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. ...

Ayer estuve en mi primer betabeers, donde presenté: GeoNetwork : domesticando una jauría de metagatos. metagatos

GeoNetwork is a server side application that allows you to maintain a geographic referenced metadata catalogue. This means: a search portal that allows to view metadata combined with maps. GeoNetwork logo Based on Free and Open Source Software, it strictly follows different standards for metadata, from Inspire to OGC. It implements the CSW interface to be able to interact with generic clients looking for data. It also has built-in harvesters to connect to other servers and populate data. ...

These past few weeks have been chaotic and as an exercise to seat and to drop anchor, I would like to make a brief summary of my job change. Why? metagato My main motivation to stop working on Emergya, despite the huge human and technical quality has been: The current situation in Spain doesn’t allow us to perform interesting projects, forcing companies to focus only on survival, with all the friction and discomfort that this generates. The challenge . And this, I think, is the main motivation. The enormous challenge of context switching to a new company, with a way of working so similar and yet so different. I need to see the world, learn, drink from other sources. Five years in Emergya have been wonderful, but I began to feel that it was becoming too small for me. Big fish on small pond or small fish on the ocean? GeoCat(s) . Can somebody refuse the possibility of becoming a geo-cat? Could there be a step beyond this? Can anyone not want to work with metacats (metadata, impossible to translate)? Of course, it has not been an easy decision. To me, Emergya is, and always will be, the company that received me openly and helped me take my first steps working, strengthening my belief that open source is the right path. Like it or not, Emergya is part of me and the title of “ex-emergyana” cannot be taken away from me. ...

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. ...

Annotations on the code or decorators have become very common. They allow the programmer to add additional useful information about how to improve the code or change how to compile / run a particular class. They are a Java extension to allow aspect-oriented programming. We have three types of annotations based on the moment of usage: Information for the Compiler These annotations allow the compiler to indicate whether or not to ignore errors and warnings or what to do with them. If you’ve worked with a Java IDE (like eclipse) probably you would have used this type of annotations. For example, you can use @Override on a function to indicate that you are overwriting a method defined on a parent class. ...

These are the notes I took on the GeoServer workshop at the last gvSIG Conference. Data Directory It is important to change the settings of the geoserver_data_dir in the web.xml file to keep the data each time you restart the application container (like Tomcat). It is also good to check out the other settings as it contains interesting facts such as the type of projections to be used or the size of the cache. There are configurable data on the fly and data not configurable on the fly. ...

This are the notes that I took over gvSIG 2.0 on the latests Jornadas GvSIG. Pre-requisites Java Eclipse Ant (should) Maven (should) gvSIG (this is recursive :)) The main advantage of gvSIG 2.0 is that you can create a new plugin without knowing how does gvSIG work or having to compile it. We already have a gvSIG installation that deploys the binaries to the workspace. But we don’t have to change the source code. Unless, of course, something doesn’t work (bugs) or we have to add some new functionality to the core. Better if you don’t touch it, ask the developers and they will take care. ...

I am proud to share with you the steps to compile gvSIG 2.0, which I discovered thanks to some fellows developers, whom I met thanks to the latests Jornadas GvSIG. Although you can find a full guide on the official documentation, this simple steps will let you customize and compile your own gvSIG2.0 version without much trouble. First, you have to install some basic dependencies: #apt-get install maven2 subversion Next, we create a folder in which we can work: ...