We attended the NCGIS 2011 and as mentioned gave two talks. The slides are available on our PostGIS book site. It was the most enjoyable conference we've attended so far and a surprising number of attendants (850 people). We met lots of people we only knew via newsgroups, blogs, or reputation -- e.g. Doug Newcomb, Tobin Bradley, Eddie Pickle (OpenGeo), Robert Cheetham from Azavea. There were lots of interesting talks like the 3D talk we were in and another we sat in on cloud computing.
One thing that really stroke me was how deeply PostGIS had penetrated into government. I guess I don't get out enough. In one of the talks we were in -- the basic message was We chose PostGIS, not because it was cheaper, but because it was better. and this statement was made after having failed getting ArcSDE to perform to the level required by end-users. That seems to be a new milestone that open source has achieved that it's no longer just competing on price, but it can outperform on performance and functionality as well. I think for us we originally chose PostGIS because it was all we could afford, but even when we could afford the others, we settled on PostGIS, because it was just better even when comparing on features, performance, ease of maintainability, cross platform. Price is just icing on the cake.
This whole conferencing thing is still new to us so we apologize if we seemed a little anti-social. Sadly we could only spend a day since we had to get back to business and Leo being the workaholic and general worry wart he is was clasping on to his cell phone. I'm disappointed we missed seeing Bill Dollins, I guess we missed each other by a day.
One thing I do regret is not bringing demos of our new Arrival 3D platform
which is a new project we are working on with some partners. It's really quite impressive what we have so far -- built on X3D, PostgreSQL 9.0/PostGIS 2.0 technology. I'm really excited about the X3D functionality coming in HTML5. I've started to play with it a little and we are working on getting our platform to be compatible with it so we won't be so dependent on 3rd party viewers. The PostGIS 2.0 pieces aren't cemented in yet since well PostGIS 2.0 is not out yet. I hope to have some demos of these once we revamp the site a bit. In the 3D session we were in, one person had demos of Unity gaming applied to GIS. I didn't think we were allowed to have demos.
The book
I know it's not done yet. At this point we are mostly waiting for the final proof. I won't say anything any more about when I expect it. As one friend said "Babies have shorter gestation periods".