-based services. It describes the location of objects in the real world and the relationships between objects. Practical applications include environmental monitoring, GPS services, customer relationship management and the management of natural resources, biosecurity, assets, land and emergencies. The spatial information industry contributes up to $12.6 billion to Australia’s Gross Domestic Product.

For more information visit www.crcsi2.com.au

Feed a Geek

2009-07-18T05:23:00.003+10:00

It has been a pleasure to have Justin Deoliveira from OpenGeo camped out in LISAsoft offices for the last week. He is a lovely person, and really knows his stuff. On top of the pure friendship factor, I've been able to work up a business case for feeding housing him and his laptop and take him out to lunch, based on the amount of high quality information I soak up in conversation.
Justin seems to be living the often talked about, but rarely seen, life of a programmer working on amazing technology while he is globe trotting around the world. I watched with envy, then took him out to lunch with LISAsoft management, and asked Justin about how well it worked for him. (I wanted my management to hear the answer.)

Who's interested in FOSS4G?

2009-07-04T06:59:00.010+10:00

Running a conference like FOSS4G is a nail biting exercise. The large fixed expenses (like conference venue) are committed up front when you only have wild guesses as to how many delegates are likely to come, and you don't get a reasonable understanding for the number of delegates till just before the conference starts when everyone files their last minute registration. It is much easier writing software, where there are established, linear metrics for tracking progress.
Even so, there are few indicative metrics which give us tentatively positive feeling about the interest in the FOSS4G conference.
We have been using Google Analytics to track who has been coming to our website and a few take home messages are coming out:

People from all around the world are interested in FOSS4G.
As hoped, we have positive interest locally from Australia.
Compared to previous years, we are getting a strong showing from the Asia/Pacific region. This should vindicate OSGeo's actions of moving the conference around the world, so that is local to everyone at some point.
As has traditionally been the case, there is strong interest from Europe, Canada, and the US. I'm hopeful that this interest, along with Australia's reputation as a holiday destination, will attract delegates.

If you want to see these metrics in more detail, or use the metrics as the basis for one of your presentations at FOSS4G, then you can have a look for yourself at:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Log in with username:foss4g2, password:foss4g2009.

Reminder: Early Bird registration for FOSS4G, closes in less than two weeks on 7 August 2009, so make sure you register now.

Moves to free Australian Public Sector Information

2009-06-25T21:41:00.013+10:00

The Victorian Parliament’s Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee (“EDIC”) has released a report recommending the freeing of access to Public Sector Information. Bruce Bannerman and I tabled an OSGeo submission for this report, as did a number of other enlightened organisations.
Anne Fitzgerald summarises the situation well, (note that Anne has submitted an abstract about Open Data for the FOSS4G conference):

I, Brian Fitzgerald and other research collaborators (including those working within the Queensland Treasury’s Office of Economic and Statistical Research) made verbal and written submissions, which are extensively referred to with approval by the committee throughout its report. This is a very important report, as it is the first in Australia to consider in depth the issue of access to Public Sector Information, and is likely to provide the template for work by the Federal and other [Australian] State/Territory governments. The report recommends that the Victorian Government should establish an Information Management Framework, with open access to Government information at no or marginal cost as the default position.

Donna Benjamin noted on the Open Source Industries Australia email list some of the Open Source highlights:

Recommendation 42: That the Victorian Government require, as part of its whole-of-government ICT Procurement Policy, that software procured by the Government be capable of saving files in open standard formats, and that wherever possible, the software be configured to save in open standard formats by default.

Recommendation 43: That the Victorian Government ensure when preparing guidance for procurement, ICT personnel should be equally aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both OSS and proprietary software.

Recommendation 44: That the Victorian Government fully evaluate the Victorian Department of Justice open source software (OSS) workstation trial to assess the potential for wider use of OSS in Victorian public service workstations.

Recommendation 45: That the Victorian Government examine its policy for ICT Procurement to ensure that it continues to assist the Victorian ICT industry.

Recommendation 46: That the Victorian Government ensure where appropriate that tenders are neither licence specific nor have proprietary software-specific requirements; and meet the given objectives of Government.

For further information, read the press release at: http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/edic/inquiries/access_to_PSI/PSI_Inquiry_Media_Release.pdf
The report itself is at http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/edic/inquiries/access_to_PSI/final_report.html

OSGeo at Spatial@Gov conference, Canberra, Australia

2009-06-25T09:28:00.006+10:00

The Aust-NZ OSGeo local chapter set up and OSGeo booth at the Spatial@Gov conference a few days back, and I gave a well attended Geospatial Open Source presentation. The conference attracted ~ 200 delegates and covered:

Climate Change (7 abstracts)
Local Government (1 abstracts)
Indigenous culture and communities (4 abstracts)
Health (1 abstracts)
Future directions of spatial technologies (24 abstracts)
Public/Private partnerships (5 abstracts)
Social Inclusion (4 abstracts)
Not Specified (9 abstracts)

The conference was particularly encouraging for people interested in "Open Technologies". It was opened by Senator Kate Lundy, who is making a name for herself in Australia around Open Government (and who is also a keynote speaker at the FOSS4G conference in October). Then most of the presentations I attended mentioned Open Standards. In particular, there is a strong push to develop a "Spatial Marketplace" which is effectively a Spatial Data Infrastructure. I was pleasantly surprised to hear ~ 30% of the presentations mention how agencies are deploying Open Source software. And there was regular mention about how agencies are following Queensland's initiatives moving government data to Creative Commons licenses. (There are abstracts on this at FOSS4G too).
Thanks to the following people for helping to man the OSGeo stand:

Milton Lofberg & Autodesk for sponsoring the booth
Cameron Shorter (me) and LISAsoft for providing fliers and giving an Open Source presentation
Bruce Bannerman
Shoaib Burq
Plus a couple of others who dropped by for a bit

FOSS4G abstract voting explained

2009-06-24T07:23:00.002+10:00

A number of people from the OSGeo community have questioned whether the FOSS4G abstract selection could be unfairly biased or rigged through the community voting process. In particular, there were concerns with our last "tongue in cheek" communication suggesting authors encourage their friends to vote for their presentations. In retrospect, the message should have focused on inviting people to review all presentations and promoting FOSS4G.

