[postgis-users] Help in Defending FOSS SDI

[Peter Baumann]

For what it's worth: I cannot speak about FOSS in general, but for 
raster servers I dare to take position.
Open-source rasdaman repeatedly has been reported to have a performance 
way superior to ArcSDE.
Some more voices (look at the Oracle one!):
“world leading technology." -- Aerovista France (market survey, 2004)
“I am not easy to impress, but this is unique." -- Eng. Hans Jacoby, 
Infrastructure Management, German Railways
“Most favourable tool for Data Mgmnt Services" -- NIMA (USA) Pathfinder 
evaluation 2003; >700 vendors invited
“Impressive software - Oracle will never do anything that elaborate in 
functionality and architecture." -- Jeffrey Xie, Senior Tech. Staff, 
GeoRaster, Oracle USA
"Your performance continues to amaze me." -- David Adler, Senior 
Database Engineer, IBM USA
"most comprehensive implementation" -- Rona Machlin, ACM SIGMOD, 2007

Starting this fall rasdaman will be integrated with GDAL (works 
already), MapServer, PostGIS. Rasdaman can exploit multiple processors 
and can be distributed (free version) and supports transparent tape silo 
access (commercial version). Installations grow by just adding the new 
compute nodes and editing a configuration script. Multi-Petabyte 
scalability is not an issue.

As for FOSS standards support, your folks may want to have a look at 
www.earthlook.org which gives demos of 1-D to 4-D earth science use 
cases, all based on OGC standards.

I myself am leading the raster-relevant working groups within OGC, plus 
editor of currently 9 specification documents. In this capacity I know 
that FOSS is of high importance to OGC and receives high attention 
there. The forthcoming WCS 2.0 standard (adoption vote ends by August 
17) will have open-source rasdaman as its reference implementation. We 
already have done first steps on the way to make sure the specification 
is implementable and scalable. BTW, WCS 2.0 will rely on a unified 
coverage model which allows coverages to float between services relying 
on different OGC standards, such as WPS, WCS, SWE Common, GML.

HTH - best of luck,
Peter



On 08/02/2010 12:31 AM, Ravi wrote:
> Some so called SDI experts feel that FOSS SDI cannot perform at-par with
> Proprietary SDI.
> Please provide examples to fight a case from an Indian state which 
> swears by Free and Open Source Software. We can never expect a better 
> level playing field.
>
> Kerala - India
>
> Here are some excerpts from a document that has false claims 
> supporting Proprietary Software.
>
> However, it is worthwhile to mention here that the OSS (Open Source 
> Software) does not match the advanced functionalities of many of the 
> commercial (proprietory) software that is in the market. Image 
> processing and analysis capabilities of the open source software is 
> not comparable to the commercial software when one require to carry 
> out advanced data manipulations, image fusion, 3D modeling, 
> ortho-correction, auto-georeferencing, stereo-image/air photo 
> interpretation (PROBABLY REFERRING TO GRASS), advanced geospatial 
> analysis etc., In such cases, certain proprietary software become an 
> integral part of the Spatial Data Infrastructures, which can not be 
> avoided. At a later stage the some of the proprietary software need to 
> be purchased.
>
> It is a well known fact that web portal that run with OSS are neither 
> OGC-compliant nor
> interoperable(PostGIS and Webservers to react). At the present 
> juncture it is only possible to establish the KSDI Geoportal
> with the available COTS enterprise software.
>
> The detailed PDF document will be emailed on demand.
>
> This is a case that has the potential to set trends in India. Hope to 
> have a good discussion such that we can sum it up and present at a 
> meeting being conducted on August 11th 2010, to settle the issue.
>
>
> Ravi Kumar
>
>

-- 
Dr. Peter Baumann
  - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
    www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
    mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
    tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
  - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 147737)
    www.rasdaman.com, mail: baumann at rasdaman.com
    tel: 0800-rasdaman, fax: 0800-rasdafax, mobile: +49-173-5837882
"Si forte in alienas manus oberraverit hec peregrina epistola incertis ventis dimissa, sed Deo commendata, precamur ut ei reddatur cui soli destinata, nec preripiat quisquam non sibi parata." (mail disclaimer, AD 10xx)



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