Back from FOSS4G 2014 – part 1

By Tuesday September 23rd, 2014Conférence, NewsFR

FOSS4G , the main international OSGeo event, takes place once per year and gather all folks involved in opensource geospatial technologies at large. This year, the conference took place in Portland, Oregon, and gathered around 1000 people, on very various topics ranging from deeply technical Mapserver pro tips, to burnout management, through opendata policies and map designs.

This year’s edition was really good, as always for this conference. A lot of social events allowed direct talks to passionate people from all over the world, and the presentations were diverse and of high quality.

Oslandia at FOSS4G

Oslandia is a full player in the OpenSource GIS field, and we participated this year with various interventions. First of all, we gave a workshop on our 3D stack, with new features and a now vertical stack of software, from storage to visualization. This workshop features the use of this stack for managing 3D GIS data. Given an opendata dataset from the city of Lyon, France, we integrate the data into PostGIS, and use PostGIS 3D features to analyze and enrich this data. Then, Horao, a 3D destktop viewer coupled with QGIS, is used to do some 3D visualization.

In a second part of the workshop, we use the very recently released Cuardo web client ( http://www.cuardo.org ) to display the data in a standard browser, using WebGL.

The workshop is self-contained and you can follow it completely to discover these new exciting features in OpenSource 3D GIS. find it online : https://github.com/Oslandia/workshop-3d

Gimme some YeSQL !

Vincent Picavet also did a presentation “Gimme some YeSQL – and a GIS -“, which focused on latest and upcoming PostgreSQL features. From updateable views to the new JSONB data type, this is a practical and technical presentation of the big improvements coming in PostgreSQL 9.4. The talk illustrates the use of these features in a GIS context.

Slides are online

OpenSource software for surveying

Another presentation by Vincent was an insight on a project we achieved for GIS Apavil in Romania, and concerns a full GIS for water distribution network and wastewater networks. The presentation especially shows how we setup some specific opensource surveying tools, and the way we deal with offline, versioning and synchronization of data.

Slides are on GitHub and the video should be up soon.

3D GIS

Olivier Courtin showed a summary of the current state of the 3D stack we develop and its foreseen future. Slides and video are online, and there should be more information coming soon.

Slides

Get in touch!

Oslandia will continue to make research and development on all of these topics. If you are interested in any of these subjects, do not hesitate to get in touch at infos@oslandia.com

A post to follow will give you some background information on what we heard at FOSS4G and where to hear more !