GeoWeb 2006 is the outgrowth of an annual conference that used to be called GML Days, but GeoWeb
is now much broader than strictly GML. It is also now supported by GITA, which opens the door to a much broader range of folks including utilities, telcos, and municipalities. This year there were about three times the number of attendees compared to last year’s conference.
There were keynotes this year from some very well known players in the geospatial market including Microsoft Virtual Earth (Steven Lawler), Google Earth (Michael Jones), Oracle Spatial (Xavier Lopez), and Autodesk (Gary Lang). In addition Kurt Cagle who is well-known in internet, XML, and SVG circles gave a fascinating keynote on SVG (in addition to an SVG workshop.)
The things that I found most interesting about GeoWeb 2006 was the presence of the mass market folks (Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth), the number of presentations on open standards, and the increases awareness of open source geospatial.
Mass Market Geospatial
What struck me most forcefully is how competitive the mass market spatial business is becoming. Steven Lawler outlined major plans for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Windows.live.local including extending Bird’s Eye View to many more areas. Michael Jones, besides including a great picture of and quote from Jack
Dangermond, released some astounding numbers that give you some idea of the magnitude of users and developers that Google Earth is attracting, for example, in the first 12 months
- 32,000 developer sites
- 100,000,000 different individuals installed Google Earth
This is simply mind-boggling for anyone in the traditional GIS industry, but is what Dave Sonnen has been predicting for the relative sizes of the spatial-enabled vs traditional GIS markets.
Open Standards
There were quite a number of presentation on open standards including GML (of course) and WFS, but also the web catalog service, XQuery, GeoRSS, LandXML, and SVG. Henry Tom gave an excellent overview of the work of the ISO TC/211 and other standards organizations and Olaf Ostensen described how TC/211, OGC, and other standards relate to the European INSPIRE initiative.
There was also a scintillating panel discussion on open standards in which I, Clemens Portele
(Interactive Instruments), Noah Doyle (Google Earth), and Nic Snape (Laser-scan) participated. The discussion focussed on whether our objective should be as Clemens phrased it “a grand unified” standard. By the end of the discussion I think there was a consensus that simplicity is an essential feature of successful standards, and that the objective should be several simple standards rather than a single complex grand unified standard. To me this is relevant to LandXML (LandXML.org ), which is a widely-used and widely-supported, in other words successful, standard for highway and transporation information. One of the reasons for the success of LandXML is its simplicity and industry focus. It is designed to satisfy a well-defined business objective and the LandXML folks have been wise to keep it simple and industry focussed and when necessary to resist forcing it into a “grand unified” procrustean bed.
There were three presentations on open source and tremendous interest among attendees, as you
might expect from a predominatley technical audience. Mike Gerlek, who has been involved with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) from the beginning, presented on overview of the OSGEO, I discussed some of the implications of the OSGEO for the enterprise geospatial market, and Gary Lang in his plenary described the process by which a successful closed source company embraced open source. I’ll cover Gary’s talk in a future blog because I expect this is of interest to many folks in closed source companies who may be in the midst of a similar discussion.
Fire Works Italia
To wrap this up I’ll include some pictures of the absolutely amazing fire works display put on by an
Italian team in English Bay.
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