However, to ally concerns about bias, we feel it is important to be transparent about the abstract selection process, which for the general track will be as follows:

Call for abstracts, including promotion in a number of areas.
Abstract submission deadline.
Chase abstracts from a few presenters who had indicated they wanted to present but forgot to submit an abstract.
Ask the community to rank abstracts.
Abstract selection committee to review community rankings. Some minor adjustments may be made to:
1. Ensure there is a suitable selection of presentations for each of the specific FOSS4G user groups: Techies, Government & Private CIOs, Academic, Regional delegates. It is expected that most voters will fall into the techie user group, while half the delegates will likely fit into the Regional and/or CIO group.
2. Any obvious rigging should be avoided.
3. Endeavor to avoid having duplicates of the same presentation, and possibly encourage presenters with similar topics to combine their presentations or change the slant of their presentation. We want to encourage a depth of presentations.
4. Focus on the conference theme of "User Driven".

Information on how the academic papers will be assessed and selected can be found here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Call4papers

The Open Source community has a reputation for honesty, trust and good will, which we expect will be prevalent throughout the FOSS4G conference. While we will be vigilant, we don't expect to see much blatant rigging of the voting system from the community.

Get your friends to vote for your FOSS4G abstract

2009-06-19T21:48:00.005+10:00

With 170 quality abstracts vying for 96 slots at the international FOSS4G conference, there is a lot competition for air-time. Some innovative presenters are stacking the odds in their favour by inviting their friends to vote for their presentation on their blogs and email lists.

If you have submitted a presentation, I'd encourage you to do the same, and don't forget to give FOSS4G a plug while you are at it.

To vote, follow the link here: http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations/

For instructions on how to vote, please refer to the voting page on the Conference website or http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Program#Presentation_Voting

FOSS4G proposed papers out - vote for your favourite

2009-06-16T07:50:00.002+10:00

The list of proposed papers for FOSS4G can be viewed at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Proposed_Abstracts

You can now vote on the papers you'd like to see at FOSS4G 2009! We have had over 170 abstract submissions. Have your say on what you would like to see at the conference. You can read the abstracts and cast your votes for your preferred papers. Voting is open now and will close on Sunday 28th June.
To vote follow the link here:
http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations/
For instructions on how to vote, please refer to the voting page on the Conference website or http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Program#Presentation_Voting
Successful authors will be notified on the 20th of July. A preliminary program will be in place by August.

OGC Call for Sponsors: Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest at FOSS4G

2009-06-12T14:19:00.004+10:00

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) are conducting a Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP) to be launched at the FOSS4G (Free, Open Source Software for Geospatial) Conference in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October, 2009 (http://2009.foss4g.org).

The OGC is seeking CCIP sponsors. Prospective sponsors are invited to contact the OGC to discuss providing requirements and resources. Sponsors will be involved in developing the CCIP test plan and the plugfest event. Participation is open to all software vendors, programmers and system integrators regardless of whether their software is open source or proprietary.

More details at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/1046

Webinar Demo of OGC's OWS-6 Interoperability Testbed Results

2009-05-29T13:22:00.003+10:00

On Tuesday June 9, 2009, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) will conduct a free webinar demonstrating results from the OGC Web Services Phase 6 (OWS-6) testbed activity.

The 2 hour webinar will be held twice, firstly in the Asia/Pacific timezone, then in the US/Europe/African timezone.

Outcomes of these testbeds provide an excellent insight into the direction of future standards work and the industry as a whole.

The webinar will demonstrate OWS-6 achievements involving Web services architecture and interoperability solutions that are documented in OGC Engineering Reports and covers:

Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
Geo Processing Workflow (GPW)
Decision Support Services (DSS)
Aeronautical Information Management (AIM)
Compliance and Interoperability Test and Evaluation (CITE)

For the Asia/Pacific:

Start at: 8:30am in Mumbai, 11am in Perth, noon in Tokyo, 1pm in Sydney, 3pm in New Zealand. http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=6&day=9&year=2009&hour=13&min=0&sec=0&p1=240

Full details at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/1021

This Asia/Pacific timezone webinar is coordinated with the help of OWS-6 participants LISASoft, Landgate and the CRCSI.

For US/Europe/Africa

Start at: 11:00 a.m. EDT, 5 p.m. CST http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingdetails.html?year=2009&month=6&day=10&hour=15&min=0&sec=0&p1=179&p2=195

Full details at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/1019

Academic track at FOSS4G 2009, two weeks till abstracts due, workshops announced

2009-05-25T21:13:00.004+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 25 May 2009.

The Academic community and FOSS4G organising committee are pleased to add an academic track to the FOSS4G conference, and remind interested presenters that there are only two weeks left for FOSS4G abstract submissions! Abstract submission closes 8 June 2009. (Note the deadline has been extended a week.) http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations/.

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference (FOSS4G), is being held in Sydney, Australia October 20-23. http://2009.foss4g.org.

The academic track will act as an inventory of current research topics and promote cooperative research between OSGeo developers and the academia. The academic track is the right forum to highlight the most important research challenges and trends in the domain, and let them became the basis for an informal OSGeo research agenda. It will foster interdisciplinary discussions in all aspects of the geospatial and free and open source domains. It aims to promote networking between participants, initiate and favour discussions regarding cutting-edge technologies in the field, exchange research ideas and promote international collaboration.

All submissions to the academic track must be original unpublished work written in English that is currently not under review elsewhere. The submitted papers will be thoroughly reviewed by two to three members of the international scientific committee and refereed for their quality, originality and relevance. For further information, please read the full call for research papers. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Call4papers.

Submit your Abstracts now

Only two weeks to submit your abstracts and secure your presentation slot. Presentations are open to all and comprises a 30 minute slot which includes hand-over, introductions and 5 minutes for questions. Presentations will be selected which have a strong "Open Geospatial" theme to them. We are keen to hear about your experiences, both technical and non technical. While the technology is a key part of the conference, in 2009 we are very keen to have a good selection of case studies and business case type presentations.

Workshops and tutorials announced

Workshops and tutorials have been finalised and descriptions are now online at:

Stay Informed

Join the FOSS4G announcement email list: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g2009-announce or our twitter feed: http://2009.foss4g.org/contacts/

Media Sponsors

* Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
* Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
* Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
* Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
* GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
* Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more details about this press contact us http://2009.foss4g.org/contacts/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-2-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

Strategic Geonetwork Investment

2009-05-23T23:11:00.008+10:00

This article was originally published in September 2008 at: https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/twiki/bin/view/Infosrvices/StrategicGeoNetworkInvestment and is copied into my blog to ensure it doesn't get lost.

Overview

ANZLIC's investment in GeoNetwork has the potential to be a world class showcase for the successful adoption and sponsorship of open source solutions, provided stakeholders address current development issues. By engaging key sponsors, tightening project management, applying resources appropriately and further engaging the GeoNetwork community ANZLIC will improve its long term return on investment.

ANZLIC’s backing of free, Open Source Software reduces commercial barriers to sharing data both internally and externally, and achieves ANZLIC’s goal of increased data access to facilitate effective decision making.

