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So FOSS4G has come and gone, in fact it came and went over a week ago. My day job kept me from posting about what happened last week, but the weekend always gives you time to write (Especially while watching Arizona State demolish Southern Cal). The near 1000 of us who attended saw all the great new initiatives around the open source geospatial community, but you probably didn’t. So here is what I see as where you should be looking in the next year before FOSS4G happens again.

• Mapnik is King. It seems every session had at least some Mapnik component to it. Mapnik is becoming the cartography engine of GIS. I saw cartography during FOSS4G 2011 that just blew my socks off. Innovation in this space is moving so fast and Mapnik is the choice for anyone who is making beautiful, useful maps.
• PostGIS 2.0 will come out early next year and you will have zero excuse to use any other spatial database. Much like Mapnik, most sessions had some sort of PostGIS component to them. If you don’t want to be left behind, get the book and start changing how you manage your location data.
• Designers: One thing that has always been a knock against “traditional GIS” is that it is designed by scientists for scientists. Totally unusable for ordinary users. What I noticed at FOSS4G 2011 was how many companies are employing designers to make sure their apps and maps are usable for everyone. Vizzuality and Development Seed (Tell me that Dev Seed?s homepage isn’t awesome, I dare you.) have jumped to the lead of pushing design in front of classic geospatial front ends. Vizzuality’s CartoSet is giving users tools that they can easily design beautiful mapping applications with little or no coding. Development Seed’s MapBox suite makes it easy to leverage the powerful Mapnik engine to produce tile caches that work out of the box without any need of expensive servers software. Awesome stuff.
• QGIS: At least in North America, QGIS is the desktop application of choice. I don’t recall seeing any gvSIG or uDIG (Is uDig dead?) presentations, but QGIS was used by almost everyone. Over the last year it has morphed into a desktop GIS tool that is now my primary choice when working with GIS data. Combining QGIS with Mapnik gives me the ability to make beautiful cartography I cannot create anywhere else. It is completely liberating!
• JavaScript not Flex/Silverlight: Yea, it isn’t much of a surprise, open source users aren’t big Flex or Silverlight users, but JavaScript HTML5 web apps are everywhere and doing everything Flex/Silverlight can do, and work everywhere (When I refer to everywhere, I choose to ignore IE 6, 7, 8. If you’re stuck on those, find a new job). At this point it is safe to call every Flex/Silverlight location app as legacy as nobody in their right mind would be coding with those tools in 2012.

FOSS4G 2011 was probably the best Geospatial/Location Conference I?ve been to. Paul Ramsey put it best when he said:

I told some folks at FOSS4G 2011 that I thought this year’s event was the “best FOSS4G ever” (HT, Juan Antonio Samaranch) but that wasn’t just tongue in cheek. 2011 was the biggest ever, but only a few attendees more than Barcelona in 2010. Yet somehow I felt more energized, more connected, like I had more conversations, than in 2010.

That was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was connect to the attendees, I was energized by the talks and left feeling like at least a portion of the geospatial community has a future in front of it. What is best about this community it is free to join. Just bring your experiences and get started.

OK, I know what you are all thinking. Esri told me 5 years ago HTML5 was for small mash-ups and those serious about mapping should use Silverlight or Flex. Well if you haven’t been paying attention in the past year you’d be totally wrong. Not only is HTML5 based maps becoming standard practice, they are performing as well as Flex or Silverlight in most applications (Now for sure one could come up with a demo where Flex can display a gazillion points, but nobody wants a gazillion points on a map at once).

The latest company to release a HTML5 client is GISCloud. While other visualization companies offer JavaScript maps as an option, GISCloud has made them default. By using the HTML5 Canvas element, GISCloud is rendering vector data right inside of the browser, with no plugin (Right I know, IE supports nothing. Upgrade to IE9 or stop using the Internet. Your choice!). Oh and you don’t need to use some sort of weird API to get it to work on iPhones or iPads. It just works, browsing 2 million features on my iPad in Safari without a native app. Crazy!

Plus when you are working with vectors in the Canvas element, you can interact with them, the potential is limitless. I’m glad to see some of the innovative companies step up with amazing HTML5 clients that work as good or better than anything else out there. This is what happens when you have no legacy holding you back. You innovate and lead.

So who will blink first? Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? My money is on Silverlight, but it sure won’t be HTML5.

Monday’s after a good conference are always a load of fun. Hitting all that work you put aside to get involved with the future of GIS. But until I can get up my thoughts on the 2011 Edition of FOSS4G here are some things you probably should know.

PostGIS 2.0 is on the horizon. If you were unable to get to the session, check out the slides.

Paul Ramsey says FOSS4G 2011 was the best and tells you why. Hopefully 2011 is a blueprint for the future of FOSS4G.

Why all the focus on sponsorships as a metric to success? As far as I can tell, FOSS4G 2011 was a huge success and gave back lots of money to OSGeo. Anyone who wants FOSS4G to be more like GeoInt is freaking nuts.

