Free and Open Source Software for
Geospatial
Arnulf Christl1,2
1 metaspatial 2 OSGeo
1 The FOSS4G Conference Series
FOSS4G is the premium Open Source Geospatial conference event of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The first edition under the auspices of OSGeo dates back to 2006 where it took place in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Before this the GRASS users organized a forerunner named the FOSS/GRASS User Conference in Bangkok, Thailand in 2004. The very first international Conference was the Open Source GIS - GRASS users conference in 2002 in Trento http://www.ing.unitn.it/~grass/. And in the year 2000, 15 years ago, the "Primo Meeting degli Utenti Italiani di GRASS" took place in Como, Italy (http://geomatica.como.polimi.it/grass_2000/). And now we are back – a long long tradition of Open Source in Como!
The first issues of FOSS4G were also dubbed "Meeting of the Tribes" alluding to the different programming languages (C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc.) and the fact that OSGeo managed to provide a neutral ground and have them all talk to each other. As Free and Open Source software became more and more commonly used, the need for broader conferences for common users also grew. Initially the annual FOSS4G conference mostly attracted core developers of the main OSGeo projects. Over time it grew to quite a considerable size and at the next edition in Seoul, South Korea we expect 1000+ attendees. These numbers also mark a size that requires increasingly larger venues and professional logistics which result in a considerably higher price tag. The venue for FOSS4G rotates around the world starting with Lausanne, Switzerland in 2006, followed by Victoria in Canada, Cape Town in South Africa, Sydney in Australia, Barcelona in Spain, Denver in the USA and Nottingham in the UK (2013). The last edition in 2014 took place in North America (Portland, Oregon, USA) and this year FOSS4G will take place in Seoul, South Korea. The 2016 edition of FOSS4G was awarded to the German OSGeo Local Chapter (FOSSGIS) which will organize it in Bonn, Germany. This means that attending a FOSS4G event is still a rare chance considering that our earth is still quite a sizable place, regardless of how well we are virtually connected.
Over time more and more OSGeo Local Chapters have started their own conferences, often in their local languages. Just one example between many is the German Local Chapter association which organizes the annual FOSSGIS conferences in German language since 2003. The need for smaller conferences could be answered by these local OSGeo chapters but there was still a gap between the global FOSS4G (commonly held in English language) and the local
conferences held in their native languages.
2 FOSS4G Europe
The first regional conference titled "FOSS4G Eastern Europe" took place in 2012 at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in the Czech Technical University in Prague. It catered for a broader audience than the original "meeting of the tribes" and also included more attendees from research and education. Especially for local and neighboring countries travel costs were much lower than a global FOSS4G taking place in Sydney, Victoria or Cape Town. This first conference was such a good success that in 2013 the Romanian Local Chapter hosted the FOSS4G Central and Eastern Europe at the National Library of Romania in Bucharest, Romania. In 2014 the conference was renamed FOSSG Europe and moved to Bremen in Germany at the Jacobs University, again with a broad audience from research, education and public authorities.
3 FOSS4G Europe 2015 in Como, Italy
This year FOSS4G Europe brings us to beautiful Como in Italy. The main tag line reads: "Open Innovation for Europe". The web site continues to state that "The Conference aims to bring together FOSS4G users and developers worldwide and foster closer interactions with and amongst European communities in order to share ideas for improving geodata, software and applications openness." This makes this edition of FOSS4G a first to explicitly mention "geodata" before "software". Interesting. Maybe it shows that Open Source software has been commonly accepted in the geospatial domain and we can turn to more pressing issues?
4 Open Data
Back in 2010 Schuyler Erle wrote (http://de.slideshare.net/sderle/how-crowdsourcing-changed-disaster-relief-forever):
Your software is awesome, (but) your software is useless
...without data
Since then many things have improved but we are still far away from a generally accepted Open Data policy. Especially in Europe the INSPIRE regulations have helped pave the way towards a more open policy but it is a top down effort which still lacks support from those who actually have the data. There are great exceptions, for example swisstopo (http://map.geo.admin.ch from Switzerland (who are not even bound by the INSPIRE regulations). Austria maintains http://basemap.at and opens up topographic maps down to a scale of 1:1000 including all street addresses and even plot numbers. Finland has opened up most of the geospatial data and even in Germany at least the federal level of data is now available as map services. Somehow not yet really Open Data, but we appreciate the effort anyway.
