CUGOS Meeting, June 19, 2013

19 Jun 2013

by Michael Rosen

Stats: About 30 attended. At capacity of room but LizardTech loves hosting

• There was mention of a FOSS4G talk about “vector tiles.” The idea is that you somehow package vector data in tiles. What it’s definitely not is pre-rendered rasterized vectors. Mapbox and others (?) seem quite excited about this.
• Gary Sherman, the founder of QGIS was here. QGIS is a pretty widely used Open Source alternative to ArcGIS Desktop
• Steve Coast, the founder of Open Streetmap and current “Principle Architect for Bing Mobile” was here (2nd time)
• Nick Dimiduk, talked about his talk about doing a massive Vector -> Raster job on Amazon’s cloud.
• The guys from Pierce County GIS talked about their work doing a “Python cookbook for GDAL” … the idea is that Python is the lingua franca of GIS and much of what people use Python and ArcGIS for (the Python interpreter is baked into the Desktop app) can be done easily using Python and GDAL. Their work is open source (git hub) was done with the approval of their management at Pierce County.
• And follow-up from Matt Kenny on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cugos

In case you were looking for a link to the Pierce County cookbook that Cort and Jared presented on Wednesday, you can find it here

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