Thoughts on GoVis conference and Spatial barcamp
I attended the Spatial barcamp and GoVis conference last week and here are my thoughts.
I thought the conference was great way for the industry to get together and network. It was nice to see some interesting talks from the speakers on how GIS was integrated into enterprise solutions
Open source good, Open standards better
The New Zealand Geospatial Office is promoting the use of open source tools (mapserver, mapguide etc) and open standards around government agencies. Its great to see more open source being promoted.
The use of open standards, KML, WFS, WMS etc will be a good way for people to share data. As a industry we already have a lot of proprietary formats, we need to promote open standards to enable better interaction between organisations.
I would offer a word of caution, using open source tools (just like anything else) is not going to be a magic bullet solution. You need to select the right tool for the job.
At ProjectX, we used a number of open source and propriety tools to make our maps. We’ve switched from mapserver to Manifold and now back to mapserver because the quality of the generated imagery wasn’t good enough for us.
Innovation under the surface
It was great to some innovations and ideas that going on out there. Big things like Aerial capture via microlight and dynamic object tracking systems, and smaller things like Napier City council making more of it core data available via open source tools.
It made me think, that as an industry (and companies in NZ) we don’t market our ideas very well. Even at ProjectX, we have a lot of things we built for clients or internally that is innovative and leading edge that never sees the light of day.
To that end, I’m working with Gavin from gis.org.nz to create a news portal for GIS / Geo-spatial news in New Zealand. We’re looking at creating a news system for companies to talk about new products, ideas and issues in the our space. We’re in the process of setting it up properly now, so stay tuned.
Partnerships
It was refreshing to see that all the GIS departments in the Auckland region were working together. Personally I don’t think there are enough partnerships between players. There is a lot of innovation happening in NZ, and we need to work together to take on the world!