Hello all, I'm new to the list, so I don't know if you discuss here general GIS news like this one. If not, please forgive me and I will not make it again :)
News reach me that the EUROSTAT, the central statistical agency of the European Union, has granted a contract for building the web portal of Inspire, the main European Commission geomatics and geographical data initiative, aimed at the setting of all kind of standards european-wide, to Terra GmbH, a business linked to ESRI Geoinformatik GmbH, ESRI dealer for Germany. The link: http://www.esri.com/news/releases/09_1qtr/european_commission.html Don't get me wrong: I'm not an anti-ESRI zealot, being forced myself to deal, or even interoperate (ouch!), with ESRI technology in many projects. But I'm a convinced europeist (maybe too romantic or idealist!), and Inspire is doing a lot of good in providing those standards to all the involved governments to enhance interoperativity and such. So imagine how disappointed I am. I though the people at EUROSTAT should promote OS as a basic government goal, and that they will be courageous enough to do the proper thing when facing technologies choices. Too many times I have a hard time trying to defend OSGeo technologies against governmental agents that still seems OS as unreliable for many tasks. Imagine my additional difficulties from now on when they heard about this! It's a very bad example for many people that already where confronting OS deployments at governmental level. (Not all is that bad, obviously, here, in Andalusia, south Spain, is a very active and committed team in the government promoting and deploying OS solutions, but in the geomatics Desktop and even SDI scene there is still too much resistance). By the way, is there any document or site, aside from the ones in Refractions, committed to explain case studies in the deployment of PostGIS and other OS solutions? Thanks for your attention, Juan Pedro Pérez Alcántara _______________________________________________ postgis-users mailing list [email protected] http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
