There is a great presentation uploaded to the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009 Blog by John Powell of eMapSite titled, “Spatial SQL: Who Needs a Traditional GIS?” John uses business cases to provide many of us an introduction to OpenGIS spatial data types as implemented in MySQL.
I believe this is a timely presentation because of yesterday’s editorial by the All Points Blog that:
“Open source is in the news again. This past week the US Dept. of Defence announced Forge.mil, an open source project repository akin to SourceForge. Last month President Obama tapped Sun co-founder Scott McNealy to prepare a document on open source and its potential role in government. But what of open source GIS? How is that corner of geospatial being funded and groomed for growth?”
The cost of vendor provided software has become so outrageous that the federal government will soon turn to open source as legitimate way to satisfy the government’s software needs. We have already seen the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) implement Google Earth visualization solutions; solutions which aren’t free, but are only a fraction of the cost of traditional GIS visualization tools. Turning to an open source software provider to provide GIS tools could help the federal government dramatically reduce the cost of implementing spatial technology. I will be watching to see what happens over the next couple of weeks on this front.
Posted by Rick Marshall