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Managers, start your FOSS engines!

Session Type: 
Lightning Talk
Presenter(s): 
Matthew Krusemark, Denver Regional Council of Governments

FOSS solutions play a key role in solving problems and filling the gaps where you COTS or closed-source solutions might fall short. In addition, it is important for managers to understand that many COTS solutions used in their organizations might already have a mix of FOSS frameworks supporting a COTS implementation – think various Apache or Python projects to name a few. Having knowledge of and understanding open data and open source software frameworks can have many benefits in solving your customer’s problems and creating real solutions and workflows that improve their bottom line. In our industry, Geospatial FOSS solutions are more times than not built on significant private and not-for-profit industry-supported efforts that have a long and successful history, level-of-support and following. As a Geospatial program manager - putting forth the effort to educate your organization’s senior leadership and encouraging your team to learn about and effectively integrate FOSS to complement your already-in-place COTS solutions can lay the groundwork for expanding options for your customers, rather than limiting them. Examples in a collaborative regional/local government and private-sector partner setting will be highlighted.

Speaker Bio: 

Matt has been using FOSS solutions in research, private sector, local and regional government settings for over 15 years.

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Introduction to OpenSource WebMapping: Beyond Google Maps

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Julien-Samuel Lacroix, Mapgears

Regardless of industry, over 80% of the data that we work with have a spatial reference and mapping is a simple and effective way to view it, be it at the heart of the solution or only a small component of it.

Beyond the free Google Maps API and its competitors, the world of open source geospatial offers a suite of tools enabling you to push the boundaries of web mapping. Having in hand a full range of software, a company can fully exploit its spatial data by integrating this essential component that is the map to its solution.

This presentation offers an introduction to the open source geospatial world with an overview of the various software packages available and a description of how to make them fit your needs.

Speaker Bio: 

Julien-Samuel Lacroix is a software developer and co-founder of Mapgears. He has been working with Open Source Geospatial software since 2002 and has developed with a lot of different technologies since then. As a MapServer commiter, he is also involved in many projects around it.

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Applying the Department of Labor’s Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) to FOSS4G Courses and Curriculum.

Session Type: 
Academic Session
Presenter(s): 
Dr Phillip Davis, GeoTech Center @ Del Mar College
Kurt Menke
Ms Amy Ballard

 

The newly minted Department of Labor Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) is now the de-facto standard for defining GIS Technician workers skills and competencies in the US.  The standard was developed by industry experts, such as Kass Green and Jan Van Sickle, and is not tied to any proprietary vendor software, such as Esri.  The GeoTech Center has applied the GTCM to college GIS course curriculum and created a series of vendor-neutral course outlines for model GIS courses (and certificate) curriculum, based on this national standard.  This paper will demonstrate using the GTCM to create a model introductory course for FOSS4G software, such as QGIS, GRASS GIS and Mapserver.  Faculty and industry trainers can use this course outline and assessment tools to either build new FOSS4G curriculum aligned with the GTCM, or assess their current courses.  By assessing existing curriculum, you can identify areas of weaknesses or missing material, based on the GTCM, to strengthen your curriculum to industry-accepted standards.   Faculty will experience the GTCM assessment tools, review an overview of the GTCM, as well as hear the success story of Central New Mexico’s adaptation of the GTCM to their GIS curriculum and FOSS4G course.

 

Speaker Bio: 
Phillip Davis—is a professor of computer science at Del Mar College. His research interest includes mobile computing and online learning.
Kurt Menke— is a Certified GIS Professional (GISP) who runs his GIS consulting business and teaches part time at Central New Mexico Community College, UNM and SIPI.  
Amy Ballard—teaches courses in beginning and intermediate GIS, remote sensing, 3D visualization/animation techniques and physical geography at Central New Mexico Community College.

Schedule info

Authentication and authorization management to OGC services with GeoShield: Introducing the GeoServer Resource Access Manager plug-in and SOS protection

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Milan Antonovic, Institute of Earth Sciences, SUPSI-IST
Dr Massimiliano Cannata, SUPSI-IST

Enterprises are increasingly feeling the need of more sophisticated data access control to OGC services. Nowadays there aren't many solution to manage data access control. Using actual techniques, administrators can mostly define read or write permission to specific services.

GeoShield meets this need by offering a centralized way to define security access-control to OGC services through a nice user friendly web interface. Basically it acts like a proxy, intercepting all the communications between clients and OGC compliant services (WMS, WFS, SOS). GeoShield is able to manage users and groups, it handles authentication and privileges settings among groups and registered services. It is capable to analyze requests applying the configured permission filters and/or manipulating the response accordingly.

This year GeoShield extends his capabilities introducing two major improvements: the Sensor Observation Services protection and the GeoServer Resource Access Manager plug-in.

The SOS protection introduces the definition of permissions for core and transactional profiles. Data managers can now set read permissions for each Observation Offering, and authorize writing permissions to transactional profile requests only to authorized users.

Thanks to the latest GeoServer release (2.1), GeoShield can be directly integrated with the new Resource Access Manager plug-in. This extension give some benefits in term of speed and reliability, GeoShield's proxy capabilities is bypassed, minimizing response time.

The presentation will introduce the attenders with GeoShield and the newly developed features throughout a practical demo.

Speaker Bio: 

Currently Employed as Software Engineer at the Geomatics Division of the Earth Science Institute, a section of the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland. His main fields are Geographical Web Services and webgis applications, in particular he is specialized in the development of government or public web application based on OGC services, like WMS, WFS, WPS and SOS.

Schedule info

Opticks: Overview Of An Open Source ELT

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Kip Streithorst, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
Mr Trevor Clarke, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

Opticks is an expandable open-source remote sensing and imagery analysis platform.  Opticks is a desktop application that can used to perform analysis of imagery, video, spectral, SAR, thermal and medical imagery. This presentation will provide a visual overview of Opticks capabilities. This presentation will also highlight some of the more popular extensions for Opticks; including hyper and multi-spectral analysis, Python scripting and IDL scripting.  This presentation will also include a quick overview of the C++ API, highlighting the possibilities for capabilities that can be built on top of Opticks.

Speaker Bio: 

Kip Streithorst is a developer and committer on the Opticks (http://opticks.org) project.

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