FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

Till Adams

Till is one of the founders of the German language FOSSGIS conference series and joined his first OSGeo Conference in Minneapolis in 2005 before it was even called FOSS4G. Till also put a lot of effort into building the local and regional community and helped form FOSSGIS e.V., the legal body of the German language OSGeo Local Chapter.

In his main job he is founder and consutant at terrestris, an Open Source GIS company focused on web based FOSS4G software development and also of mundialis a company that focusses on Big Data and Remote Sensing Data processing. Till actively works with FOSS4G Software for many years. Also he introduces agile methods into both companies.

Till was the chair of FOSS4G 2016 in Bonn. For some years, he chaired OSGeo's conference committee. Till is also active member of FOSSGIS e.V. and membered the OSGeo board from 2020-2022.

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Sessions

08-25
14:45
30min
The GeoStyler Project - Status Report
Till Adams, Daniel Koch, Jan Suleiman

After 2019 and 2021 we also want to give a status report of the GeoStyler [1] project on this years FOSS4G. GeoStyler is an OSGeo community project [2] and received a lot of new features and changes in the past months.

GeoStyler provides a set of parser libraries that allow the conversion between different styling formats. On top of the core functionality GeoStyler provides an user interface library that helps to integrate GeoStyler into your own web application. Using these components, GeoStyler can be used for example to create a WYSIWYG style editor. The project also maintains a GeoServer-plugin [3], which includes styling UI-components into GeoServer.
Two more tools from the GeoStyler universe should be mentioned: A commandline interface (CLI) and a REST interface. The CLI provides a tool for server-side style conversion for an arbitrary number of style files – completely automated. The REST interface can be used to create web services which do the conversion between formats. With these tools, it is possible to convert a huge amount of QGIS styles to SLD, or Mapfile or any other supported file based styling format and vice versa.
GeoStyler is based on a plugin concept, so the UI works with any of the supported parsers and can thereby be used for projects that use SLD, OpenLayers, QML, etc. Currently, GeoStyler supports the styling formats OGC SLD, OpenLayers Styles, Mapfiles, QML, Mapbox and also – for assistence when styling by attributes – the geodata formats GeoJSON, OGC WFS and Shapefile. Common Query Language (CQL) for filtering is understood as well as filter encoding (OGC FE).
There are a number of new features such as a card layout, enhanced support of expressions, filter UI enhancements as well as various documentation updates and translations planned for this year and we expect all or most to be realized when FOSS4G 2022 takes place.
With this talk, we want to present the current project status and show how GeoStyler evolved since the last talk. In order to show a real-life example, we will present the results of a project, where the task was to convert UMN Mapserver based styles to QGIS using GeoStyler.

[1] https://geostyler.org/
[2] https://www.osgeo.org/projects/geostyler/
[3] https://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/community/geostyler/index.html

State of software
General online
08-25
10:00
30min
Stable Open Source Software in production; the case of MapProxy
Till Adams, Daniel Koch

MapProxy is a tile server for geospatial data that is capable to cache, accelerate and transform data from existing map services and serve them for various clients.
MapProxy is a tile cache, but also offers many more features like full support for WMS, re-projection of tiled map services and much more. MapProxy is Open Source (Apache Software License 2.0), is easy to install and to configure and runs on various OS.
Thus, for many of our customers MapProxy is an essential part of their geodata-infrastructure (GDI), but the simple possibility to ask on a mailing list is often not enough, when they want to bring Mapproxy into production. Guidelines of IT departments often require a service contract, looking at proprietary software such a contract often is a binding part of the user agreement. But what about Open Source Software?
We as a service provider offer professional support and also service contracts for MapProxy (and other OSS software) and thus, we help customers to bring Open Source into production by filling the gap of missing warranty. In the talk we would like to discuss the various business models that we developed in the past, but we also want to show why MapProxy is an important part of their GDI for many customers.

[1] https://mapproxy.org/

Use cases & applications
General online
08-25
15:15
5min
Making free climate and weather data more usable - status, ideas and products resulting from the research project "FAIR"
Till Adams

In this talk we'd like to present the results of a research project, that was funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (https://www.fair-opendata.de/) in Germany. The goal of the project was to simplify the exchange of information and data between the German Meteorological Service (DWD) and economic and public, as well as private actors. With this goals, we think we can add a great contribution and maybe also an impetus for other countries to address the provision of meteorological data.

Climate and weather data play an important role for e.g. identifying measures against climate change and optimising industries. However, a correct understanding and handling of such data is often difficult for many potential users without a meteorological background. Moreover, to process and analyse this data, users often need specialised software solutions and an infrastructure that is able to handle large amounts of data; another hurdle to be able to put the data to value.

A range of services has been developed to improve the discoverability, processing, visualisation and delivery of meteorological data. In addition to weather APIs and app developments, the data products of the german meteorological service (DWD) are offered via various portals, but also through a REST API. An upload area also enables easy data provision from third parties towards the public and the meteorological service.

In the presentation, we will present the base-ideas and the implemented products that, from our point of view, increase the usability of the freely-available meteorological data.

Open Data
General online