Today I attended the first day of Wherecamp EU 2011 unconference, learning about the latest stuff on the geoscene. This being my first geo-related event , I didn’t know anybody - but the geoguys seemed like a friendly lot . The Wherecamps are annually returning events all over the world – and it looked like the most of the guys knew each other from a lot of earlier events (and of course there were some friendly rivalry between the Nokia, google and openstreetmap guys).
Ed Parsons discussing open data
I started the day by dropping in late ( I had been eating breakfeast with my family) . When I arrived , Ed parsons from Google lead a discussion on how we want goverments to share data. It sounds like Google are trying to help out the EU with the process of sharing data. During the discussion I noted that people do not like the general idea of goverments sharing data in form of pdf reports or other non machine-readable forms – people also discussed the pros and cons of adding a clause of making data collected for govements “open” - and what “open” should mean.
Kashif Rasul leading a debate on geodatabases
After walking around a bit to find the room, I participated in a session called ”Postgis on an iphone?” by Kashif Rasul. I think Kashif wanted to talk about his libpg-ios project where he is building a client for postgis that runs on the iphone - but the discussion ended up more in the general concepts of what a geo database can do. This session was great! At the end of the session I had an impression of what the general expectations are of a geodatabase. Kashif left some notes here
Gary Gale talking about his experience with his w3c work on poi
I walked into the middle of a session (true unconference style) while Gary Gale was talking about “democratic maps”. Gary talked about the difference in the production of maps back from when maps were produced and printed into a book – not changing for years- to today where changes are almost instant .
After that he talked about his experience on the poi working group at the w3c working group , trying to define what a place of interest is.
Peter Batty on “To G or not to G”
After lunch Petter Batty talked about his work at ubisense and the various different architectures his products has been through – the current architecture is using Postgis and mapfish with a mix of google maps and openlayers. It sounded like a healthy approach to mix the use of google maps for publicly facing stuff – and using Openlayers for more complex data. During his talk , Peter discussed various licensing aspects of google appengine and why he chose not to use it in production for enterprise clients.
I also attended a Q/A session with the Openstreetmap guys , they managed to keep focus away from their upcoming license change for a bit, but then the debate went over into license discussions – with the Google and Nokia guys giving some friendly rivalry. I was a bit bored, so I decided to checkout potlach2 . I am not a big fan of flash – so I hope to find a javascript openlayers editor to contribute to.
The last session I attended was by Georgi Kobilarov from Uberblick (of dbpedia fame). They are working on aggregating place data and commentary from various social networking sites. I will look into this technology in the future.
All in all – a day well spent in Berlin . I am here with my family , so I will spend the rest of the weekend seeing the sights . I hope to attend another wherecamp in the future!