Open Source offers many advantages, including free licensing and engagement of an international pool of developers, but it does require appropriate investment and management to capitalise on Open Source’s offerings effectively.

Australia and New Zealand have many agencies interested in contributing to a Robust Spatial Data Infrastructure, some with suitable funding to address long term core infrastructure issues, others focused on localised customisation and infrastructure deployments. We have suitable funding, know-how and developers to build a great success story.

Background

ANZLIC and its member organisations agreed that GeoNetwork addressed ANZLIC’s functional requirements assuming some minor issues were addressed. Eight months later, Bruce Bannerman vocalised community feeling:

"I'm concerned at how ANZLIC's adoption of the GeoNetwork open source application as our spatial metadata tool is being handled and also at a perceived lack of progress in getting a production version of this application out."

Bruce proceeded to engage key stakeholders in a constructive email discussion to funnel the extensive good will and capabilities of our community into making ANZLIC’s backing of GeoNetwork to be an exemplary success story.

The following pages were collated by Cameron Shorter, Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft, and aim to summarise and collate ideas presented and build upon them to propose a path forward.

Open Source Sponsorship

Open Source Spatial Data Infrastructures

A key challenge faced by Spatial Data Infrastructures is that the organisations who gain value from the data are different to the organisations serving the data.

The value of a Spatial Data Infrastructure is measured is the quantity of usable data it contains – or most specifically, how much data from other organisations can I get my hands on.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure becomes valuable to me when everyone else puts their data online so that I can use it. It costs me money to put my data online and I don’t gain anything because I have my data already.

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are deployed to allow organisations to properly store, document, index, distribute and analyse spatial data. Most data is collected to support decision making. These decisions range from the simple, “How do I get from A to B?” to the complex, “Which management strategy is most effective at preserving a particular environment?” To support these decisions, government departments work to a triple bottom line: Financial, Community and Environmental. While balancing these factors is critical to making decisions, the decisions are only as good as the data they are based on.

Improving the triple bottom line of national and international SDI programs is dependent on a number of factors:

Data Quantity and Integration
A national dataset, aggregated from local and state datasets, is significantly more valuable than the constituent datasets.
Data Quality
Inaccurate or imprecise data can lead to incorrect conclusions and ultimately poor decisions.
Data Currency
Some data changes rapidly, such as traffic congestion or transit demand. Other datasets, such as geologic zones, will theoretically never change, though changes in surveying methods or resolution can add to the accuracy and extent of the dataset. Making decisions based on last year’s data serves only to solve last year’s problems a year too late.
Efficient Data Collection and Maintenance
The costs and timelines of collecting data and maintaining existing datasets must be managed in order to achieve acceptable results in the previous three categories.
Data Availability and Licensing
Simply storing the data is not enough. Data must be accessible when and where it is needed, formatted in such a manner that it can be used with the tools at hand, and it must be licensed in such a manner to permit the analysis and publication of results or derived products as required.

SDI programs often seek to address these factors by developing a centralized SDI to service a network of related departments and organisations, ranging from a number of departments within a ministry, to integration of datasets across the country. As Paul Ramsey explains (here and here):

“… a key funding challenge faced by SDI programs is that while sharing data in a distributed SDI reduces the overall cost for everyone, not everyone is equally better off”.

For data custodians, publishing data is a cost centre and doesn’t provide a substantial business benefit.

Many, including Ben Searle from the Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management, realize that:

“… an effective way to increase access to other agencies’ data is to sponsor free, *Open Source tools which will reduce the cost barrier to sharing data.*”

Open Source offers many opportunities, which can significantly enhance the investment of organisations prepared to capitalize on them.

Opportunity Management is the inverse of Risk Management. With risk management you quantify what can go wrong then identify mitigation strategies to avoid or reduce the impact of the risks. With opportunity management you list potential windfalls and deploy strategies to enable and benefit from the windfalls. The table below shows an example opportunity management matrix.

Opportunity	Enabler
Use data from external agencies.	Agencies are given access to open source tools to reduce their barrier to sharing data. Use Open Standards for tools to facilitate communication. Use Open Standards for data schemas so data can be integrated.
External Agencies extend our toolset.	Use and share our tools as Open Source Software so that others can use and extend them. Support the Open Source development processes to reduce the barrier of entry to potential development sponsors.

Effective Open Source Sponsorship

After selecting Open Source sponsorship to achieve cost effective data access, agencies are now faced with a relatively new business model, open source sponsorship. Agencies need to align purchasing policies, based upon deliverables and milestones, with Open Source community development.

Under a proprietary business model, a company builds and markets a product. Multiple customer sales cover the cost of development, supporting infrastructure, marketing, support, future enhancements and hopefully include a profit. While Open Source business models incur the same costs as the proprietary models they generally distribute the costs to the end users differently, charging for the implementation of specific functional or usability improvements.

Initial investment in communities, infrastructure, and marketing for an Open Source project is often the most effective way to ensure a long term return on investment as these areas are commonly neglected in favour of feature enhancements. Proper promotion and infrastructure support, instead of a sole focus on missing features, will encourage project growth and ultimately lead to open source Nirvana: hundreds of developers building your application using someone else’s budget.

Keys to Success in Open Source

There are a number of key elements that a potential sponsor should consider when evaluating an open source project in order to ensure maximum return on investment. These include:

Solves a specific need effectively.
Has an active, diverse and inclusive community.
Enjoys support from multiple sponsors.
Established development processes including:
- Issue tracking
- Communication channels like email lists and IRC
- Quality control
Clear and comprehensive documentation and marketing material.

The OpenLayers project is a good example of a commercial entity driving the creation of a thriving open source project. OpenLayers is an open source, browser based web-mapping client which provides a front end to various proprietary and open data sources like Google and Yahoo Maps, WMS and WFS. In three years OpenLayers has grown from nothing to be the dominant open web-mapping client, attracting the majority of the users and developers in this space.

OpenLayers was initially sponsored by MetaCarta who needed a browser based application to support their mapping services. Rather than focusing on features, MetaCarta focused much of their investment on infrastructure and community support. In particular their effort was spent answering developer and user questions on email and IRC, monitoring the quality of code contributions, and setting up automated testing. Many of MetaCartas engineers have developed a personal interest in OpenLayers which MetaCarta encourages by allowing the engineers to spend some work time on the project.

Today, OpenLayers has an incredibly active developer community requiring minimal support from MetaCarta and have provided functionality significantly greater than MetaCarta’s original scope. Key to the success of OpenLayers has been the long running, dedicated community support provided by Chris Schmidt from MetaCarta. GeoServer, another Open Source project, has recently introduced a similar community liaison role, dedicated to community support and marketing.

