FOSS4G NA 2012
Here's a collection of raw notes I took at sessions during FOSS4G NA 2012.
PostgreSQL
- PostgreSQL 9.2 in about September
- many geeky performance updates
- index-only scans will affect spatial data the most
- new visiblilty map: in-memory bitmap of data currently loaded
- takes 1% as long as getting this info from the physical table (heap)
- read/write scalability; better support for cloud hosting
- cascading replication & other replication improvements
- multi-master replication, hopefully in 9.3
- "I don't know how it's going to happen, but it has to."
- we love "weird data", e.g., spatial data
- new weird data in 9.2 is JSON!!!!
- JSON <==> Hstore for indexed JSON!
- write views in JavaScript!
- spatial index directly in PostgreSQL, should (will?) be used in PostGIS 2.1
CartoDB
- presented by: @jatorre
- some new, awesome apps using CartoDB
- CartoDB demo
- download wifi hotspot data from NYC OpenData
- support different data types (spoke too fast), zipped shape files
- drag & drop from desktop
- I wonder if they fixed the issue where uploading a .geojson export from QGIS failed
- can edit geometry when designing map
- individual vertex editing for polygons
- style with CartoCSS
- uses new PostGIS 2.0 already
- can query for styled tiles with "Maps API"; style query string argument
- can query for actual data with "SQL API"
- can use new PostgreSQL index nearest query
- "I have seen the future and it is not made of tiles"
- I would say: not only made of tiles
- 8 Bic map demo looks great!
- open source; they make money from tiered hosting plans
- free tier
- can import OSM data
MapBox
- presented by: @tmcw
- presentation is here: ds.io/beyond-maps
- Google "begat" Maps API because people were creating their own mashups by hand
- open source options adopt big software company's interface to help with conversion
- google helped change mapping
- tiles don't need to reload
- cartography: not all roads need to be shown
- start thinking in frames per second
- eliminate old ideas users don't care about: scale bar
- users can make/design maps with greater detail than any company (including MapBox)
UX Panel
- why does the interface suck?
- the more stuff your product does, the more complicated the ui has to be
- we have to get designers involved because we're software engineers
- is $1M the price of a good UI?
- current OSM UI already cost well over $1M in time
OpenLayers
- github gives credit to more contributors
- good mobile support
- tile animation
- new Zoom control (only +/- buttons)
- nice accessability features
- writes tiles to localStorage automatically?
- do they know there's not much space for that? Can we shut it off?
- the important part about HTML5 is that you think it's cool
- UTFGrid integration
- continuous zooming
- does it switch to higher tile zoom (and scale backwards) at a middle threshold?
- improved APIs
- can pass plain objects to some functions
- can abort tiles
- OpenLayers is the cat chasing a mouse
- "There's some question about the size of the cat."
- hosted build tool would be an improvement
OpenLayers in 3D
- presented by: @pelicanmapping
- original plugin didn't work in Chrome
- nice 3D mountain demo
- OpenLayers 2D to 3D with a click of a checkbox
- GeoTIFF to encode elevation data = "home grown, JSON-encoded tile" = nice idea!
PostGIS
- NOT backwards compatible
- because serialize to disk is different
- PostGIS 1 had unaligned data storage
- new 3D functions: ST_3dDistance, etc.
- new 3D types: triangle, tin
- 3D index-based query: &&&
- new PostGIS connection GUI
- batch shapefile loading in the GUI
- dump spatial tables to shapefiles
- geometry data type can include geometry type, e.g., MultiPolygon, and SRID
- can still use un-typed geometry table
- better raster support
- load raster with raster2pgsql command
- join between raster and geometry tables?
- rasters are large collections of tiny chips
- rasters are for analysis, not visualization
- can snap rows: ST_Snap "work in progress, but mostly works"
- force features to valid: ST_MakeValid
- nearest neighbor indexed searches
- order by geom <-> ... limit 10
jQuery Geo
<shameless plug />- presented by: @ryanttb
- AppGeo has had an internal map widget for over eight years
- feature set akin to OpenLayers, size close to Modest Maps
- "jQuery Geo is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript...for mapping"
- like jQuery, one script tag hosted on worldwide CDN
- can use map services not in web mercator
Challenges Panel
NYC
- 200,000 employees in all agencies
- moderate degree of specialization
- low degree of colabaration between agencies
- 17 developers/analysis in department
- everything built internally, maintained internally
- some apps have lived many, many years past their lifespan
- in house mapping framework developed 4/5 years ago (open layers wasn't ready yet)
- geoserver in that framework, as is geowebcache
- app shows all streets that are closed, based on OpenGeo stack w/o PostGIS (because Oracle shop)
- all components available for other city agencies on shared service environment
- oracle not going away any time soon
- many other commercial software to integrate
- painful integration with SharePoint
- "legacy solutions being built every day"
- simple operations support doesn't need knowledge transfer, e.g., start/stop services
- moving off of Solaris to RedHat Linux
- first group in DoITT to move toward open source
- it takes leadership to create adoption of open source
- having a support model around an open source solution is "key"
- legal issues do not exist, do it and apologize later
- don't ask attornies unless you have to, they will find things
- not "most interested" in any one part of OpenGeo stack
- it's all about what the project needs and what best fits it
- simulated the traffic hit while trying to generate new tiles, etl, etc. for snow removal app
- concern is scalability
- especially on "our antequated servers"
- OpenGeo team came to help
- would like to know what community wants from agencies like DoITT
- biggest app to use OpenGeo is City Map
- most popular is snow plow app
- see us continuing down the open source road
- excited by projects out there
- hopefully the agency follows along
- getting open source software had to go through the same accreditation/security audits of all software
FCC
- brought on for national broadband map
- many silos in fcc
- focus on what we can do in the future
- broadband map introduced new technologies to fcc
- agency has a lot of QGIS usage
- people have come to it w/o thinking a GIS problem, but to look at data, e.g., census
- use MapBox & TileMill for authoring Maps (publish all maps on fcc.gov)
- legacy of expertise, esp. in database
- PostgreSQL wasn't mature enough at the time for some projects
- idea of moving to more loosly-coupled systems
- should be able to work from an API call instead of proprietary third party solution
- open source developers used to doing a lot of system admin, usually have root access
- now, ops admins don't let devs get too close to hardware
- but devs are trying to push that boundary
- internally, you need to cultivate change (to open source)
- most users don't care if they're using open source, some seek it out
- if there's a license that other agencies have used, then there's not much to worry about
- PostGIS on a super computer can do a lot of analysis
- didn't offer horizontal scaling that IT staff thought it could
- "OpenGeo team scrambled to support us"
- likes that people want to build apps around government data
- having open APIs is a way we give back
- giving code back to the community is good (open sourced Drupal code for MapBox)
- part of RFQs now mention that source must be put on public site like github
- some good ideas snuck through with broadband map
- fully RESTful
- use OGC
- app must use own API
- would like to stop hosting own hardware
- see us moving geoserver to cloud space
- looking for OpenGeo to guide us
Round trip
I had a great time at FOSS4G NA and look forward to a great year of open source!
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