Hot Apps Conference 2008
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008I cruised down to Eugene on Friday for the Hot Apps conference sponsored by Oregon URISA. Anselm Hook was along for the ride. The theme this year was open source GIS and was focused particularly on the web. Paul Ramsay was invited down to do the morning workshop which was essentially a crash course in web GIS. It included the use of free software and free API’s like Google maps.
There was excitement on the faces of some workshop attendees when we showed up at the end of the morning session. Most of them work for local and state government agencies and had never had the opportunity to get their hands on this stuff.
I demoed the Inforain watershed locator and Forestland carbon calculator web tools along with the OpenOceanMap desktop tool based on QGIS. They really liked seeing a web-based GIS being used to do more than just visualization and attribute display. The carbon calculator is destined for greater things. Most were also happy to know that OpenOceanMap has been field tested, being used for interviewing fisherman down in California as part of the process of defining marine protected areas.