The role of Community Liaison has always been key to Open Source and often is filled by volunteer enthusiasts, however commercial deployments of Open Source creates a workload volunteers can’t maintain and hence industry hires these volunteers instead. Ensuring that the community is supported in this fashion promotes the uptake of the project, increases the user base, which in turn attracts more sponsors and more developers. This leads to the situation where many developers are employed by a variety of sponsors to create new features and improve the performance and stability of the project.

Sponsorship Checklist

There are a number of tasks and roles that need to be addressed in order to ensure a successful open source project. These are described below:

Community Support
A person or team is required to answer user and developer questions, review submitted code from external developers to ensure quality control and ensure that all submissions meet the project requirements in terms of test coverage and documentation. This is one of the most effective investments in a project.
General Project Processes
All projects should invest in tools and processes such as automated build systems, issue trackers, concurrent versioning systems as well as ensuring that releases are performed smoothly and regularly.
Documentation
Good, current design and implementation documentation lowers the learning curve for developers supporting and extending software and greatly increases productivity. Good user documentation engenders confidence in project reviewers which in turn will lead to greater adoption.
Marketing
While Open Source benefits significantly from community generated promotion, it is enhanced by prudent investment in web pages and presentations for targeted conferences.
Commercial Support
One of the main reasons given for avoiding Open Source is not being able to call someone to fix problems. Offering commercial support for a project you use will go far in encouraging adoption by other organizations.
Integrate and bundle with related software
Microsoft Office has been especially successful because it integrates a suite of related products and bundles them all together in one easy install. Open Source products improve their attractiveness in the same way.
Open Standards
Due to the release-early/release-often approach of most open source projects, they are often leveraged to develop, test and extend open standards. This makes open source projects among the earliest adopters of emerging standards, encourages the uptake of open standards and makes the projects attractive to those interested in sharing data between agencies.
Project Management
Just like proprietary software, a sponsor’s software development should be managed using standard software development processes . This includes estimation; planning resources, work activities, schedules, budgets, deliverables; monitoring schedule, quality, risk, issues, contractors, configuration management.
Measurement
Measurement is a key tool used during proprietary Project Management, as good metrics enable good management decisions. Good measures highlight whether specific business goals are being met and enable management to alter their strategy early if issues arise.

Metrics are under-utilized in many open source projects as developers usually drive their own agendas, are self motivated, and spend less time on Project Management. However metrics based decision making can be equally effective for Open Source projects especially for sponsors who will need to answer to commercial milestones and targets.

Standard software development metrics should be complemented by measures to monitor the health of an Open Source community. The Community MapBuilder project tracks many of these metrics and can be viewed at the URL provided below. There are now a number of dedicated tools which automate many of the common software metrics. http://communitymapbuilder.org/display/MAP/Strategic+Direction#StrategicDirection-Metrics. Typical measures are discussed in the following sections.

Project Management Measures

Earned Value Management

Earned Value Management (EVM ) provides an effective way to track progress over time and make adjustments to scope, schedule or resources as required. When employed EVM measures the planned value of the project as estimated in the original schedule, the earned value calculated from the percentage completion of all tasks at a given time, and the actual cost of the project at a given time as derived from time logs.

Milestones

Milestones provide an easy means of determining whether deliverables are on time or not. By decomposing a project into a number of smaller milestones, stakeholders can monitor these deliverables to determine if the schedule is likely to be met and adjust their planning accordingly, before the expected completion of the project.

Software Development (Indicative)

Features Implemented

By using an issue tracking system, such as Trac or JIRA, to record, track and report on the progress of feature and improvements, management is able to determine the progress of the project at a finer resolution than would be provided through milestones alone. This process also assists in the planning and prioritisation of features and encourages a flexible and agile development methodology.

Repository Commits

The frequency of commits to the projects source code repository is a strong indicator of the activity experienced by the community. While a high level of activity could indicate anything from a pending code freeze prior to release, to the discovery of a large and pervasive security vulnerability, it does show that the community is responsive and the project is undergoing active development. Commits to documentation repositories, or changes to the project wiki, provide similar indications of community activity.

Quality Measures

Bug Reports

Contrary to intuition, a large number of bug reports usually indicates a healthy project. It is an indication that the community is actively identifying bugs and endeavouring to fix them. Many issue tracking applications allow the reporting of bugs reported and fixed over time, or relating to specific releases. Many bugs indicates a strong user community that is testing and reporting issues or feature requests to the project.

Test Coverage

Many projects have a minimum requirement for the percentage of source code covered by automated tests that must be met before a new feature may be added to the project. The test coverage of a project or a specific module of the project is a strong indicator of the quality and stability of the source code. Projects with minimum requirements are indicating to the community that code quality and stability are more important that a long list of features that may or may not be stable.

Code Reviews

Code reviews are audits of newly written or modified source code performed by a developer or developers other than those that are responsible for the code. The presence and availability of code reviews is indicative of a commitment of the project community to following good development processes. This is another indicator of the quality of the project.

Community Measures

Communication

The activity of the project email lists, IRC channels, forums and other public means of communication is the best indication of the health of the community. In order to promote the use of the project, this activity should be balanced between discussions on the direction of the project, questions from new users or developers and in particular answers from knowledgeable members of the community.

Downloads

The number of downloads of binary releases, developer kits or source code provides an indication of the size of the user community. A large user community provides a large pool of people that may be interested in sponsoring additional development on the project, thus sharing the costs of the project.

Web Metrics

Indicators such as web page hits and related blog entries provide a means of estimating the interest in the project. While downloads provide a good indicator of the current size of the community, these web metrics are more of an indicator of growing interest and awareness in the project, and provide a means of forecasting medium-term growth in the project.

Number of Sponsors

The number of sponsors is a strong indicator of the size of the sponsored community. While this may sound obvious, open source projects suffer in this regard, since many sponsors will not advertise themselves as such. Instead they simply offer code patches, or hire existing developers within the community without informing the community at large. Unlike proprietary software projects, there is no centralized authority to track the number of licenses or authorised vendors/developers associated with the project, so the advertised number of sponsors will generally be a subset of the actual sponsors.

Assessing GeoNetwork Investment

Assessing ANZLICs Investment

Using the criteria described above, the following sections discuss the effectiveness of ANZLIC’s investment in GeoNetwork. Most of this section draws upon an email thread where suggested improvements to ANZLIC’s investment in GeoNetwork were discussed.

