There are dozens of posts out there that cover very well the second day and all the talks of Where 2.0. So I’ll briefly sketch my personal highlights of today (as I did yesterday):
I really got impressed by the effort of NASA’s World Wind team to improve their product and their enthusiasm behind all their work. From an EULA point of view it’s quite clear that in a professional environment NASA’s World Wind is the only option to go (by now) if one would like to use globe applications:
- World wind has no use restriction,
- it’s 100% open source software,
- extendable due to their add-ons,
- direct integration of WMS (and soon WFS),
- supports GIS file formats like ESRI shapefiles.
Once the place names can be accessed via WFS and don’t have to be packed into the application itself, the download size (60 MB at the moment) will significantly decrease to probably only a few megabytes.
Support for more platforms should be achieved in fall 2006 as World Wind is currently ported to Java. Well, not only ported but reprogrammed as far as I understood today.
Apparently, for Autodesk did the concept of Open Source make sense, as they claimed that the revenue is made in other segments of the mapserver market than selling server software and they could meet user needs better by adopting Open Source development cycles for parts of their product portfolio.
There were only a few GIS talks at Where 2.0, but they made me wanna try some of the shown tools like OSSIM and GRASS (well, GRASS I tried once but had not the time to dig deep enough into it).
Pretty funny was the presentation of Donald Cooke from TeleAtlas! I definitely will get a copy of “Fun with GPS“.
Mr Jack Dangermond demonstrated the strategy of ESRI products: author, serve and publish. The audience saw a demo of ArcGIS Explorer (incl. Jabber chat), how data is edited in ArcGIS Desktop and published as WMS on the server. Quite impressing was the demo of ArcWeb SVG Map Viewer, which illustrated with a view clicks the power of the-next-big-thing-since-5-years SVG by changing to various projections, applying different styles and switching layers on/off without reloading (no, not even asynchronous!) anything. To me it became quite clear the ESRI isn’t heading at all into this Where 2.0 market, they clearly stick to their professional GIS business and concentrate in providing the technology to enable the back-end for services like Google maps (I don’t know if Google maps is using any ESRI technology at all…).
Check out this excellent Where 2.0 photoset at Flickr (btw, wasn’t Stewart Butterfield on the speakers list?) and the roundup written by the Where 2.0 co-chairs.
See you next year at Where 2.0, 19.6-20.6.2007, Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA.
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