It has been a while since this year’s FOSS4G-Europe conference took place in Bremen; however, we would like to share our presentations and experiences in this blog post. Three members of 52°North staff attended the FOSS4G-E, which was conveniently located in the nearby city of Bremen, and talked about diverse topics involving INSPIRE, the WPS standard, collaborative software development, teaching, JavaScript, and more.

The conference was organized by Peter Baumann‘s group at the Jacobs University under the motto “Independent Innovation for INSPIRE, Big Data, and Citizen Participation”. Over 200 participants from 50 countries met for a whole week of workshops and talks around free and open source software for geospatial applications. 52°North participated with the following contributions.

The WPS 2.0 Standard – Benjamin Pross

Benjamin presented the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) 2.0 standard, which, at the time, was supposed to be released by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) shortly after the conference (but still hasn’t been). He described the changes to the previous version of the standard (1.0.0) and gave an in-depth introduction to the new features, concepts, and structure of the specification. You can download the slides here.

An Open Source SOS-Based INSPIRE Download Service Implementation – Simon Jirka

Several domains require near real time, as well as historic, observation data for scientific analyses, decision making, and the development of policies. As a result, Annex II and III of the INSPIRE Directive include several domains, for example, oceanography, hydrology, health, environment (emission data), meteorology and biodiversity, to make observation data available in the coming year. Simon provided an overview of the most important aspects of the proposed update of the Technical Guidance document and of the development of the 52°North Open Source INSPIRE/SOS implementation.

You can download the slides here.

Teaching Software Development with Open Source, GitHub, and Scrum – Daniel Nüst

Based on his experience as a software devloper and lecturer in programming courses, Daniel pondered about how, from the perspective of a software developer and open source enthusiast, to improve teaching how to program. In this talk he presents first ideas utilizing a Scrum-like project management and GitHub as a collaboration form to get students ready for the real world and get them hooked on open source at the same time.  Since there was such positive feedback after the talk, he published the core ideas online, of course as a GitHub repository: https://github.com/52North/teaching-open-collaborative-software-development. Contributions are welcome!

Javascript Client Libraries for the (Former) Long Tail of OGC Standards – Daniel Nüst

In his second presentation of the day, Daniel presented new JavaScript libraries and clients developed in the Geoprocessing and Sensor Web communities to control processes and respectively visualize data based on the WPS and SOS standards. These clients were developed as a reaction to increaslingly powerful client side JavaScript engines and the continuing trend toward lightweight browser clients. The 52°North communities were not the only ones to observe this trend, thus a lively discussion ensued after the presentation and there was a common agreement that a JavaScript client library across all standardized OGC web services should be developed. Interested? Join the ows.js mailing list at OSGeo.