FOSS4G 2010 conference

Last week, FOSS4G conference came to visit us in Barcelona, and of course we couldn't miss this event. There were tons of interesting conferences and topics, such as 3D and raster support in PostGIS, and using CSS to style WMS services.

We gave a presentation about BeETLe project on Thursday afternoon, with a nice amount of attendees and several interested people. We are proud to have brought BeETLe to FOSS4G, as there was a big competition this year (more than 200 abstracts were discarded during the FOSS4G selection process). [Side note: If you don't have OpenOffice, you can grab the PDF version of the talk].

We also attended Thierry Badard's talk about GeoKettle (right after ours), who announced several new features and a new version of GeoKettle for October. Our projects should definitely have a closer collaboration, since they are very complementary and I think we could make bigger improvements working together.

Thierry also gave a talk about SOLAPLayers, which is a visualization and exploration web application for Spatial-OLAP cubes stored in GeoMondrian. ETC-LUSI is also running a similar project with CamptoCamp, which was also presented as a poster in FOSS4G. Our focus is a simple and intuitive interface to build the queries, and several interactive tools to explore the data. The application interface provides maps, tables and charts to show the queried data in a visual way.

We were also talking with Thierry about collaboration on this field and maybe an eventual product merge. Hopefully, we are not replicating work here, as we have taken complementary approaches. For example, we are sending raster (WMS) data to the client, which is supposed to load faster, while they are serving vector (WFS) data, which is useful for some interaction tools. For the moment, they use a raw MDX query to launch the queries, while we already have a nice query builder in place. We will provide some links to the project website as soon as we release it.