Gearing up for GIS in the Rockies

I finally got around to finishing my travel plans for GIS in the Rockies (personal obligations prevent me from making it out for Ingite Spatial NoCo). I booked my flight a while ago but I had been procrastinating on the hotel and rental car. This will be my first time in that part of Colorado so I am looking forward to seeing the area and meeting people out there. NoCo is second only to the DC area in clustering of folks in my Twitter crowd.

I’ll be giving a small talk at the conference about zigGIS. It’ll be part history lesson and part look-ahead and I’ll try to address some use cases. In conversation, I find that people tend to see an “either/or” choice between zigGIS and using ArcSDE with PostgreSQL. In truth, they can peacefully coexist and, depending on how ArcSDE is configured to work with PostgreSQL and PostGIS, zigGIS can augment workflows nicely. So I’ll touch on that but I’ll also explore how it can provide some flexibility in a maturing GIS shop.

Of course, I’ll also talk about zigGIS returning to open-source at version 3.0. Abe is shouldering the burden for that and there’s a lot to do, starting with choosing a license. We had some discussions about it and I think he’s leaning toward the Apache license but we’d be happy for thoughts/inputs from others who’ve been down this road. Version 3.0 will be a major re-work of the code to address some of the changes that Abe blogged about. It could be a while before something testable exists but it’s an overhaul that’s been needed.

All-in-all, I’m looking forward to the trip and the conference. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.