FOSS4G North American 2016

I am sitting at the airport and reflecting the FOSS4G North America 2016 conference I just attended in the past week.  It was one of the best organized conferences I’ve attended. For those who know me, you know I go to many and maybe too many conferences every year.  FOSS4G North America 2016 is definitely ranked top 5 among all conference/meetings I’ve attended.  What impressed me the most is its inclusive atmosphere.  You can feel free to discuss, to share, to connect, to network, and to brainstorm.  Although the topics we discussed can be serious and dry (e.g., OGC standards, data modelling, MapReduce, SFCurve), the atmosphere is casual, social, and embracing. Kudos to Eclipse LocationTech and @42aross. 

Bid data is definitely a “hot” topic in the conference.  The LocationTech big data projects, e.g., GeoMesa and GeoTrellis, attracted a lot of attentions from the crowd.  If you are not aware of these big data open source projects, make sure you take a look!  During the conference any session about “Tiles”, especially “vector tiles”, has lots participants as well.  In fact, it made me think of the old days when I was a MSc student (2002~2003). In our lab we developed a vector tile based system that not only supports efficient vector tile loading and rendering, like today’s vector tiles, in addition we also have progressive vector transmission for multiple levels of detail. However, it was a research project so it wasn’t used widely.  If I recalled correctly, the file extension for our vector tiles is *.vct, and we joked about it is the shortening of our professor’s full name (Vincent Chuang Tao == vct).  🙂 

SensorUp had two presentations and they are both well attended.  Every “THING” in the Internet of Things exist in space and time. Spatio-temporal information plays critical roles in order to use the IoT effectively, and SensorThings API provides the open standard and interoperable way to communicate the observations and relevant spatio-temporal information in the IoT.  Eclipse Whiskers provide an open source library for the SensorThings API (Open Standard + Open Source = Big Heart). I also presented the Arctic Sensor Web and Arctic Citizen Sensor system as the examples of using SensorThings API. My slides are available here: Arctic Citizen Sensors and Open IoT Made Easy – using OGC SensorThings API. Enjoy.

@steveliang