Lastly the World Champs are teasing me with thoughts that they might actually make the playoffs. FOSS4G 2011 was all about the Giants putting the hurt on the Colorado Rockies. Glad I could be there to witness it.

There are over 900 people attending FOSS4G 2011 in Denver.

You probably should have come.

So I’m stuck at Sky Harbor waiting for my flight (Thanks United for not being on time) and catching up on FOSS4G before I get there. One thing that caught my eye on the twitter feed was GeoGit.

Following on the core Versioning WFS work, in 2011 OpenGeo started experimenting with a new way to handle versioning, drawing on git, a distributed versioning system built for Linux and widely used.

I’ve been working on migrating my blog to being stored in Git (rather than MySQL) and the benefits of such a system are crystal clear. Most of us are used to versioning in legacy applications such as ArcSDE (What is that thing called these days? ArcGIS for Databases?) . You basically need a DBA to manage that junk and the idea that I’m going to pay anyone to be a DBA these days is ludicrous. Read what Chris Holmes writes about their thinking on using Git for a version control system and tell me you don’t want to have access to that. I’m already on board using Git for my version control, extending it further into other workflows is just brilliant.

For those who still use ArcGIS, it looks like the next Service Pack has a release date. The Service Pack 3 announcement is a PDF that is classic Esri.

All this goes without saying…

Tomorrow I’m heading up the hill to Denver (bringing my jacket it looks like). I’m looking forward to seeing everyone and basking in the huge open source geospatial community. It’s been a long time since FOSS4G was in North American and it could be a long time until that happens again.

We don’t need a bunch of cats in location, we need more dogs. FOSS4G 2011 will make dogs of all of us.

WhereCampPHX is getting close to being filled up so if you are still on the fence, now is the time to secure your spot. Saturday October 1st will be something special at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University. Don’t miss it!

For those who want to continue the hacking, Hack the Map will be held October 2nd at Co+Hoots also in downtown Phoenix.

It has been a long time since I was matriculating at my alma mater but clearly I can tell that school is starting up for a lot of people. My inbox is full of emails from students asking where they can find data for their projects (I like students who are proactive and not reactive to their school work).

WeoGeo has over 8 terabytes of free and inexpensive data available in the WeoGeo Market for inclusion in your analysis. Just this week we uploaded some great data from the State of Hawaii on Hawaiian Natural Areas and data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on U.S. Diabetes and Risk Factor Prevalence.

We’ve also have the complete USGS National Hydragraphy Dataset and USGS Earthquake, Fault and Seismic Hazard data available for customization. Bonus points for using the WeoGeo Tools for ArcGIS to import these datasets into your ArcMap projects.

Another great option for students is our WeoGeo Library. Generally after the end of the school year, students need to archive off their projects to some personal stoarge device. Students using WeoGeo Library know their projects are available semester after semester no matter where they are. Since WeoGeo Library is a system of record, you’ll always have them at hand. My masters thesis was stored on a Brother Word Processor which meant that the minute I lost access to that hardware device, I lost all my hard work (At least I remember it as hard work, ‘twas a long time ago). That’s why a real geospatial content management system like WeoGeo is the best way to manage your school work. Plus you can get started today, for free.

So the answer is? No.

via Bill Dollins

From the Esri Support Forums: Edit spatial data with “ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1” in non-SDE RDBMS systems?

ArcGIS Server 10.1 will include a new technology component called Spatial Data Server (SDS). It is a separate installation from ArcGIS Server and will be included with all editions of ArcGIS Server. SDS is a low-memory footprint application that enables you to publish feature services of your vector data stored in a database or geodatabase. SDS will allow you to edit spatial data in a standard database and does not require ArcSDE technology. Editing for SDS is done via the REST API only which ArcMap does not support at this time [editors note: see below].

Oh snap, not only can you not edit spatial data in other RDBMS without Esri’s Spatial Data Server, you can’t even do it via ArcGIS for Desktop. [editors note: see below] To be fair though, Esri’s business model is built on being the middle man to everything.

‘I don’t know how this whole business started
Of me thinkin’ that I could edit PostGIS
But if you think that we’d be better parted
It’s gonna hurt me but I’ll break away from you`

The latest:

Craig Williams clarifies a key point:

Derek’s comments about ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1 not being able to edit SDS are incorrect. ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1 can edit SDS and all other types of ArcGIS feature services. These edits are performed via the REST API for SDS and hosted feature services.

So what does that mean? Says Craig

you connect to SDS, drag the service into the map and it draws via REST calls. To edit you check out / check in

So the final word on this is that you still need middleware to get this done, but you don’t need ArcSDE anymore. Esri views editing spatial databases differently that many of us do, I don’t fault their thinking too much on this, but 99.9% of the time in the real world no one cares about deltas. So to fix my thoughts from above:

Oh, snap, you can’t edit spatial data in other RDBMSs without Esri’s Spatial Data Server.