- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development
In just over a week, a sizeable contingent of Safe Software staff will be taking the ferry across to Victoria to participate in FOSS4G. (That's the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference, for those who prefer long-hand.) It's a huge bonus to have this international event hosted virtually in our own back yard this year. We've certainly done our part to boost participation at the conference, and it looks like attendance will be off the scale compared to previous years.
Although other "Safers" have attended FOSS4G regularly in the past, this will be my first opportunity to attend. Even more exciting, Safe will also have the privilege of participating in the proceedings for the very first time.* Given that Safe is a commercial software house, this is a privilege I don't take lightly, because I believe it underscores the close relationship Safe has with the open source community. Both Don Murray (Safe's president) and I have great respect for Frank Warmerdam and Daniel Morissette, who have been long-time friends. On a personal level, I can certainly identify with the ideology behind the open source movement. In fact, Safe's origins were in the open source arena. Back in 1993, Safe's first project was development of the SAIF Toolkit – a free library for reading and writing the SAIF format used by the Provincial Government of British Columbia. It was only later, when we started writing translators to enable diverse systems to use this format, that we switched to a commercial approach.
As a company, Safe has learned much from the example provided by the open source community. In terms of serving users, the quick reflexes of the open source community should be envied by all commercial vendors. We've endeavored to incorporate this kind of responsiveness into Safe's business model by maintaining a busy schedule of two releases per year for most of the last ten years, and also by offering the latest beta FME builds on our website - builds that are refreshed almost daily. Safe has also tried to match the prompt reaction time set by open source developers with respect to supporting some of the less complex, newly emerged formats. We recently earned a mention in Jason Birch's Random Nodes blog for adding support for JSON and GeoJSON to our betas before the specification for these formats had even been released. Prompt support of KML and GeoRSS has earned us similar kudos in the past as well.
It's difficult to come close to the spirit of collaboration that exists among open source developers, but we've tried to foster this in some way by hosting the fmepedia online community. Users can post code for specific data transformations (i.e. FME Custom Transformers) to fmepedia for sharing with other users. Safe also provides open APIs so others can extend and use our technology.
Like many other commercial companies, Safe has directly benefited from the efforts of the open source folk – we've embedded various open source packages in the source code for our FME platform. To show our appreciation for the work done by OS developers, Safe has sponsored a number of open source initiatives over the years. Currently, Safe is sponsoring work on GEOS, BigTIFF and GDAL, and we are gold level sponsors of the FOSS4G 2007 conference itself.
Our presentations at FOSS4G will emphasize the important role we see FME playing in light of growing interest in open source software in the geospatial arena. The industry no longer holds a “one size fits all” view of geospatial systems. Today, organizations that once used only proprietary applications are now taking a “mix and match” approach and incorporating both commercial and open source components into their geospatial system stack. But the same data interoperability issues that have long hindered efficient exchange of data between proprietary solutions are now encumbering data exchange in these hybrid systems. As a data translation and transformation tool, FME can solve these challenges by serving as a two-way bridge between proprietary and open source software, allowing easy flow of data in both directions. Since the transformation can be tailored to support the specific data models on either end of the data transfer, data can be loaded into the destination application, then returned to the source application, with no loss of information during the exchange.
FME provides similar advantages for those who prefer to use only open source solutions in their geospatial infrastructure stack – loading data into the various system components is quick and easy, and the full information content of the data is preserved. And that’s just the data translation side of the story. FME also provides an almost limitless number of ways to add value to your data, by applying a combination of over 270 “prepackaged” data transformations during data loading.
If you’re planning to attend FOSS4G and would like more information on FME, I hope you’ll find an opportunity to attend one of the presentations listed below. If you have some specific data challenges you’d like to discuss, do stop by our booth on the exhibition floor (#23) – Safe staff will be happy to offer their insights.
Before signing off, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the members of the local planning committee for FOSS4G - Paul Ramsey, Brian Low, Jason Birch, Evert Kenk, Tyler Mitchell, Dave Patton, Jeff McKenna, and Frank Warmerdam. Although I am also a member of this committee, my travel commitments have meant that my contribution has been minimal compared to the efforts and dedication of the other members of the team. They have worked extremely hard to ensure that FOSS4G 2007 is a resounding success, and I’m certain they will not be disappointed.
* Here's more information on the various presentations Safe will be involved in at FOSS4G 2007:
- Safe’s hands-on lab session will employ six different scenarios to showcase the diversity of components from the open source stack that can be accessed using FME - components such as such as PostGIS, PostgreSQL, MySQL®, SQLite, GDAL, OGR, FDO and GEOS. A detailed description of this session is available at www.foss4g2007.org/labs/L-15. The workshop will begin at 8:30 am on 27 September in the Colwood Room.
- Catch Safe’s 10-minute demonstrations during the Lunchtime Theatre in the Sydney Room on September 26 at 12:00 pm and 12:20 pm.
- Stop by Safe’s booth (# 23) for a demonstration of FME’s format translation and data model transformation capability, or for a preview of Safe’s upcoming FME Server solution - a scalable, enterprise-ready spatial ETL processing environment. Booth visitors can also check out how well FME performs during the Integration Showcase – an interactive demo that will be running continuously during the exhibition to explore how effectively various solutions are able to integrate, process and serve up data provided by other conference exhibitors.
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