Open Source GIS Technologies are as capable as COTS?

I've been championing the cause of open source GIS technologies since the last few months and find that these are as capable as the commercial off-the-shelf products and at times, more.

We've been traditionally an ESRI and MapXtreme shop and it was quite a challenge convincing others about the open source stuff until a prototype application was created with a rich user experience and that too with less than half the man-hours usually taken to customise on ArcGIS.

More on this will follow...

Web Innovation 2008 Conference was cool

I was there in the Web Innovation 2008 Conference in Mumbai last week speaking on "Web 2.0 Trends in Geospatial Applications : A User Centric GIS". I attended the inaugural Web Innovation 2007 in Bangalore last year and this was on a larger scale though the Bangalore one was more spacious.

This is an excellent forum where all the innovative minds get together and discuss where the web is going towards. There were a lot of great technical and entrepreneurial sessions some were pushing their boxes. This is understandable considering the fact that a conference like this cannot be possible without sponsorships and sponsors need their ROI :-).

My session on the stage covered how the Web 2.0 concepts are being used in the GIS software industry and how some of these concepts were in use in GIS much before the Web 2.0 jargons like mash-ups, user generated content, AJAX etc came into picture.

| View | Upload your own