All of this can and should be improved. To achieve this we need to complement these top down efforts with a bottom up approach. Many smaller initiatives already go a lot further than national programs and some small local administration make their geospatial data wide and openly available for anybody to use. Hand in hand with this growing sense of distributing geospatial data freely is a growing tendency to recognize OpenStreetMap as a valuable addition to national geodata infrastructure instead of perceiving it as the natural enemy of the surveying trade. One nice example is the state of Bavaria (Germany) where the authoritative map offering includes a layer named "Biergarten" (http://geoportal.bayern.de/bayernatlas/). The locations have been taken from OpenStreetMap and are also updated on a regular basis. This makes sure that the locations of the "beer gardens", a cultural asset of Bavaria, are up to date and get maintained by the people who actually go to these places to drink beer. Not something you would expect from the officially endorsed surveyor. Well, who knows, Bavaria is known for its open approach to beer. Whatever else, Open Data is surely the way to go. This is a fact and this edition of FOSS4G-Europe will show many examples of how this can be done, what needs to be taken into account when starting off and how both the public and the economy can profit from it.
Open Source Software
This shift in priorities towards Open Data in the FOSS4G Europe Program also reflects on the maturity of Open Source geospatial software in general. OSGeo software, libraries and tools are nowadays commonly used in many public authorities. Be it QGIS or gvSIG on the desktop, MapServer, GeoServer and deegree on the dynamic serving end, the obligatory Postgres database with PostGIS in the basement and a plethora of Web clients and client frameworks including OpenLayers, MapBox, Leaflet and many more.
This basic architecture now also scales by adding caches (TileCache) and proxies (MapProxy), NoSQL databases (MongoDB, CouchDB) and so many more good things that this introduction cannot make justice to even a small number of them. With the uptake of Big Data we see Hadoop introduced and spatial indexes are created using Solr. This shows that the artificial gap between geospatial and "other" software is slowly closing. Geospatial is not special anymore. Well, it is still spatial and probably also special but people recognize that both "standard IT" and geospatial software have to work together to address current needs.
Application Openness
Honestly, this one should get you thinking, even if you are a long time Open Source developer. Why should FOSS4G Europe explicitly mention "Application Openness "? What is that anyway? My take on asking for more "application openness" is to reduce the barriers implemented in "Apps" (archaic: "software") and to make access to the maps and underlying data more open. Many applications these days are built with Open Source software but access is still restricted to named users and the data is purposefully obfuscated. The crux of this problem is that Apps as we know them from our beloved mobile devices
follow a newish business model which creates a new vendor-lock-in. Why that? Because vendors of the Apps cannot live off "selling" software usage licenses (an outdated business model from the late nineties). There is also no sizable servicing or maintenance business and nobody needs trainings or consulting for using an App. If an App does not work we stop using it. A regular 24/7/364 Service Level Agreement is bluntly expected – for no extra fees.
So where is the money in App development? It is our private data, the new currency of the Web. We (apparently) get to use services and Apps "for free" (as in free beer). But we do pay. We pay with our location tracks, information about friends or what we search on the Web. We let others read all our private emails, address books, calendars, event listings and even our private photo album. Wow! Unheard of?
Most people righteously rebound in outrage whenever any national secret service has been found guilty of peeking into our private lives. But if Facebook wants to know all details about our friends and Google wants to read every single email we send – then it is sort of OK. At least acceptable. This is really weird but a fact. In Great Britain people will rather want to see my Credit Card as proof of identity than my official state issued German identity card or passport. Come on?! This is a German identity card and it cost a billion to develop... But we are digressing.
Or maybe we are not? With the erosion of privacy in the personal continuum why are we making such a fuss about not being able to publish geospatial data openly?
