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Open Source GIS Conference Wrapup

Posted by timothy on from the couldn't-find-it-in-time-to-announce dept.

Wugger writes "The open source GIS community has been around for a long time, but has only been meeting regularly for the past three years. The most recent conference wrapped up on the weekend in Minneapolis. An excellent summary article and blog postings are available from Directions Magazine. Other attendees have also posted blogs and observations. The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year) and all the major open source GIS hackers were in attendance. In addition, some proprietary corporate players showed up to check out the scene: Autodesk, ERMapper, and ESRI, the Microsoft of the GIS industry."

2 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Low Attendance? by ndansmith · · Score: 3, Funny
    The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year).

    400 people were registered, but the missing 100 people were not able to locate the convention center thanks to faulty map software.

  2. Summary fails to mention primary open source GIS. by theapodan · · Score: 3, Informative

    GRASS http://grass.itc.it/ is the primary open source GIS solution. The summary could have at least mentioned it in passing.

    Odd that they mention AutoDesk too, considering their mapping software doesn't feature as nice spatial analysis stuff as ArcGIS does, although I haven't used it enough to make any other conclusions about it.

    Now if GRASS would only improve their text interface and revamp their GUI.

    Another critical open source GIS application for webmaps is MapServer http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/

    I've found that doing the data analysis with ArcGIS and displaying it with mapserver is the only way to go. ArcIMS is a bit too complex, at least compared to mapserver.