Map India 2006

I was fortunate to attend Map India where I gave presentations on some of the themes of this blog.  This year Map India was especially interesting for several reasons.  First of all the theme of the conference was "Finding Mainstream", which brought home to me how all over the world people have recognized that geospatial has become part of mainstream IT and is no longer a niche.  This is one of the reasons that I think 2005/2006 is such an important time for geospatial technology.  Dave Sonnen, who prepares IDC's annual spatial information management report, has been predicting for years that spatial-enabling IT was going to become a much larger market than traditional GIS and would at some point overtake traditional GIS.  2005/2006 is the first time when it feels that this crossover is imminent.

Another reason that Map India was so interesting is Delhi, which is where MapIndia took place this year.  Delhi and the Delhi area were at the centre of the Mughal empire and Delhi is full of remarkable monuments that have endured from that period.  One of the most remarkable is Humayun's Tomb, which with its extensive garden, is located right in Delhi.   It was the first what is called garden tomb in the Indian subcontinent and was a precursor of the more famous Taj Mahal.

Another reason that Map India was so interesting is that I had an opportunity to chat with Sanjay Kumar and Maneesh Prasad of GIS Development, which is one of the organizers of the event.  Sanjay reminded me that Autodesk had been a sponsor of the first Map India nine years ago and that next year will be quite special, because it will be Map India's decenary .  We chatted about some of the interesting trends in geospatial technology and in particular about open source geospatial, to which the January issue of GIS Development was devoted.  To me this is another important reason that 2005/006 is such an important period for geospatial technology because we are seeing a recogniton of the maturing of open source geospatial technology.  At the end of 2005 Autodesk announced that it was open sourcing the next release of MapGuide, called MapGuide Open Source.  And then early in February of this year a number of folks active in the open source geospatial world including people representing GDAL, GeoTools, GRASS, Mapbender, MapBuilder, MapServer, OSSIM and MapGuide Open Source got together to create an open source geospatial foundation (www.osgeo.org), which I recommend that you check out.  I like to draw a parallel between where web mapping is today and to the formation of the Apache Foundation, when most of the major IT vendors recognized that it made more business sense to support the Apache web server project than for each vendor to develop its own proprietary web server.

One of the events that distinguished Map India from other geospatial events is the evening of ghazals that was organized for the attendees.  This is an experience you really have to go to the Indian subcontinent for.  Ghazals are a form of poetry that is sung to the accompaniment of traditional Indian instruments and other instruments, in this case a violin, which you should be able to make out on the right in the photo.  I believe ghazals were historically written in Urdu, but you can find them in a variety of languages including English (http://ghazalpage.net/).

Comments

[glenn]

Geoff, thanks for the update from Map India. I have always wanted to attend this fine event and your synopsis only reinforces my commitment to get there one of these days!
Cheers... glenn