The issues discussed include:

GeoNetwork provides most of the functionality required by the stakeholders, making it a good basis to start from.
Software developers have noted the design and software is fair, but a number of improvements to the design, documentation and testing regime would greatly improve the extensibility and maintainability of the code-base.
There is concern over the disjoint between sponsors and developers knowledge. The cost of feature development is understood by the developers for specific parts of the code but has not been communicated to the sponsors, limiting their ability to make effective decisions.
The standard infrastructure and liaison costs associate with the project are being incurred by the developers and are neither visible nor acknowledged by the sponsors.
To date there have been long delays in expected deliverables.
There is concern that multiple forks of the GeoNetwork code base are being maintained, which will ultimately increase the costs of managing the project and keeping the forks up to date.
The current release is still being labelled as a beta release, indicating that it is currently not ready for a production environment despite assurances that it is.
Development progress is currently not being monitored against any schedule.
The requirements and scope of ANZLIC’s investment are unclear, and no milestones have been established.

While this list is long and varied, these concerns can be largely addressed with three changes to the process:

Employ software development project management techniques. Management of software development is a refined art with established processes which extend the usual management processes already established in government purchasing processes.
Accurately assess the scope of the project and resource accordingly. The scope should include GeoNetwork infrastructure development and community support to ensure the long-term health and opportunity management of ANZLIC’s investment.
Monitor the software development progress using techniques like Earned Value Management.

Resourcing

Australian and New Zealand already have a strong community of GeoNetwork developers both within government agencies and commercially that we can draw upon. These developers can be pooled together under a common project and project manager but still answerable to their respective organisations’ goals. The project will answer to the Aust/NZ steering committee.

There are two identified funding structures readily available for GeoNetwork, described in the following sections.

Long Term Strategic Investment

Programs like the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) managed by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have long term funding to build a robust spatial data infrastructure and have substantial funding to apply to infrastructure – automated build and test suites, core design changes, documentation, community building etc.

Project Specific Deliverables and Timeframes

Many of the other stakeholders have project specific requirements related to collecting and managing metadata within their organisation. These projects will typically focus on configuration and integration with existing systems.

Recommendations

Resources

A number of key roles have been identified that, once filled, would contribute significantly to the success of the project.

Software Project Manager

A role is created to manage ANZLIC’s software development in accordance with standard software development processes. These include accurately assessing and prioritising scope, monitoring progress (using standard techniques like EVM), reporting progress, liasing with stakeholders (including ANZLIC members, greater GeoNetwork community and standards bodies), and managing risks and opportunities.

Community Liaison Officer

Funding a community liaison officer to sit on email lists and IRC and answer developer and user questions is a very effective investment in engaging future developers and sponsors. This role is usually someone who has been involved in the project for a while and has a good understanding of the technology and people involved in the project.

Developers

One conclusion of community discussions was that ANZLIC’s investment in GeoNetwork is insufficiently resourced. Increasing the number of developers available to work on core infrastructure is essential in ensuring the project will remain stable and extendable as well as speeding the incorporation of missing functionality as needed. This has the added benefit of increasing the pool of developers available to perform or assist in large-scale deployments as the project nears completion.

Tasks

The following tasks need to be addressed:

Identify sponsors and their business drivers.
Provide list of desired features.
Review the state of the software, design, and infrastructure and recommend updates.
Provide cost/benefit analysis

GeoNetwork Stakeholders

This section provides details of currently identified stakeholders. Please update or add the details of your organisation below.

ANZLIC

Bluenet

Point of Contact: Kate Roberts

Bluenet aims to provide a virtual data centre to support long term curation and management of data for Australia 's marine science researchers.

Bluenet has taken a lead role in extending GeoNetwork by sponsoring Simon Pigot to build the MEST extension to GeoNetwork.

Metadata Entry and Search Tool (MEST])

Extends the latest GeoNetwork release (2.2)

Adds ANZLIC profile
Is labelled Beta, but is of a stable quality
Managed by Bluenet

Bureau of Rural Sciences (BRS)

The BRS have hired LISAsoft to improve the User Interface for entering data to be user centric – putting the most important fields for the user first.

Commonwealth Scientific & Research Organisation (CSIRO)

Point of Contact: Rob Woodcock

Business Drivers as described by Rob Woodcock

… For a number of years my team has been working with others towards the creation of an open standards based interoperable geoscience infrastructure for Australia. Collaboration with both Australian and International organisations resulted in the formation of the SEE Grid community, a number of testbeds (e.g. CGI interoperability experiments with GeoSciML, Minerals Council of Australia and Geological Surveys Geochemistry, ebXML registry and repository) and various information models and tools (e.g. ANZLIC ISO metadata profile, GeoSciML, OGC Observations and Measurements, GeoServer community schema support, Fullmoon and Hollow World GML application schema modelling tools). Most of these outcomes have completed their “testbed” phase and some are moving to ISO standardisation or broader uptake.

The reason I say this GeoNetwork discussion is timely is NCRIS has provided an opportunity to make the step change from testbeds and demonstrators to production grade services. To date many of the activities have been, as Cameron noted, “for the work being done, …under-resourced”. This is particularly true as a move from testbeds to production grade services requires considerable investment and appropriate staff to achieve quality assurance, branch management, help desk support, deployment, and so forth. It is a credit to the NCRIS process and the Auscope board and AeRIC, that this investment is actually being made (to the tune of nearly $10 million by mid 2011) and the strategic objective, in an open standards/source way, is to achieve production grade infrastructure for geospatial & geoscience information.

To this end, the NCRIS activities I am involved with (Auscope and SISS) are:

Seeking feedback and engagement with the broader community on where best to target the available resources to achieve the production grade services infrastructure – fill in the gaps to production services and complement/support the existing activities. Flexibility and cooperation is a key ingredient

Establishing a quality assurance framework around the Spatial Information Services stack including – packaging/installation, regression testing/unit-test suites

Performing development on core open source technologies in the stack so they are interoperable, in sync with the open source community developments

Establishing a maintenance and support environment including help desk, priority bug fixes in the Australian and New Zealand context, deployment assistance, training, sample deployments

Developing features necessary to support the Australian and New Zealand geospatial communities – in particular those areas represented in NCRIS noting that is a very large group of Government and non-government organisations already.

Seeking to facilitate/assist organisations and communities that might be able to sustain the stack beyond the lifetime of the NCRIS investments so that the organisations that deploy have a sustainable technology base – with my CSIRO hat on success is defined as my not having a job at the end of the activity!

On a more technical note, the SISS is currently based on the following open source technologies:

!GeoServer - with community schema extensions
!GeoNetwork
THREDDS, Hyrax
Web Portals and Desktop clients – various samples are being made available particularly for training and regression testing purposes (e.g. Googlemap portal, uDig, sample java desktop clients)
OGC standards
!GeoSciML standards for geoscience information

Due to our previous work we already have reasonably good links with the open source communities involved and broadly the Australian and New Zealand activities around GeoServer. Geospatial and Geoscience information standards and the Web Portal and Desktop clients. We are less well connected with the GeoNetwork community (something we are actively seeking to improve) though we have a strong involvement in registries, metadata standards and the ANZLIC profile.

