Free-Libre-Open-Source-Software

This post was originally posted on the blog of a former company. But since they have decided to violate my authorship rights, here is a copy of it. Last week I attended the JIIDE conference, that took place here in Sevilla. This is the official conference for both portuguese and spanish spatial data infraestructures. The presentations were diverse and rich in content and there were working groups for INSPIRE and conformance running in parallel. Trends on GeoSpatial You could see some trends in how SDIs are evolving through all the Iberian Peninsula. Geograma explained to us that hiding data behind paywalls or registering sites makes us less compliant. But on the other hand, maybe it doesn’t matter because as José Fernández ( IECA) showed us, data is going more and more open and free. Why should someone pay for data generated on a public administration? It has already been payed by taxes and a paywall is just another stone on the way of generating added value to the data. And above all this, every country has a different payment and access system, so it is virtually impossible to query the same data on different countries easily, which was one of the goals for INSPIRE.

This post was originally posted on the blog of a former company. But since they have decided to violate my authorship rights, here is a copy of it. GeoNetwork, your friendly spatial catalog, never has been an easy software to deal with. But specially after the 3.0 version release, many things have changed. On this series of posts we will try to help new developers start with it. The source code is available on a public repository on Github. This means that you can clone, fork and propose pushes of your custom changes. If you are not familiar with repositories of code or git, you should check this quick manual.

This post was originally posted on the blog of a former company. But since they have decided to violate my authorship rights, here is a copy of it. The 9th SIGLibre conference in Girona starts with bad news: no wifi. But that didn’t stop us to talk about geo free stuff. SIGLibre Topics Almost all the plenary talks touched topics like smart citizens, open data, crowd data, crowd sourcing,… It is quite clear this is an emerging subject that we are going to use more and more. But, is this really a business market or is this just something to research and contribute to the community? ...

Estas últimas Jornadas SIGLibre de Girona han girado en torno a servicios cloud y datos abiertos. Desde el apoteósico inicio con las ponencias plenarias, con parte destacada de Sergi Morales ( ExportosenTI), el resto de las charlas han ido rodando todas en el mismo tema. Algunas quizás un poco más críticas, como F. Puga desde CartoLab cuando nos pidió que no olvidáramos que no todo el mundo tiene acceso global a internet, y que muchos millones de personas, las cuales no tienen nuestro nivel tecnológico, también tienen necesidades GIS. ...

Sometimes I find technologies and free software that pleasantly surprise me. Not only because of its use, but because the impact it can cause. This is the case of GNU Solidario, or GNU Health, recently awarded by the FSF for their solidary contribution. GNU Health Logo This software is basically a free and open source platform for managing medical data such as patient records, test results, diagnoses,… Everything any hospital need and use to offer their services. ...

Although this has already been discussed previously , I wanted to give another lap to the issue DNIe under Linux. And what the hell! After spending one day and a half on the subject, I wanted to leave the tutorial available somewhere, if I have to do it again. When I started I was recommended that I tried on Windows first and then if it works, I should try again on Linux. And although I followed the advice, it turns out I am definitely worse in Windows than in Linux (I ended up having to reinstall Windows again), so I tried again where I felt comfortable and understood what I do. ...

I’ve been thinking for a while about writing about the importance of open data, but is with the advertising given to Google Map Maker when I really understood the urgency of the matter. Can you imagine a country with so poor geographic data that even the government doesn’t known which cities and towns do they have? How could they invest on roads, literacy, drinking water or even know that there are people who live there? How could they collect taxes or… count votes in elections!? Can you imagine that a battalion of soldiers use maps that are wrong and establish a base in the nearest country? An absurdity that happened recently on the border between [Nicaragua and Costa Rica](https://www. elmundo.es/america/2011/04/19/noticias/1303174548.html), which almost causes an international conflict. ...