Session Abstract

A Survey of Open Source GIS

Open source software is sweeping the enterprise IT world, with products such as Linux, Apache, and Tomcat receiving industry awards and taking up prominent positions in many organizations.

Open source is also entering the geomatics industry.  There is a large collection of mature open source technologies available for geomatics professionals to solve problems and build spatial data infrastructures.

This session will provide an overview of the available open source technologies:  What tools are available?  What is their maturity level?  What capabilities does the state-of-the-art in open source provide?

Speaker Biography

Paul Ramsey

Paul Ramsey is the President and founder of Refractions Research, a spatial database and geomatics consultancy. He provides consulting on spatial database design, spatial data infrastructures and enterprise GIS systems. Paul has been working with spatial data, open spatial standards and open source tools for the past 6 years, and has kept Refractions focussed on open source tools and technologies.  Refractions is heavily involved in the open source geomatics community, making contributions to PostGIS, Mapserver, GeoTools, GeoServer and uDig.