Thursday, November 26, 2009

OSDC 2009 Thursday

Brisbane producer.jpgAll credit to Microsoft for sponsoring the conference (second only to Google) but guys... the Asure presentation/demonstration was enough to put me off. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Again, incidental conversations at breakfast and lunch were more enlightening than many of the talks except a wonderful session on GeoExt which is a toolkit combining Ext JS and OpenLayers to provide really impressive geospatial features. I was totally blown away and am re-thinking much of the work I've been doing in recent months to speed up mapping in the browser.

A theme of the conference is how hard it is to get laptops to talk to projectors. We had one that didn't like Mini DVI Macs yesterday but today there were problems across the board. In a five minute lightning talk, this can easily eat half the time.

lightningvert.jpgOne speaker who didn't have any trouble with the projector was a four year old who demonstrated great skill with her linux netbook.

Dinner tonight is sponsored by Google but it's been a long day and I'm not sure I'll last 'till midnight.

1 comment:

Christopher said...

Hi Pete,

Looks very interesting. I'm continued to be fascinated by what we're able to do in the browser.

There may be more to this than meets the eye at a cursory glance, but I don't see much reference to the projection information of a layer. As you know maps and geo-referenced imagery are always associated with a projection - and there are hundreds of projections out there.

From my own observations Google tend to assume everything as UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) for simplicity; which is why they can't show the polar regions very well (I stand to be corrected!).

Incidentally I'm using the Proj.4 library and the GDAL library (both Opensource C projects with other language bindings). My web plugin that renders geospatial imagery - supplied mainly as GeoTIFF files. Given that I sit on top of Proj.4 and GDAL I can thus support hundreds of different projections with great accuracy. :-)

Kind regards,
Christopher