Busy Day at FOSS4G

Okay I may as well continue with pictorial guide to foss4g; I am putting more picture over on Flicker somewhere (but the best ones are going here and you can click on them for more detail).

We had one more entertaining keynote; the always popular Paul Ramsey (this is my day to take awkward pictures of Paul in a range of contexts; here we have Paul in action)

Paul really does an excellent job on his presentations; twitter provided the following foss4g2011_keynote.pdf if you were not lucky to be their in person.

The catering at the conference this year has been excellent; starting with the always welcome first coffee break.

While FOSS4G may wish to downplay the gathering of the tribes - in some respects it is true "IanS" was part of my rough introduction to GeoTools and it was amazing to meet him in person.

I was really happy to catch up with various Refractions alumni: in this case Sam Smith, Paul Ramsey and Jesse Eichar

I managed to drop in on the gvSig mobile talk; and then raced over to see the MapMint presentation (which is a great example of ZooWPS used in anger).

The MapMint application reminded me how the deegree portal idea worked (in which the various page layout components were added to a standard web map context file). In this senario the team was able to use the general nature of Web Processing Service in order to ask it to produce a range of artefacts from "mapfiles" for mapsever; through to page layouts and so forth. MapMint looks to be an interesting high value product which should showcase the talents of MapServer.

I actually into a couple of amusing characters out side the MapMint presentation and it was good to catch up. Frank as always is a great community builder and asked if he would be welcome in the Java tribe. After a bit of thought I was able to assure him that yes indeed Java has a garbage collector and he would be very welcome.

I assume that was my limit of wit for the day; and they will take away my community builder badge. Good times.

Speaking of the Java tribe the "windows" room was Jam packed with an all star line up; Justin and Simone did a tag team State of GeoServer talk.

It was handled with good grace, plenty of fascinating information and a brisk pace. I especially like that Justin took time for Questions; even at the expense of finishing the vast quanity of slides. When he gets around to making it available on the internet it is well worth a read through.

Next up we had a series of talks from GeoSolutions responsible for a lot of excellent work in the GeoServer and GeoTools community. The highlight here was a talk by Alessio Fabiani offering a top to bottom walkthrough "Advanced Cartographic Map Rendering in GeoServer". I was impressed at seeing so much information in one place; and heard a couple of remarks about the presentation being better than some of the tutorials.