Whilst I believe the strategic intent of these activities, our collaborations, and the investment level are capable of contributing to the broadly desired outcomes Bruce mentioned in his initial e-mail, the move to production services and actually having a large investment does create some additional challenges both in project management and the, more important, social interaction side of the community.

Flexibility and communication are clearly keys to achieving our shared objectives and I welcome any feedback or suggestions on how the activities and resources represented by the Auscope and SISS investments could serve the ongoing development of GeoNetwork , GeoServer and more broadly the spatial information services stack. We do have a plan to keep things moving but it is not set in stone and there is flexibility in the resourcing to “grease the wheels” so to speak to ensure the necessary gaps can be filled – you may just find we change the plan to resource the need.

Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC-SI)

Point of Contact: Peter Woodgate

The CRC-SI wishes to support the development of a robust Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure. This should be preceded by a National Strategy paper developed under the guidance of ANZLIC.

Key dates

By end of 2008: National Strategy Policy
2009: Funding provided for a SDI

DSE – Victoria

European Space Agency

Point of Contact: Jeroen Ticheler, Geocat

Through a project with the European Space Agency the ebRIM model will be implemented in GeoNetwork. One of the prime goals of this is to improve the internal handling of metadata and make sure other interfaces and GN as a whole benefit of some of the ebRIM advantages. The project runs until the end of 2008 and should be stable by the end of January 2009.

Organisations often use quantitative measures to review employee effectiveness. But, beware the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Human Measurement. “The act of measuring a human affects the quality of the metrics being collected”.

Key dates

January 2009: Stable code included in GeoNetwork

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

Geoscience Australia

Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD)

GA are migrating the ASDD over to using GeoNetwork and have resources allocated to this.

New Zealand Defence Force

Point of Contact: Byron Cochrane.

Byron is using the trunk version of GeoNetwork and is developing automated Spatial Metadata Extraction Tool (SMET) to be used for harvesting and validating metadata. As yet, he is unclear how to incorporate SMET into the GeoNetwork trunk.

There are a number of others in the GeoNetwork community investigating this problem.

New Zealand Regional Councils

Point of Contact: Jim McLeod

New Zealand mini SDI pilot

A consortium of New Zealand regional councils aim to set up a pilot to set up a mini-Spatial Data Infrastructure pilot to facilitate sharing of data.

Key dates

August 2008: Councils meet to determine key requirements

Office of Spatial Data Management (OSDM)

Point of Contact: Ben Searle

OSDM have been taking a facilitating role for Australian GeoNetwork development, coordinating sponsors involvement. In particular, OSDM is sponsoring the migration of The Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD) to Geonetwork. ASDD provides search interfaces to discover geospatial dataset descriptions (metadata) throughout Australia.

http://www.osdm.gov.au/Metadata/GeoNetwork/default.aspx

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Point of Contact: George Percivall

OWS6 Testbed

The annual Open Web Services (OWS) testbeds provide international, practical testing of current and upcoming OGC standards, and covered many of the strategic objectives of Australian/New Zealand geospatial programs.

By aligning with OGC testbeds we gain:

Our development is aligned with existing and future OGC standards, increasing the longevity of our solutions.
Alignment with similar international programs
In kind and/or financial contributions toward our projects.
Access to world developments in this area.

The 2008 OWS6 testbed themes are:

Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
Aviation Information
Geoprocessing Workflow (GPW)
Geo Decision-support Services (GDS)
Compliance Testing (CITE)

Key dates

June 2008: Release RFQ
August 2008: RFQ responses
September 2008: Kick-off
March 2009: Completion

Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)

Point of Contact: Cameron Shorter

OSGeo supports the development of the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects.

The Australian/New Zealand Chapter of OSGeo will host the international conference for OSGeo, FOSS4G , in 2009 and the GeoNetwork success story will be an ideal showcase study.

Key dates

November 2009: International conference for Open Source Geospatial Software, FOSS4G, in Sydney.

GeoNetwork Open Source community

Point of Contact: Jeroen Ticheler, GeoCat

GeoNetwork has a strong Open Source community behind it, lead by the primary author, Jeroen Ticheler who has built a company, GeoCat, around supporting GeoNetwork.
GeoCat are strongly engaged with the European communities and are a good point for engaging and coordinating with projects like INSPIRE, as well as aligning with future roadmaps for GeoNetwork.

Collaborative mapping of Sydney down under

2009-05-18T14:50:00.007+10:00

Sydney government departments are collating Sydney city's underground geospatial data from multiple agencies into a common database and extruding 2D features into 3D, thus providing significantly more valuable datasets for all parties. The project was initially initiated to support emergency management and counter terrorism, however it also offers significant day-to-day savings by reducing infrastructure maintenance costs, like digging up streets, reducing public inconvenience, and increasing responsiveness to faults.
The results of the first few years of colloboration under the Emergency Information Coordination Unit (EICU) were presented at a workshop, Friday, 15 May 2009. While the data is still in the pilot phase, it was impressive to see how many of the datasets from different agencies lined up, and interesting to see how easy it was to identify glitches in z-axis points when displayed in 3D for the first time.

EICU call for Data Standards
A few participants and presenters recommended that standards be defined for sharing data between agencies. This sparked my interest as there are a number of OGC initiatives that we Australians have a lot of experience with which are directly applicable to the EICU.

The Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure Interoperability Pilot
The Canadians, under their Geoconnections program, addressed the same EICU use case of sharing data between agencies by providing data from multiple provinces through a single portal interface as if it were coming from one database. The data was updated at source and made available in real time. This was acheieve during the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrsatructure Interoperability Pilot, run as an OGC testbed, by using cascading Web Feature Services. The pilot also provided a workflow for users to feed updates back to data custodians, and search and discovery provided through a catalog interface. LISAsoft in Australia developed a Geoserver based cascading Web Feature Service and the browser based client.
A video of the pilot can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIZLc_qHYZc .

Community Schemas
As explained in more detail in this article, Community Schemas describe specific attributes and data structures for a data community. The community schemas act as a wrapper over disparent datasets, facilitating sharing between agencies.
Australia, and CSIRO in particular, pioneered much of the work related to Community Schemas in the development of GeoSciML and WaterML. LISAsoft supported the project by developing community schema performance and validation tools.

