Talks, talks, so many talks!

Opening plenary Thursday was all open data, all the time. It started with Peter ter Haar from the UK Ordnance Survey, not an organization renowned for its openness, but one that has been wrestling with existential questions and moving towards open over the last few years: how to meet government open data mandates while still performing cost recovery? Peter says OS has moved from an everything-closed licensing model to a freemium model, where some data and services are free and other premium ones are not. It will be interesting to watch Ordnance Survey continue to evolve over coming years.

Then we got a taste of Open Street Map, which made me wish I’d been able to come a few days earlier. The OSM community continues to be a real hotbed of great news ideas for engaging folks in geography. My favourite from the talk: a mobile address verification application, but cast as a video game, with a medieval theme and rankings of the top players.

Finally, Michael Byrne presented on the open data aspects of the FCC Broadband Map and Developers API initiatives. While the open source aspects of Michael’s story is compelling (turning around a high visibility project with incredible load in only a few months using an open source geostack) I find the open data aspects even more compelling. The whole site is based on APIs. So the architecture completely separates the data feeds from the user interface, which makes the UI completely modular and ensures that everything is available to third parties for re-mixing. This architectural practice — building APIs, then building sites using only those APIs — is the best possible long-term approach to open data, because it embeds openness at the core of the system.

Friday is PostGIS day in the Windows room (yes, the Windows room), power users, 2.0 features, raster, replication, query, oh my!

Tags: foss4g2011, recap