GeoForAll – Education
One of the most important aspects in the Free and Open World was and still is is education. Many curricula are still focused on old tools or are limited to one specific brand. OSGeo and ICA/ACI (the International Cartographic Association) have partnered to improve this by starting the GeoForAll Initiative – to promote and enhance education, research and service activities in the area of Open Geospatial Science & Applications – all over the world. http://www.geoforall.org. FOSS4G Europe will mark a milestone for the GeoForAll Initiative because it will bring together a wide range of interested parties who want to contribute and profit from GeoForAll. There will be meetings and sessions focused entirely on developing this initiative and to explore ways in which to spread word and competence in teaching geospatial tools. GeoForAll has been started as an extensive outreach program to consistently improve education all around geospatial topics.
The Tracks
FOSS4G Europe has one general track and additional five themes including the Academic session, Library track, Open Data track (see above), Positioning and Water tracks.
The Academic Session
The Academic Session focuses on original research contributions on all aspects of open-source geospatial software and its application. Submissions focusing on
INSPIRE, Big Data and Societal Challenges were particularly encouraged. Papers were selected in a blind review process based on their merits in scientific novelty, relation to the state of the art, presentation of the paper and overall quality. Authors have received feedback and suggestions for improvement to their paper before submission of the final camera ready version of the paper. Selected papers will be published online in the Geomatics Workbooks (ISSN 1591-092X), the conference journal of GEO Laboratory at Politecnico di Milano, Como Campus. Outstanding contributions will be further invited to submit an extended version to high-impact journals.
The Libraries Track
Libraries are evolving from repositories for printed information to engaged community centers which provide places and services for discovery in science and technical information. Open source geospatial software has a great potential for advanced location-enabled library services. The expertise of librarians on the other hand can provide significant benefits to access and preserve the wealth of knowledge, software and data generated by the OSGeo project communities. Metadata and data blur and intermingle depending on the perspective and questions asked. This track focuses on sharing experience between librarians and GIS experts to encourage collaboration and discussion of new and emerging concepts in the library domain.
The Positioning Track
The objective of this track is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners to present and discuss new advances in research, development and application in the area of Indoor and outdoor positioning, mapping and location based services.
Precise positioning by low cost sensors is a big research topic. Over the past years, increasingly accurate indoor localization technologies, based on new technologies are fundamental for many applications. This includes social efforts (support for impaired people), commercial applications (fleet control and guidance), personal Apps (sport and outdoor activities, social networks), indoor safety & security and many more.
Topics of interest include indoor maps, localization techniques, routing and navigation but also GNSS positioning for navigation, integration of sensors for positioning and georeferencing, mobile client-side technologies and applications, system architecture, experiences and best practice.
The Open Data Track
The scope of the Open Data Track is to provide insights on success stories, best practices and guidelines in releasing public geodata, fostering community driven geodata and developing and maintaining products, services and apps based on open geodata. The Open Data Track will reflect on the growth of Open Data initiatives in the geospatial realm and highlight advantages, controversies and questions it brings forward.
The track will showcase the state-of-the-art of Open Data and how Open Source Geospatial software is a perfect technological fit. Presentations will explore significant implications of open geodata and present best practices and guidelines for releasing and using these data within the FOSS4G community
and beyond.
Summary and Thanks
The submissions for the 2015 edition of FOSS4G Europe in Como, Italy show a growing sense on the importance of Open Data for everything geospatial. Proven and working software and architectures are presented side by side with completely new approaches coming out of research. Diversity wins.
The FOSS4G Europe Organizing Committee has done a great job in providing a broad approach to everything open in the geospatial domain. Many thanks to the Organizing Committee and Conference Committees for the many hours of tedious work that went into making this conference and proceedings a great success. A special thanks for her tireless work goes to our conference chair Maria Brovelli, without her we would not have this wonderful conference. And another special thanks goes to our conference secretary Marco Minghini for putting up with so many open ideas and still managing to keep everything together.
We hope that you enjoyed the conference and profit form the proceedings and welcome you to all the FOSS4G successors in coming years. In case you did not have a chance to come in person why not consider to Roll your own FOSS4G? If you are interested you should first subscribe to the OSGeo Mailing Lists and find out whether there are others interested in joining you – either on a specific theme, a software, a region or a common language. The OSGeo Wiki also provides a cookbook (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_Cookbook) which highlights what you have to take into account if you want to start your own series of events. Or maybe you just plan to have a one-off meeting on a specific topic...
Whatever your take on openness, keep in mind that diversity wins. Have fun,
Arnulf Christl