CityGML
CityGML is a specific Community Schema which offers the key building blocks for a EICU schema. CityGML was the basis for much of the latest OGC testbed, OWS6, which LISAsoft provided validation tools for. The results of this testbed are planned to be presented in as a webinar early in June 2009. Let me know if you wish to be informed when the webinar is announced. An good overview of CityGML is provided in the OWS RFQ:

CityGML is an open data model and XML-based format for the storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models. It is an application schema for the Geography Markup Language version 3.1.1 (GML3), the extendible international standard for spatial data exchange issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the ISO TC211.
The aim of the development of CityGML is to reach a common definition of the basic entities, attributes, and relations of a 3D city model. This is especially important with respect to the cost-effective sustainable maintenance of 3D city models, allowing the reuse of the same data in different application fields.

CityGML not only represents the graphical appearance of city models but specifically addresses the representation of the semantic and thematic properties, taxonomies and aggregations. CityGML includes a geometry model and a thematic model. The geometry model allows for the consistent and homogeneous definition of geometrical and topological properties of spatial objects within 3D city models. The base class of all objects is CityObject which is a subclass of the GML class Feature. All objects inherit the properties from CityObject.

The thematic model of CityGML employs the geometry model for different thematic fields like Digital Terrain Models, sites (i.e. buildings; future extensions of CityGML will also include explicit models for bridges and tunnels), vegetation (solitary objects and also areal and volumetric biotopes), water bodies, transportation facilities, and city furniture. Further objects, which are not explicitly modeled yet, can be represented using the concept of generic objects and attributes. In addition, extensions to the CityGML data model applying to specific application fields can be realized using the Application Domain Extensions (ADE). Spatial objects of equal shape which appear many times at different positions like e.g. trees, can also be modeled as prototypes and used multiple times in the city model. A grouping concept allows the combination of single 3D objects, e.g. buildings to a building complex. Objects which are not geometrically modeled by closed solids can be virtually sealed in order to compute their volume (e.g. pedestrian underpasses, tunnels, or airplane hangars). They can be closed using ClosureSurfaces. The concept of the TerrainIntersectionCurve is introduced to integrate 3D objects with the Digital Terrain Model at their correct positions in order to prevent e.g. buildings from floating over or sinking into the terrain.

CityGML differentiates five consecutive Levels of Detail (LOD), where objects become more detailed with increasing LOD regarding both their geometry and thematic differentiation. CityGML files can - but do not have to - contain multiple representations (and geometries) for each object in different LOD simultaneously. Generalization relations allow the explicit representation of aggregated objects over different scales.

In addition to spatial properties, CityGML features can be assigned appearances. Appearances are not limited to visual data but represent arbitrary observable properties of the feature’s surface such as infrared radiation, noise pollution, or earthquake-induced structural stress.

Furthermore, objects can have external references to corresponding objects in external datasets. Enumerative object attributes are restricted to external code lists and values defined in external, re-definable dictionaries.

Tapping into OGC test beds
Future EICU initiatives, focusing on cross agency collaboration, provides an excellent opportunity to engage OGC participation. OGC participation provides access to international expertise and ensures R&D work flows into future standards and products. Australia is in an excellent position to lead an OGC initiative. Though the EICU, we have the business drivers, multiple agency support and local expertise. It would make a nice change to work on a testbed where meeting times align with Australian timezones.

OSGeo: 10,000 strong

2009-05-11T10:10:00.005+10:00

Over 10,000 unique email addresses are subscribe to Geospatial Open Source lists! (Thanks Markus Neteler for working this out). Check out the success of your local project at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r_y6-xiF3ZvE-rDJ5y30GfA and add details of your project if it isn't there. These figures are very useful when making a business case for sponsoring OSGeo or FOSS4G, so I'm hoping some resourceful geek will work out a way to extra these figures every month so we can track the growth of OSGeo from this point on.
I've also been overwhelmed with the good will and marketing power of the OSGeo community when promoting our FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G logos are appearing on blogs and web sites, press releases are being translated, and like previous years, community leaders are forwarding press releases through to their local communities. It is not surprising that 46% of FOSS4G2007 delegates heard about FOSS4G from a collegue or email. With 10,000 evangelists, OSGeo provides powerful viral marketing.

Alan Boudreault new despot of UbuntuGIS

2009-05-07T06:55:00.002+10:00

Alan Boudreault has accepted the role of despot of UbuntuGIS.

Alan has demonstrated strategic thinking on how to move UbuntuGIS forward, leading many of the recent initiatives to improve UbuntuGIS. I'm confident he will take UbuntuGIS to the next level.

The UbuntuGIS project is responsible for packaging Geospatial applications into the Ubuntu linux distribution.

Welcome Alan. I wish you all the best in the role,

Cameron Shorter, retiring UbuntuGIS despot.

FOSS4G conference registration opens

2009-05-04T20:52:00.003+10:00

Sydney, Australia. 4 May 2009.

http://2009.foss4g.org

The international conference for free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), held in Sydney, Australia 20-23 October, 2009, is now open for registration. http://2009.foss4g.org/registration/.

FOSS4G attracts the cream of international Geospatial Open Source and Open Standards system implementors and sponsors. With themes ranging from the integration of Open Source with Proprietary systems to the building of Spatial Data Infrastructures and application of Open Geospatial Standards, the conference offers a unique opportunity to tap into the wealth of knowledge and experience available among the Open Source developers, sponsors and geospatial professionals of all persuasions. The Open Geospatial Consotium (OGC) is underpinning the conference with a Standards Based integration showcase based on a climate change scenario, demonstrating integration between Open Source and proprietary applications.

Along with a comprehensive program of thought provoking presentations and interactive workshops you would expect from an international conference, FOSS4G retains many of the engaging characteristics of its Open Source heritage. With Bird of a Feather sessions, code sprints, install-fests and impromptu project meetings, there is an unparalleled opportunity to take part in active communities and provide input into the direction for a variety of projects. FOSS4G encompasses the best of Open Communities, such as collaboration, helpfulness, innovation and honesty.

Early bird registration is just $AU725 (~ $US525) for 3 days of conference and tutorials, and $AU375 (~ $US270) for a day of top notch workshops from the world's best international presenters.

Location
FOSS4G 2009 will be held in Sydney, Australia which is built around one of the largest, most beautiful harbours in the world with miles of golden beaches stretching north and south of the city on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It has a warm climate in October with average temperatures ranging from 15 - 22°C. Sydney and its surrounding areas provide a diverse range of visual excitement and vibrancy. Visitors to Sydney are spoiled with choice including national parks, famous beaches, the World Heritage Blue Mountains area and the picturesque Sydney Harbour. Sydney’s also offers a diverse range of cultural activities including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Theatre Company all performing at the well know Sydney Opera House.

