MUM2: Day 1
Overall it was a good day at MUM 2 at Carleton University
here in Ottawa, Ontario Canada. I think that I’ve compressed
more acronyms into my speech in the last day than I’ve said
in the past year. The good thing about a meeting like this
is that it is a chance for everyone to really meet each other
in person for the first or second time. Also, it means that
everyone’s interpretations of the pronunciations of
library names and acronyms don’t quite line up.
So, here they are from the source (that is, from the developers themselves).
- GDAL - Goo-dull — Frank
- PostGIS - Post-giss — Refractions guys
- OGR - Oh Gee Arrr, not ogre — Frank
MapScript
Much time was spent with Sean Gilles discussing MapScript,
its current implementation, and where it might go in the future. We
talked about the upcoming refactoring of the API and some of the naming
of the new methods. We also talked about other various warts that we thought could
could be candidates for refactoring as well.
Python
I got a chance to talk to Norman Vine over a cigarette or
two about Python and all of the various opportunities to use it with
GIS. We talked about the Python C API, and I expressed my frustration
with Python reference counting and my poor understanding, which he
gave me some good tips about. We also talked about the possibilities
for geometry algebra operations in Python. The
PySDE wrapper is one
way of doing it, but he gave me some names of other libraries to look up (which,
of course, I already forgot).
SDE
On the bus ride home, I talked to Frank Warmerdam, who is
the master when it comes to data formats. He is the developer of
OGR and GDAL, which are becoming the foundation data input libraries in
MapServer. We discussed what might need to be done to put SDE vector and
raster support into OGR/GDAL. This is one area I would like to pursue if
I had the time.
GIS Monitor
I talked to Adena Schultzberg of GIS Monitor about my comments about the
swallowing of Mapping Science by LizardTech. I told her that I wrote the
article in a fit of frustration, because I had been championing GeoJP2
within my organization, and then LizardTech pulled the rug out when they
swiped the GeoJP2 specification. That whole thing still makes
me mad…
Zope
J.F Doyon of Environment Canada gave a very cool presentation to
Sean and I about his fancy Zope site that serves up millions
of MapServer maps a month. All of the mapping happens outside
of the Zope process because of the thread-safety issues that
MapServer has, but it was very cool to see all of the neat
CMF stuff that he build for his organization.