GeoNetwork Presentation

I was able to attend this one, but only caught snatches of material as I reviewed my presentations for the day. Nice to see some new catalog profiles supported, I would really like to work against a public catalog that actually mattered to people.

I am looking forward to seeing GeoNetwork step up to OSGeo involvement - it is one aspect of the software stack that OSGeo has been lax on, although producing a useful understood profile may be another challange.

GeoTools Presentations

I had a couple of presentations, rather then talk about them much I will simply link to them.

• GeoTools Getting Standards to Work (with slides)
• GeoTools Working on Standards (with slides)

The first presentation was kind of like GeoTools 101 (with working code examples - something our website lacks) and is recommend for anyone wanting to start using the library.

The second was a little less optimisitic (although subsequently generated the most positive feedback) and talked about some of the leasons learned through success and failure with GeoTools over the years. I need to produce an update of this one capturing Simone's experience of 15-20% synchornization overhead when working on branch (yes developing with open source has a certaint expense to it).

uDig Presentation

Once again Paul's slides speak better then what I can manage here:

• uDig Desktop Application Framework (with slides)

The highlight of the talk for me occured during the break where I got to see some of the uDig developers from around the world comparing notes (in this case it was talking about upgrading to uDig 1.1).

Paul did answer some very difficult questions on why uDig and gvSig both exist, very similar to the questions I was asked last year as part of the MILES online conference thing. The answer amount to:

• Both projects started at the same time
• They have different licenses (reflecting the different roles they wish to play)
• Differences in design goals

We do try to collaborate with gvSig on matters such as network graph analysis or GML handling. We tend to collaborate as a matter of course through involvement with other projects like GeoTools, GeoAPI and GeoServer.

DivaGIS Talk

Very fun to see a successful project based on the uDig & GeoTools platform. Interesting to see how things that are often abstract to me (wms layers), leap into focus as a climate prediction is compared to species distribution.

DivaGIS Highlights: workflow from GIS using a Grid Analysis tool to generate out a "grid", and thend sending this grid off to there existing analysis tools (based in R, etc...).  Serving as a very friendly intergration platform. Fun to see custom "Style Views" that are explicitly focused on the target data sets. Same deal with a preference page set up to define database connections for the analysis tools.

Someone was else talking about uDig intergration with R (Adrian Custer), interesting to see it already done :-). Diva GIS made use of R "serve" (once again defined with a preference page), and constructed an R bridge.  Seems to be outed as a uDig operation, this particular one did interpolation based on precanned settings.

Next Steps for the DivaGIS project:
- migration to grid manipulation
- interoptability ICIS and BioCase by BioMoby protocol for bio diversity data sets
- connectivity to R for geo-stats analysis
- GeoServer planned

gvSig Talk

Nice talk, with clear presentation of features. A few notes scattered notes were all I had time for ...
- deeply modular
- table joins

Interesting array of data sources:
- WMS 1.1.0 - 1.3.0
- WFS 1.0.0 + GML import/export 2.1.2
- WCS 1.0.0
- Catalog search tool ( OGC CSW 2.0, IDEC)
- Gazetter search tool (WFS 1.0.0, WFS-G 0.9, ADL)

GeoProcessing, made available as tree of "buffer" and so on (always like to see how people end up sticking a user interface on these things - I am more a circles and arrows kind of man myself - ie like FME). Image georeferencing, use of control points etc... ArcIM Map and Feature services. Image enhancing and pan-sharpening controls. Jython scripting to simple for gui-based tools.

And what is next for gvSig ...
- initial needs are now met :-)
- network and topology analysis
- raster analysis
- 3D and temporal
- SDI authoring: OGC service plugins (generate of mapserver configuration files)

Ended up talking to one of their developers about GeoServer export as well (you can produce raw xml files or make use of java DTO objects directly).

Short term
- raster formats
- image filters, historgrams, lookup tables
- topology construction

Network topology analysis
- optimal path, service tree
- raster analysis, reprojection, mosiacing and fushion tools, classification / vectorization

It would be very interesting to see what gvSig is doing (I have offered them the GeoTools graph / network package before as a point of collaboration but so far they have been quiet). I do have some hopes on collaboration on GML parsing technology (we will see if they attend a meeting).