Roundup: 2021 Global Open Source Geospatial Software Conference (FOSS4G)
The FOSS4G conference is an annual global conference around Open Source Geospatial software. ISRIC – World Soil Information is an active participant in various open source communities, which shared their current and upcoming activities at the conference. This post highlights some of the presentations and contains links to the videos.
OGC API
A main topic at the conference was adoption of the new branch of Open Geospatial Consortium Standards, called OGC API. More and more variations on OGC API Common, such as Features, Maps, Records, etc, are implemented in OSGEO software. Implementation of these standards in software facilitates adoption by data providers and ease of access by end users. For that reason we contribute to implementation of OGC API in QGIS, pygeoapi, geonetwork and others. Some of the results were presented at the conference.
“OGC API in QGIS” presentation
ISRIC contributed to the GeoPython workshop. At ISRIC we use (and contribute to) the GeoPython tool set in our data analyses and publictions. Libraries such as OWSLib, pygeoapi, pygeometa, geonode etc
GeoNetwork
GeoNetwork is a catalogue to facilitate discovery of mainly datasets with a spatial aspect. This software facilitates data providers in making existing assets more discoverable. ISRIC was the main contributor to the GeoNetwork workshop, to facilitate adoption of the product.
There is a growing interest in Search Engine Optimization for data discovery. Recent research in the UK indicates that most of the visitors of their national data portals arrive from search engines. We presented some work on this topic together with Astun Technologies in the scope of GeoNetwork.
“Search engine optimisation for data catalogues” presentation
In the 'State of GeoNetwork' presentation we presented together with Titellus, GeoCat and Camp to Camp the latest developments from the GeoNetwork community.
“State of geonetwork” presentation
GraphQL
GraphQL is an interesting de facto standard based due to its powerful filter capabilities. Our impression is that this standard, which is between OGC API and GeoSPARQL in complexity, complements the API community. We ran a workshop on this topic to bring this standard to the attention of the FOSS4G community.
At ISRIC there is a growing interest in semantic web technologies in the field of soil data harmonisation. Our impression is that a group within the spatial community is still unaware of the capabilities and conventions of semantic web. That’s why we asked the creator of GeoSPARQL to present a Linked data 101 for GeoSpatial with us. Of course 15 minutes is too short to cover the full topic, but we hope we sparked something with listeners.
Linked data 101 for geospatial presentation