Presentations

A history, status report, and outlook of Proj.4

August 17, 2017

Talk, FOSS4G 2017, Boston, MA, USA

The Proj. 4 library and its many language ports provides the coordinate system math implementation that underlies most of the FOSS4G software ecosystem. The original author of Proj. 4, Gerald Evenden of USGS, who first published the library in 1983, recently passed in April of 2016. After a long release hiatus, the library has gained new maintainer, the user-contributed proj4.org website recently modernized the documentation management for the project, and the first significant library feature was added to support coordinate transformation pipelines. In this talk we will discuss Gerald’s software legacy with Proj. 4, describe how the library has evolved through the years, and demonstrate recently added capabilities.

Hello from the 90s – JS.Geo

August 15, 2017

Talk, FOSS4G 2017, Boston, MA, USA

New platforms historically came with a devils’ bargain to be struck – port all your existing code over into the new platform. This is fine for new development, but it’s a huge drag on stuff that’s been around forever – especially open source software that has solved problems for decades. Howard Butler from Hobu, Inc. will discuss how that bargain doesn’t always have to be maintained with today’s JavaScript platform.

Open Source GIS Hacks

June 05, 2005

Talk, Open Source GIS Conference '05, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Sean Gillies and Howard Butler presented a workshop at OSGIS ‘05 about how to use Python and Open Source software to do geospatial stuff. A number of Python geospatial libraries and tools such as Shapely and Fiona from Sean and the GDAL “next gen” Python bindings from Howard followed this workshop when it became clear there was an audience and need for the tools.