FOSS4G Europe in Como

20 July 2015

We attended the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Europe conference in sunny, 35-degree Como, 15th to 17th of July 2015. This was a fantastic opportunity to meet with the community and get informed on the state-of-the-art in this relatively new field to us.

The status overview of open-source projects allowed comparing different solutions to similar challenges, such as virtual globes (Web World Wind / CesiumJS / Glob3Mobile) or Web Processing Service (WPS) implementations (pyWPS / ZOO-Project), with their own approach, benefits, philosophy and trends.

Many presentations highlighted the omnipresence of PostgreSQL/PostGIS in virtually all Geographical Information Systems nowadays and the ways to optimize it for this purpose. Although the benefits of linking various types of data using other kind of structures were evoked, the potential of NoSQL in geospatial remains an open question to us.

Moreover, exciting side talks happened during the event on sensor webs and hubs, on standards and on data mining of geo-located data for example.

Big thanks to the community for this event and their amazing work on these crucial geospatial tools.