Thursday, April 7, 2011

Summary of FOSSGIS 2011

After 3 days in Heidelberg, here are some thoughts about this year's edition of FOSSGIS, the german speaker FOSSGIS conference. After reading the programm, we can see that the hot topics are web mapping (particularly performance and harvesting), open data, crowd sourcing and 3D. I was a bit suprised not to see a lot of presentations about mobile technologies.

Several presentations discussed the possibilities of harvesting or aggregation of geospatial sources. For the metadata, several systems are working well, but for the aggregation of goservices of geodata, there is, for now, no real solutions. The usage of MapProxies is one option, cascading geoservices is another option but both face technical and organizational issues. Still some work to do ;-)

LinkedData or GeoLinkedData (spain example) is also an area where a lot of works need to be done. I particularly like the idea to use the complete power of the web to access/find geo data.

Finally, it's great to see that a lot of works are done around performance. The web user doesn't like to wait and it's very important to deliver the geographical information very fast. Javascript compression, MapProxies or WMTS need to be used to satisfy the end user.

On the MapFish side, a lot of presentations mentionned this framework (for example http://www.energieatlas.org/) and the workshop was overbooked. GeoExt is also very widely used.

Great summaries here and some tweets here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words on those summaries that I made :-)

georreferenciamento said...

The web user doesn't like to wait and it's very important to deliver the geographical information very fast. This is very nice news.