SIS at ApacheConf, and proposal for next time

[Martin Desruisseaux <ma...@geomatys.com>]

Hello all

The talk about SIS in ApacheConf Europe was Monday. The slides are
available online at [1]. The number of attendees was low (5 persons).
This looks a little bit paradoxical to me since I have seen other talks
doing some geospatial work, one of them implementing its own map
projections code. But very few peoples know SIS existence, and maybe
SIS's relevance seems mysterious to most peoples. Geometries in
(latitude, longitude) seem considered sufficient for many Apache
projects needs. Some peoples specify a datum (WGS84), but I do not know
how they plan to handle historical data or Galileo data (which will use
another datum than WGS84).

I had interesting talks with some peoples and noticed that when they
look at the SIS web site, they often look first at the developer guide
[2]. But in addition to be very incomplete, I think that the current
guide structure does not make easy to spot the most useful parts for
developers. I think that an external opinion proposing a different plan
would be helpful.

The Monday presentation was focusing on recent evolutions in some
OGC/ISO standards because I wanted to avoid repeating the presentation
done last year. But since very few peoples at this ApacheConf seem aware
of geospatial standards, probably a talk about what is new in those
standards seemed irrelevant to almost everyone. I think that if we have
a chance to talk again at ApacheConf, we will need a more educative
approach. Maybe a join talk between projects doing geospatial stuff
(e.g. Tika showing their geographic metadata support) followed by a talk
about SIS? The idea would be to begin with the geospatial needs already
encountered in various Apache projects before to explain:

 1. what are the limitations (that they may not realize that they have),
 2. how geospatial standards may help to describe more accurately their
    data, and
 3. how SIS may help to use those geospatial standards.

Martin


[1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/SIS.pdf
[2] http://sis.apache.org/book/en/developer-guide.html