The FOSS4G Observatory is an initiative that started 10 years ago in quite a different world.
In 2016, we were setting out to better understand what are the open source solutions in the geospatial realm, following the technological progress to answer the intimidating challenges on the horizon. Stable and operational stacks for serving impossible amounts of satellite data to thousands of users simultaneously, allowing complex processing and fast visualisations, integration of numerous types of data and state of the art cartographic digital representations become vital.
Years have passed and the FOSS4G observatory increased, following the vast and fast expansion of the FOSS4G ecosystem, documenting almost 600 open source projects and providing the international community (not only the geospatial one) a service that would allow a better, clearer understanding of the open source software available for a specific task, its licenses, standard compliances, dependencies, allowing objective comparisons based on git-related information, and more.
Today, our world is quite different than the one a decade ago. Challenges, of all kinds have significantly increased, but so did the potential of tools and data to answer them.
In this talk, the presenter will walk you through the vastness of the FOSS4G ecosystem, seen though the objective view of the Observatory, describing the various indicators and providing a potential answer on why and how the open source model has contributed to the development of geospatial technologies underpinning major European initiatives, such as INSPIRE or the Copernicus Program.