Between the Poles: A bit of early history of open source geospatial

Geoff Zeiss

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Lidar News
Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« Power utility identifies 60-70% productivity improvement by integrating engineering design, GIS and enterprise systems | Main | AR enables better grid damage assessments and improves quality of utility GIS »

March 25, 2019

A bit of early history of open source geospatial

It is now 20 years since the University of Minnesota (UMN) MapServer 3.0 was made open source. Daniel Morissette (@dmorissette) has posted a bit of interesting history on Twitter about the early days of open source and UMN MapServer, the Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and the annual meetings that evolved into FOSS4G. I have augmented Daniel's material with more history from Markus Neteler (@MarkusNeteler) and other sources.

1994: University of Minnesota awarded NASA/ForNet funding to support web-based delivery of forestry data.

1997: MapServer 1.0, Developed as Part of the NASA ForNet Project. MapServer project led by Steve Lime (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-lime-353231122/).

1998: MapServer 2.0 released as final ForNET deliverable; added reprojection support (PROJ.4).

1999: UMN makes MapServer 3.0 an open source project.

2000: Release of Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) by Frank Warmerdam (@nfwarmerdam). Now used by over 30 commercial and other applications including ArcGIS.

2001: The initial implementation of OGC Web Map Service (WMS) in MapServer was supported by funding from Canadian Forest Service.

2001: Paul Ramsey (@pwramsey) then at Refractions adds PostGIS support to MapServer

2002: The CWC2 (Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure WMS Client Components) project becomes the open source Chameleon framework.

2002: GRASS Users conference, Trento, Italy - 150 people

2003: First MapServer User Meeting (MUM1), Minneapolis, Minnesota - 90 people

2004: FOSS4G: GRASS Users Conference, Bangkok, Thailand - 150+ people

2004: MUM2 and Open Source GIS Conference, Ottawa, Canada - 200+ people

2004: Release of The Atlas of Canada WMS Service powered by MapServer. Still serving 10 million WMS maps/month today

2005: MUM3 and Open Source Geospatial Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota - 300+ people

2005: MapServer Technical Steering Committee (TSC) created.

2005: Autodesk, MapServer Technical Steering Committee Members, the University of Minnesota, and DM Solutions Group announced the creation of the MapServer Foundation which ultimately became OSGEO.

2006: Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) created with eight founding projects. MUM and GRASS users meetings become FOSS4G events.

2007: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference (FOSS4G) 2007, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada - 700 attendees

2009: First C Tribe Code Sprint in Toronto thanks to Tom Kralidis (@tomkralidis) and Paul Ramsey.

2017: FOSS4G Boston, Massachussets - 1150 attendees. In addition regional FOSS4G conferences are held in North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Japan, Africa, and other regions and countries.

2019: OSGEO supports 24 projects + several community projects.

I became involved with the open source geospatial community in 2005. I was at Autodesk at the time and together with Dave McIlhagga of DM Solutions, which was using MapServer commercially, managed to attract the interest of Gary Lang, who was responsible for Geospatial development at Autodesk. As a result Autodesk supported the formation of the OSGEO for its first three years and contributed three open source projects, MapGuide Open Source, Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology, and CS-Map.

Posted at 11:00 AM in Geospatial Open Source, Geospatial Standards, Open Source Geospatial | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

October 2024

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March 25, 2019

A bit of early history of open source geospatial

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