Call for Presentations
Are you planning to present at this years conference? If so, don't wait until you have your presentation finalised to tell us about it! Go to the submission website now (http://2009.foss4g.org/presentations/) and enter your name and contact details and at least a title. Then, closer to the close-off date, log back in and fill out the abstract details. This will be a big help for the organisers as it will give us some advanced notice as to how many and what type of presentations to expect.

FOSS4G 2009 Highlights
The Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP): FOSS4G will launch the OGC's Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP), which demonstrates standards based interoperability between Open Source and Proprietary geospatial applications. It consists of a server with multiple virtual machines, each installed with geospatial applications offering standards based web services. All web services will demonstrate a common dataset, and will be accessed by a range of geospatial client applications installed on client computers. http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome

Presenters are encouraged (but not mandated) to make use of scenarios and on-site data from the Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest (CCIP). This is especially important as demand for access to data over the internet is expected to be high, and Australia has notoriously slow connections to the outside world.

FOSS4G Live DVD: LiveDVDs, based on the Xubuntu operating system and including Geospatial Open Source Software, will be given to all delegates. Users can boot a Live DVD on their computer and trial the software without installing or effecting the existing system. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc

Installfest: The Installfest will give delegates the opportunity to meet in a common area and install a wide variety of FOSS software on their laptops, EE PC or any other system they care to bring in. Community members will be around to assist with any troubles and provide help and insight into the software. The install fest will take place after workshops on the first day.

Workshops and Tutorials: Workshops and Tutorials allow presenters to lead attendees through applications, integration solutions, or other topics in an interactive environment. Half-day workshops (3 hours) will be held in computer rooms on the first day. Tutorials (90 minutes) will be held in standard presentation rooms, run concurrently with presentations during the third and fourth days.

Presentations: The meat of the conference are it's presentations. Drawing on a huge community of local, regional and international experts we will discuss some of the most current and poignant topics in the industry today.

Demo Theatre: During lunch and coffee breaks the demonstration theatre will be showcasing live software. These short demonstrations from sponsors, open source projects and the user community show what is possible with open source today.

Birds of a Feather: Rooms have been set aside for semi-organised meetings between like minded groups. Some prominant community initiatives started in prior FOSS4G Birds of a Feather sessions.

Code Sprint: The weekend after FOSS4G is reserved for the Hackers' Code Sprint. Hackers will be locked in a basement with lots of bandwidth, pizzas and coke. (Well, maybe something better than that, but we don't want to spoil the mystical hacker image by describing it any differently.)

Upcoming milestones

1 Jun 2009, Abstract submission deadline
13 Jul 2009, Presenters notified of acceptance for talks
31 Jul 2009, '''Author/Early registration deadline'''
14 Sep 2009, '''Completed program available on the wiki'''
20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
24-25 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Code Sprint

Media Sponsors

Position Magazine: http://www.positionmag.com.au/
Asian Surveying and Mapping Newsletter: http://www.asmmag.com
Geoconnexions Magazine: http://www.geoconnexion.com/
Directions Magazine: http://directionsmag.com/
GIS Development: http://gisdevelopment.net/
Baliz Media: http://www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com/

For more information or to keep informed from the FOSS4G Organising Committee, join our email list or twitter feed at: http://2009.foss4g.org/contacts/

or contact:

Cameron Shorter, Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

FOSS4G Sponsor logos available

2009-04-29T08:50:00.003+10:00

Sponsor logos, as well as other variants of the FOSS4G banner are available for inclusion in your website, blog or other promotional material.

In 2007, 26% of delegates learned about the FOSS4G conference from weblinks. This is an easy and powerful way for you to promote FOSS4G and your own Geospatial Open Source credentials.

Pick your preferred logo at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Marketing.

And make sure you include yourself as one of the sites promoting FOSS4G at: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Marketing#List_of_FOSS4G_promotions.

Credit to Volker Mische for creating the new images, and updating the previous images to use Standard banner sizes .

Cameron Shorter

Presenting at GeoNext conference

Big Spatial & Open Source week in Canberra, Australia

Call for interest in OSGeo-Live 5.5

22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website’s Usability

LISAsoft is hiring Developers, Project Manager & Sales Person

OSGeo-Live 5.0 released - the Open Source Geospatial DVD

Highlights

Contents

Credits

Sponsoring organisations:

Launch of Australian Open Technology Foundation

US Defence purchasing emphasises Open Technology Development

Project Overviews & Quickstarts for New Zealand's SDI Cookbook

Memoirs of a Cat Herder - Coordinating OSGeo-Live volunteers

Australian Government defines Policy for Opening Public Sector Information

Secrets of Mashup Design

A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies

OSGeo-Live 4.5, the Open Source Geospatial DVD, released

Australian Defence embrace interoperablity through standards

Australian government embrace "pro-disclosure" of information

Australian government now to actively consider Open Source

Goals and schedule for OSGeo-Live 4.5

Packaged projects - which version?

Use Natural Earth dataset for examples

Translations

Quick Starts

User Testing

OGC Standard Overviews

Key Milestones

About OSGeo-Live

Contact Us?

EU Guidelines for Public Administrations purchasing software

LISAsoft launches training in GeoSpatial Standards and Open Source Technologies

Script for "How to sell Open Source to Government"

How to sell Open Source to Government

Video of the best GeoSpatial Open Source - OSGeo-Live

Highlights

Packages

I'm giving away my discount tickets to "Business centric Open Source conference"

OGC Webinar describing advances in GeoSpatial Standards during OWS-7 testbed

Using Web Processing Services in the OGC's testbed: OWS-7

Tools for developing & validating GML Application Profiles using AIXM

OGC and OSGeo collaborate on documentation

One week till OSGeo-Live Feature Freeze

Resources

About OSGeo-Live

Building OSGeo Live DVD for FOSS4G 2010

Milestones

About OSGeo-Live

Contact Us?

Governments don't know how to buy Free Software

Report from OSGeo stand at the Federation of Surveyors conference

2 International GeoSpatial Standards meetings coming to Australia

OSGeo Live DVD and Virtual Machine released

Downloads:

Packages:

Interested?

OSGeo Live DVD joins Google Summer of Code

Does your favourite OSGeo application work on the LiveDVD?

FOSS4G Registration Metrics

LISAsoft awarded three innovation grants for SLIP Enabler

LISAsoft hiring Open Geospatial Software Engineers

Will there be an OSGeo Desktop shootout at FOSS4G 2010?

Planning for next year's GIS Live DVD

Milestones

Ideas for future releases

Interested?

FOSS4G Videos and Presentations online

About FOSS4G

Media Sponsors

Federated Geo-synchronization

Overview

Technical Problem Statement

Technical Design

Version WFS-T

Version WFS-T Development

Security

Security Development

Cached WFS-T