tommy's scratchpad

Just read Cameron’s pointer to this course. All I have to say is wow. This is probably the most user-friendly and comprehensive online course / outreach material I’ve seen in a long time. And the student demo pages are really impressive.

Kudos to Ian and students!!

I’ve been working with MapServer since 2000. In October 2006, I was added as a committer to the codebase. Since then, I’ve been working on mainly OGC support and Perl mapscript type issues. After a few months, here are some things which I would like to see at some point in MapServer from a developer’s point of view.

1./ libxml2 support: it would be of benefit to MapServer to have XML support taken care of by libxml2. Currently, MapServer uses msIO_printf, which, while functional, is prone to XML errors in particular when outputting XML. libxml2 takes care of closing tags, quoting attributes, namespaces, schemas, and a slew of other functionality. Also, coding MapServer XML in libxml2 allows for extensibility (e.g. applying a stylesheet via mapfile configuration).

2./ Better organized codebase: something like:

• mapserver/
  • etc/
  • core/
  • formats/
  • mapscript/
  • ogc/
  • tests/
  • util/

3./ subversion: It’s nice to see MapServer move towards a shared infrastructure like OSGeo‘s and leverage trac for issue tracking. Already an improvement over bugzilla, trac also plays nice with subversion. So hopefully it will just be a matter of time before the codebase gets ported from CVS.

Headed to Ottawa for the OGC meetings. After waking up at an unsightly hour to catch the plane, we found out that Ottawa International Airport is shut down because of the weather there. Martin (Daly), who travelled from the UK (and 25C conditions), sent me a photo from the scene. Some days I miss living there. Some days (like snow in April, ice storms, snow in October), I don’t.

Update: I’m in Ottawa now.  It is terrible outside.  Imagine rain, snow, cold.  Near wipe-out on the way to the hotel.  Worst ever!!

I go to my share of conferences, seminars and meetings. I think it’s part of keeping abreast of the community, technology, seeing colleagues, and making new contacts.

I always say, if there’s one conference that I make my best effort to attend, it’s the FOSS4G conference. Although the name has gone through a few iterations, I think the theme has generally been consistent: open source software for geospatial (I prefer the term geospatial, as oppossed to geo-informatics, GIS, geoscience, etc.).

Some of the things I enjoy are:

• Meeting the actual developers. Many of the developers attend this conference, and it’s a great chance to meet them in person, find out about future developments, or even ask them that burning question about line 642 in file gfoo.c
• The workshops: hands-on workshops are provided which are very useful. For example, I quickly learned PostGIS here and applied it the week after. The developers frequently give or hover these workshops, especially when it pertains to their software, so you can be sure that questions, no matter how complex, will be addressed
• The applications: it’s valuable to see presentations of projects which use FOSS4G approaches. Regardless of how simple you think your application/project/portal is, the fact that you have integrated these approaches is a great indication of your abilities, integration, and the tools used
• The community: last, but not least. The dynamics, the personalities, and the commitment and passion for this cause is exhilarating to see and be a part of

If you come from the open source software world, or have an interest in geospatial, or are a geospatial professional who’s curious about open source tools, technologies, the projects that use them, you’ll want to think about this conference.

Looks like all the geo-rage is Google Maps’ latest announcement that they will support indexing of KML documents, so someone can search for KML documents with a bit more intelligence then adding a filetype filter.

I think this will pick up some steam, like most things Google do. Many KML docs already exist out there, and this will also motivate publishing of more KML docs.

I hope there are similar plans for GML documents, however the problem there is that many GML docs are produced from WFS interactions, which, for the most part, have to be triggered by a WFS client request, which usually is not statically published.

I also hope that there is some discussion of this in the OGC Mass Market Working Group. I remember some discussions on how this would have been great for the WMS specification to publish a static Capabilities XML document for the sake of search engines. Maybe this is a good opportunity for catalogue providers out there to write wrappers to additionally publish KML of their resources. I’ve started looking at this for owscat.

Sean tagged me, so here are five things that you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I have dual citizenship. I was born and raised in Canada, and got my Greek citizenship in 2005
2. After undergrad, a few of my buddies and I decided to forget about looking for work, and packed our backpacks for Europe for a couple of months. We visited 10 countries. After blowing the bank, it was time to come home. Hands down one of the best experiences in my life
3. My bachelor’s degree was in social / economic and urban geography. Stuff like urban growth patterns and gentrification were things that really interested me (they still do)
4. I didn’t learn how to program or anything UNIX-ish for that matter until 1998. My first introduction to this world was by Mike (Adair of mapbuilder fame) who suggested I take UNIX training. I was hooked. The rest, as they say, is history. Thanks again Mike!
5. I’m mildly considering a PhD, having bounced around research ideas with Carleton and McMaster. I’d like to do something which combines my social/economic and urban undergrad degree and the stuff I do nowadays. The showstopper being the feasibility of actually doing it relative to having a life, salary and mortgages

I hereby tag Cameron, Jody and Tyler.