FOSS4G Notes - Day One

Wow there is a lot to be done and it is only the first day .... Spent the morning lost on the "bus" system, apparently M1 indicated a train, and T1 referred to a bus - always ironic hanging with lost Geospatial experts.

Oh Catalog where art thou?

Mostly I hung out at the OSGEO booth, adjusting to jet lag, and trying to assist catalog and metadata refugees wandering from booth to booth in search of solace.  Perhaps with the introduction of GeoNetwork to the OSGEO incubation process.we will be able to handle these issues a bit better in the future.

The interesting incite is that the OSG catalog specification is viewed as being complicated, in actual fact is no worse then the WFS specification (and shares much in common with WFS 1.1 including a Transaction operation).  Let me sum up:

• Open Web Services are usually constructed around a "resource"
• OWS WFS is structured around a resource of "features", you issues queries against the features, and you are returned a subset that  that match
• OWS Catalog is structured around a resource of "records", you issues queries against "metadata" about the records, and are returned a subset of records that match.

No the difficulty is that when the phrase "metadata" is used, most of us fall to sleep :-)  Currently there are two camps trying to define a record+metadata profile to store in a OWS Catalog.

Both of these camps are taking so long they are starting not to matter, my hope is a "BOF" on simple catalog stuff this Thursday will be nice and focused and offer a third pragmatic approach. I am going to go and represent "client concerns" - ie give me enough information that I can make the user experience better.

My fear is that we will get stuck in some  SOAP/WSDL/OWS/REST protocol debate, frankly it does not matter - if useful data is in there us client programmers will use the protocol to go after it.

GeoTools 10 years on

This FOSS4G is going to be the first large gathering of all the active GeoTools developers, really looking forward to trying to answer the many questions Adrian Custer has stored up. Hopefully we can get a  user guide that makes some sense.  It is fascinating to start meeting people.

It was interesting that nobody wanted to relax and talk about where we come from, instead everyone was excited about the future and what needed attention this week!

• OSGEO involvement, we need to get some contribution document defined and signed so we can be good on legal footing.
• Users Guide! we are not user hostile, honest. We are all just very very busy, please next time you engage one of our organizations for a support contract please ask for a documentation delivery :-)
• Meta Rendering Design - basically we need to back port the uDig rendering api so we can start to slurp up additional rendering standards and code (developers working on ISO based portrayal etc...)
• Oracle DataStore - we need to have a good example of implementing an JDBC datastore, and our oracle support needs help. Half QA and half rescue - all needed.
• And so much more .. not sure our BOF will ever end.

Deegree Workshop

In the afternoon I attend the Deegree workshop, and was surprised a couple of times.  My big surprise was that their iGeoPortal is completely defined within the confines of the a WMSContext file.  I liked their open - lets say "engagement" rather then "abuse" of this interoptability format to gather plugins together to define a web page.

Fun stuff. Looking forward to their WFS 1.1 support.

BOF WMS Grid

Always fun about the difference between everyone knowing what needs to be done, and then actually agreeing to it. At the end of the day it looks like a seperate capabilities document that provides additional information for clients so they can make requests in a specic manner so they can get cached.  I am going to look hard at this one as it forms, it was great to see the enthusiasm for getting this solved, as well as the emphais on backwards compatibility.