Geospatial > The Layer File > It's Conference Season Already! (PART 1)
it’s September.
Which means the fall conference season is here. While our young team is still deciding which organizations to support and be a part of, there are a few that are a no brainer: ILGISA, IACE, EPN just to name three. Last week, Baylor and I both visited separate conferences to see if they would be good conferences to attend or even exhibit at in future years. Below is Micah’s summary of FOSS4G NA. Baylor’s Summary of GEOGRAPH will be next.
FOSS4G North America
The 2024 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) North America conference took place in St. Louis, Missouri, from September 9-11. It attracted a wide variety of geospatial professionals, developers, and enthusiasts to collaborate and explore the transformative potential of open-source geospatial technologies. A key focus of the conference was on democratizing access to geospatial tools, emphasizing how open-source solutions can empower individuals, small businesses, and organizations.
I (Micah) actually did my Master’s thesis on FOSS4G software in the Enterprise GIS realm. So, even with spending 90% of my career in Esri software, I have a working knowledge of the players and platforms. Additionally, the STL is too close not to attend such a notable and relevant conference. Aside from the agenda looking great, I wanted to meet a few of the people I saw chatting about the conference online. Unfortunately, due to scheduling issues and family commitments, I could only attend on Wednesday. Still, I wanted to know where FOSS4G as an industry is compared to the proprietary behemoth with whom we are admittedly a part of their partnership network.
Sessions
The sessions I leaned towards spoke of web mapping, data, and enterprise systems. I learned that there is a working community group at the the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop standards and guidelines for creating a new standardized and easy map HTML element for display in modern browsers. The demonstration of MapML showed tiling, full screen, as well as pop-ups interacting with the OGC services from GeoServer via custom CSS. Noting stated about other protocols.
What I did learn about Parquet and GeoParquet is that I should be using it. Not so much Crunchy Bridge analytics, I don’t have that much data and it’s too onerous to port what I do have.
Although, the Overture Map Foundation is of interest, I’m skeptical. My very distilled explanation is that it starts with Open Street Map data, enhances with TomTom data and a dash of Foursquare into it, and provides it to whoever wants to download. I do want to critically look at the data for the small towns that are our clients. Also, this may be a great place to start to learn GeoParquet seeing that is how they deliver the data. Regardless of the quality of data, it was a fantastic presentation by Steven Pousty.
After lunch, and learning that Mapillary is actually owned by Meta now (Hello 2020), I heard the best quote from the developer of startup GeoBlaze during a live demo on Hotel WiFi: “It’s so fast, you think it’s not working”, neat tool, don’t know what it’s for. I tried to learn how to scrape geodata, but was quickly lost in the technical details.
The final presentation I went to was to see the evolution of GeoMoose 4. This fast, lightweight web viewer now works serverless. Dan Little showed the snazzy demo published from a public Google Drive folder. The application has quite the modern ‘feel’ and read geo layers right from within the folder.
Thoughts
Here’s a Hot Take: Linux and other FOSS may run the world during apocalypse, but that's not now.I believe in the idealism and the core principles of Free and Open Source Software, but I don’t think they’re practical in real life (Insert your token statistic here of what already runs on FOSS). Believe me, as a card-carrying GenXer, I LOVE the idea of going against the grain. I push back whenever I can, I listen to STP on 11, I don’t match my socks, and drive an old jeep because I choose to, don’t you dare tell me what to do. That mentality is all well and good when you are your own boss or there is a principled leadership decision to use FOSS. As a consultant using someone else’s money to build a business that plays nicely with a local governments' GIS and a DOT’s project requirements, I need to use the proprietary software that they are or tell us to.
Here's a hard truth, using FOSS, and specifically FOSS4G, is not easy. I still don’t see a complete out-of-the-box FOSS enterprise GIS solution that can compete with ArcGIS Enterprise. This discrepancy is especially accentuated when 99% of your clients use Esri. Do not misunderstand, sometimes Esri is the bane of my existence. I can rant and rail with the best of the trolls, but this is business. I need to prove my excellence in the board room and on proposals in the most efficient way possible. Everyone loves to hate on success while they quietly try and copy it.
I will continue to keep an eye on FOSS4G. I promise to keep my version of QGIS updated. I will not roll my eyes at open-source projects. I will continue to push for open standards and data. I also appreciate the community built around FOSS4G. Everyone loves an underdog.