GeoWeb has always been a great conference that covers many topics that fall within the realm of “geoweb”. This year’s conference was once again excellent with top notch technical attendees coming from around the globe. In the past the conference very much had an OGC bias to it with lots of discussion about the benefits of GML and standards with little critical discussion. This was definitely not the case this year with a refreshing amount of candid discussion on what works and what doesn’t! See the blog post by James Fee where he discusses the excitement around GeoWeb and OGC technology.
The conference this year touched on a much larger set of themes and all types of web technologies were discussed over the course of the conference. I knew this year was different when at the first talk I heard “XML is human readable is a lie!” during the best presentation on RDF I’ve ever seen, by Serge Boucher of Brussels Free University. Serge has great hair too of which I am extremely jealous. 🙂
The conference facilitated a great deal of discussions on how we can better serve customers by delivering systems that really matter, with much discussion about sharing solutions, successes, and challenges. The collaborative atmosphere was great and fit well with the theme of collaboration that was mentioned throughout the conference in several sessions such as Michael Jones of Google whose presentation video is available on YouTube.
My favorite talk was that done by Jason Birch of Nanaimo. Jason and his team continue to impress with all of the work they are doing for the City of Nanaimo. Jason is also a great presenter! I liked his talk a lot as he demonstrated how the City of Nanaimo is using existing web technologies to provide a higher level of service for his community today! Jason’s talk can be found here and his blog article on making government data open and easily accessible is a must read.
I was hoping to catch Stu Rich’s talk on “Geospatial Representations of Buildings” but had to miss it as it clashed with my presentation. I heard it was great and have since gone through the slides and recommend it. Stu’s conference review post is also worth a read.
We at Safe are lucky to have a conference in Vancouver that attracts such a great group of intelligent passionate people and I consider myself fortunate to have presented at this conference. I definitely look forward to continuing many of the discussions that got started during the conference and also look forward to GeoWeb 2010. Thanks again to Ron Lake for continuing to deliver a great conference!
Note: I’ve uploaded the slides from my talk – “Spatial ETL for Web Services-Based Data Sharing” – let me know what you think!
Don Murray
Don is the co-founder and President of Safe Software. Safe Software was founded originally doing work for the BC Government on a project sharing spatial data with the forestry industry. During that project Don and other co-founder, Dale Lutz, realized the need for a data integration platform like FME. When Don’s not raving about how much he loves XML, you can find Don working with the team at Safe to take the FME product to the next level. You will also find him on the road talking with customers and partners to learn more about what new FME features they’d like to see.
