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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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:

1. Call for abstracts, including promotion in a number of areas.
2. Abstract submission deadline.
3. Chase abstracts from a few presenters who had indicated they wanted to present but forgot to submit an abstract.
4. Ask the community to rank abstracts.
5. 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

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

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

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

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
Register at: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/090609_ows6_webinar.php
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
Register at: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/090610_ows6_webinar.php
Full details at: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases/1019

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

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:

• http://2009.foss4g.org/workshops/
• http://2009.foss4g.org/tutorials/

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.