OpenGeo and the Geospatial Web –Chris Holmes

In the beginning (The Open Planning Project)

The first project

Towards OpenGeo From a side project of TOPP To sustaining contract work And the push to grow Grow!

Building a stack

The Client OpenLayers

The Cache

The Database

The Rich Client

The OpenGeo Suite

Funding

OpenGeo.org

Enterprise Towards a Product

Building the Open Geospatial Web Making Geospatial Information Open and Accessible By bringing Open Source Principles to Geo Working by building OS software that gets used by all In the context of a hybrid organization

OpenGe o Enterprise The full solution

Examples

Next directions for OpenGeo Suite User collaboration Editing and Maintaining Data Sharing Data (bottom up SDI) Continue standards focus GIS apps through the web Massive scalability Multi Modal Routing

User Collaboration: Data Compatibility with GIS tools Advanced workflow management Sandboxes, approval before acceptance Automatic validation (topology, required fields) Branches and merging with Conflict Resolution Automatic change notification / rss Automatic feature extraction: GPS tracks and Satellite images Support a number of communities, for flexible sets of plugins that can be configured for all kinds of workflows Emergency Roads vs Butterfly Parks

User Collaboration: Sharing Data Give all users a mapping homepage Compose layers, change styles, create styles, add annotations to their 'map' on the homepage Advanced users upload shapefiles, geotiffs Export to webpage, blog, Google Earth Let other users in to edit (with versioning etc) Rate, tag and comment on others' maps, styles, data, edits Lots of statistics, pages of most popular, and personal statistics

Standards Focus We love standards OGC, REST, INSPIRE, ESRI, Google WMS 1.3 and WFS 1.2 Atompub for Feature Editing / versioning WMS Tiling spec Catalog Integration More GeoSearch and Streaming KML

GIS-based applications Create tools to let developers make rich GUI desktop-like applications that leverage GIS operations But designed for their users who may not know ‘GIS’ Many users get trained on GIS and then use the same 5 operations GeoExt plus Web Processing Service plus local storage (gears or GeoServer) Wizard map app creation and granular developer focused components

Multi Modal Trip Planning Contract from Portland Improve ‘Five Points’ open source project developed from Atlanta Make it work with more data formats Improve codebase and scalability/reliability Build open source community and commercial clients around it.

Scalability Already serving IGN France’s full infrastructure: 50 servers with on average 30,000 unique visitors a day No license fees makes things friendly for the cloud Burst tile creation - EC2 or other to process tiles in hours, not weeks Enterprise monitoring and reporting tools Clustering and fail over best practices and advice

Towards the ‘dot-org’ Full Cost Recovery for OpenGeo Spin off like Mozilla Corporation Reinvest profit in similar ‘dot-orgs’ –Make Capital viral like the GPL Require complete transparency Business built on Open Source principles

Open Source background Basis is licensing All successful Open Source is because of community An asynchronous cooperative of code Organizations that want the same thing can pool their resources Cost is not 0, OS can be sold. Real value comes when companies form mutually beneficial relationships with communities

Software Business before Open Source Proprietary Software sold boxes of ‘software’ Customer thought they were just buying the code, but there is far more to software: Manuals, Support Bug fixes, new features Training, integration, custom solutions Software companies made huge profit margins

Software Business after Open Source High quality code is now free A new class of Open Source companies has emerged There is a market for everything around the code Support, manuals, training, integration, additional development, services Profit margins on code are lower and lower Smart companies move up the value chain

Open Source Business Models Collaborate on the pieces that everyone is needs (and might build themselves) Sell the ‘whole package’, your special sauce with all the open parts Can be hosted services, integration with others, special plugins, trainings, support, feature development Some will just use code directly (and may contribute back). Others want a ‘solution’, and will pay to not worry

Opening of Geospatial Data Everyone now sees the value of geospatial data Navtec, Teleatlas sales, Google maps But ability to sell base layer data is decreasing Google is practically giving it away OpenStreetMap is a pressure like Open Source Software Segmenting of market - many don’t need high accuracy for their base.

Moving up the value chain Towards services Ordnance Survey ‘special sauce’ is the data Can get in to the services game before data is more open While experimenting with crowd sourcing so your data acquisition cost is lower There is still lots of space for innovative services

Business models in an Open World Custom Tiles Hosting of Layers Collaborative editing ‘Authoritative’ layers Bundled Software and data package Subscriptions to updates GIS-based applications

Custom Tiles Let anyone customize base layers Use an online styler They can match the look and feel of their website Google can’t offer this, always looks the same Use EC2 or other burst hosting so they can pay to create tiles quickly

Collaborative editing Let anyone crowdsource their data Pay for advance workflows on hosted version A sort of ‘sourceforge’ for the geo web in france Free for people who release their data Charge for those who make it private Eventually a marketplace for private ones to sell to one another.

Hosting of Layers Free for everyone to add some points or upload a small shapefile Costs money for large information Charge for secure access, when they want hosted data not open to the world All available with online styling, with exporting maps All exports have your logo and link back, unless people pay to have it be ‘theirs’

Authoritative and Subscriptions IGN provides the stamp that ‘this is accurate’ People want that so they can sue someone if it goes wrong Free users can use a six month old dataset Perhaps they can get new one if they help improve it, submit edits Various services to get updates when they are marked official

Bundling Software Combined software and data package Built on Open Source Software, packaged nice for your data Let anyone get set up quickly (can partner with OpenGeo Enterprise packages)

GIS-based applications Area that Google etc won’t touch directly Create tools to let developers make rich GUI desktop-like applications that leverage GIS operations But designed for their users who may not know ‘GIS’ This is direction of GeoExt Could do a hosted developer toolkit for apps based on IGN data Wizard map app creation and developer focused components

Business Model warning Be sure to not optimize for money making too early If you have people pay for a service that is not that great they won’t come back Get them hooked on a great service, spend time figuring out what that is. Then start charging, after they’ve committed.

Towards user collaboration on OS Portal ‘Export’ - after composing a view let a user embed in a webpage or blog Be sure to show logo and ‘created with OS, make your own map!’ Track stats on layers and exported maps, show page of most popular Have search results of catalog based on those stats, and prioritize catalog results with layers you can add Rating, tags and comments on ‘maps’ that people create Let people remix other maps