The "Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial" (FOSS4G) 2009, Conference, will be in Sydney Australia.

Currently, the public can vote on presentation submissions at: 2009.foss4g.org/presentations/

While reviewing various abstracts, 10 pages!, and found a few that would be of interest to Indigenous, tribal, First Nations, people considering open source GIS solutions.

Cast your vote for:

Building community information systems with Drupal and OpenLayers (Charles Burnett)

Coastal British Columbia indigenous communities seek solutions to their community information storage, sharing and processing challenges. They are looking for systems that provide basic GIS database, mapping and reporting functionality all in a web-based, open standards, secure, and multi-user environment. They are also keen to have these systems be very intuitive and embedded within their current web infrastructure. And, they would like these systems to serve many functions, from treaty and economic development support to language revitalization. We have developed community information systems (CIS) for several First Nations using Drupal and PostGIS. Key to these systems is the Drupal Open Layers module, which works with the Druapl Geo module to spatialize nodes (GIS features) stored in PostGIS. These nodes, such as archaeological and traditional occupancy/use sites, often have large amounts of attribute data and link to multimedia files. In this presentation we will show some of the current OpenLayers capabilities, including its ties to Drupal Geo (to interface with PostGIS), and its integration with the Drupal Views module which enables the building of unlimited custom maps within the CIS. We will then demonstrate some of the challenges/solutions of creating large multi-user web-mapping sites that house a lot of sensitive multi-media material. And we will discuss some of the benefits of an open standards approach in terms of building links ("referrals interconnectivity" between government and First Nations systems. We will finish with some glimpses into the future for the CIS application of Drupal/PostGIS/OpenLayers technologies, including a demonstration of fusion between our CISs and the Alfresco document management system.

Mapping interviews with open source technologies (Chris McDowall)

Semi-structured and unstructured interviews generate large amounts of information. However, even when a session's audio is transcribed into text, this information can be difficult and time-consuming to search and analyse. This presentation describes a set of techniques for recording, storing and searching geographical aspects of qualitative interviews. This is achieved through a system consisting of an mp3 recorder, a homebrew interactive whiteboard and a custom web application built upon OpenLayers, PostGIS and the Django framework. The system provides an interactive map that remembers where and when participants touched the map during the interview. These annotations are automatically synchronized to the interview's audio file and stored in a database. The database enables people to make maps of places mentioned in particular interviews or to make geographic queries when searching within and across interviews. I demonstrate the system with reference to a New Zealand case study where Maori Kaumatua (tribal elders) were interviewed about the histories of various landscapes.

Yukon Planning Atlas - Building regional capacity for land and resource management (Jeff Hamm)

Production of data products occurs at various stages of regional land use planning processes, most commonly in analog formats of text, maps, tables and photographs. Distribution is often limited an local, due to the high cost of reproduction of color maps and images. By developing workflows that also prepare and manage data for distribution as web map services, a subset of the regional planning database can be published to a broader community. The FOSS4G framework can then be used to lever this data, providing the interoperability necessary for multi-agency resource management. The adoption of Open Source technologies may also help reduce costs for capacity building. The Yukon Planning Atlas is a Mapserver/Chameleon application developed to distribute ecological, cultural and economic data assembled for production of land use plans following settlement of aboriginal land claims. Training in the use of the application is provided to build capacity in knowledge management with First Nation and government land and resource officers. This presentation will review the process for developing an Open Source application, describe the workplan for preparing and publishing WMS data, and demonstrate the use of a FOSS4G application.

The Capacity Building Tools ‘FOSS4G’ (Phisan Santitamnont)

Abstract The FOSS/GRASS 2004 conference that was held in Bangkok Thailand saw the coming together of GRASS and Mapserver communities. The abbreviation ‘FOSS4G’ comes from ‘the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Geoinformatics’ and the term was coined by Venkatesh Raghavan of the Osaka University during his academic sabbatical leave at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. The 2004 FOSS4G conference was very successful and has encouraged Thai to use more FOSS4G since then. Last year 2008 Thailand has just launched two remote sensing satellites namely, Thai Earth Observation Satellite (THEOS) and Small Multi-mission Satellite (SMMS). The dual satellite systems are generating high geometric resolution of 2-meter and high radiometric resolutions of 5 nano-meter for 128 bands and they are complementarity imaging the earth with medium-resolutions of 15 and 30 meter. The government are now developing software for supporting processing of THEOS data using FOSS4G. Initial designed of the FOSS4G support THEOS is based on world-class FOSS GDAL, OGR, OSSIM and Orfeo. Several training courses for capacity building for Thai have been developed and have handed over the hundred of Thais and other neighboring nations as well. FOSS4G is also successfully deployed in many government projects for environmental agricultural and infrastructure administrations. FOSS4G will definitely be the core component of the emerging Geospatially-aware Thai Society. This presentation outlines recent FOSS4G initiatives in Thailand and discuss its relevance for the Southeast Asia region.

And follow the twitter news using the hashtag #FOSS4G2009

Rose