Mapping Hacks

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending las 3es Jornadas gvSIG, the third annual gvSIG conference, in Valencia, Spain. gvSIG, as you may know, is a (primarily) desktop GIS system written in Java. The project was initiated in 2003 by the Conselleria d’Infraestructures i Transport for the Generalitat Valenciana, the provincial government of […]

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” AJ Liebling
Jo Walsh, our co-author on Mapping Hacks, has never forgotten this. Sometimes it is annoying. I want to say “but look, you can do all this cool stuff with this free (but not open) API? Why struggle to reinvent the map […]

I set off for Where 2.0 with some trepidation, but it was largely unjustified; and it was chance to see many old friends, make a few new friends, and to see many of them doing well out of the conference. I left with my head spinning, and these notes are what came out the top […]

Last summer at the Open Source Geospatial conference in Minneapolis, Dirk Willem van Gulik gave a closing keynote talk in which he talked about his experience of establishing the Apache Software Foundation, a pioneering example of open source governance and meta-organisation. Dirk Willem’s message partially was: “don’t do what we did.”
At the time Sean Gillies […]

Tyler Mitchell, the author of O’Reilly’s Web Mapping Illustrated, an excellent practical guide to building your own open source web mapping applications with the Mapserver package, has started a new blog at spatialguru.com.
In these intense times of governance, licensing and access policy discussions, Tyler’s essays into geek humour provide welcome light relief. And he promises […]

Today, representatives of various Free and Open Source geospatial software
projects, including MapServer, GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, GRASS, GeoServer, GeoTools,
Mapbender, Ka-Map and several others met in Chicago today to found the Open
Source Geospatial Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to
supporting and promoting the development of F/OSS GIS. Following on the heels
of the controversial “MapServer Foundation” announcement prompted by
Autodesk’s release […]