Introduction to Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Data Infrastructures and Web Mapping Services

by Christian Braun and Ulirch Leopold - CRP Henri Tudor

Currently there is a growing demand for analysis of geospatial data with the help of geographical informations systems (GIS) in various fields, such as environmental risk analysis and modelling, analysis of marketing, strategies, remote sensing, urban planning, car navigation or internet mapping (e.g. google maps). As the demand for geospatial data in public, business and research sectors is growing new concepts have to be developed to serve and distribute data to users or even customers.
The Ressource Centre for Environmental Technologies (CRTE) at the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor is currently implementing geospatial data infrastructures (GDI) to integrate research results from different research projects in the environmental sciences and make them accessible to their staff and to the public. The core system is based on free and open source geo-spatial software which provides geospatial-temporal information to engineering offices, stakeholders and decision makers on a national scale in Luxembourg. Environmental data can be stored, queried, processed as well as visualised using databases, geo-spatial data libraries, web mapping services and various geographic information systems depending on knowledge of the user. Due to open standards, additional open source software such as the powerful R programming environment, can be integrated with this geospatial data infrastructure to build automated tools for environmental prediction and data analysis.
Since the amount and demand of geospatial information is growing a meta database has been developed to store and provide important additional information, such as contact, methodologies and uncertainties on each data set. This meta database is linked to the spatial data infrastructure to retrieve automatically relevant database information on each data set.
After a general introduction to open source GIS and the presentation of the developed GDI system there will be a live demonstration to show the audience the possibilities of such an integrated system and also underlines the demand of such an infrastructure with growing information processing.

About the speakers

Christian Braun studied Applied Physical Geography in Trier, Germany with a strong background in GIS in environmental sciences. He is responisible to build up a spatial data infrastructure and GIS-related topics in general at Ressource Centre for Environmental Technologies (CRTE) at the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor. He is working at CRTE since 10/2006.
Ulrich Leopold studied Applied Physical Geography in Trier, D. Afterwards he started a PhD thesis in Amsterdam, NL, with an emphasis in environmental modelling and error propagation. He is working at CRTE since 08/2005.

Why implementing an open source ERP ?

by Pierre Spilleboudt - Audaxis

The goal of the conference is to explain the real benefits of open source ERP and give an outline of what an open source ERP looks like. Based on his 5 years experience in open source business applications, the speaker will detail why and how a company should evaluate open source ERP. The presentation will be illustrated with some customer testimonials and a live demo of Compiere, n°1 open source ERP worldwide. Compiere enables financial, distribution, sales and manufacturing processes automation with the advantage of flexibility and interoperabality. Customer testimonials will illustrated that open source ERP can fit any size of business.

About the speaker

50 Years old Pierre Spilleboudt is an engineer graduate from ULB (polytech). He started at Electrabel as project manager and then held the position of IT manager for a multisites operating manufacturer specialized in information technology for the Industry.
He then founded in 1990 his own company on ERP services which grew up to 500 people across Europe. After he sold his Company to an American corporation, he joined Audaxis a start up in open source applications services where he is in charge of business development and strategy. He can be defined as a visionnaire who figures out how new technologies should challenge the way organizations drive their daily business.

Managing automated, profile based server installations with LinuxCOE and openQRM

by Matthias Rechenburg - openQRM Project

Still hassling with manually installing custom servers per request ?
With the combination of openQRM and LinuxCOE system-administrators now can take their advantages of a complete solution providing automated- and profile-based server installations integrated within a "single-management console" for the whole data-center.
When it comes to automated server installations the goal is to avoid the need of one or more "loosely connected" tools per linux-distribution but preferring one tool supporting all current mainstream linux distributions tightly integrated within a flexibly and robust management interface for the IT infra-structure. This is achieved by the cooperation of LinuxCOE and openQRM.
After an unattended installation according to a previously configured LinuxCOE installation-profile openQRM supports to dynamically leverage the installed system to custom needs using the Puppet plugin which provides automated configuration-management. Another, well integrated option is to let system-users administrate their ready-installed servers on their own via the openQRM Webmin plugin.
In openQRM the automated installations featured by the LinuxCOE plugin are also the first step to bring the data-center to the next level of flexibility and maintainability by creating server-images from the installed systems and automatically deploy them seamlessly either on physical systems or virtual machines using one of the several different deployment methods supported by openQRM.
This presentation shows how to turn to a dynamic, flexible, scalable and fully automated data-center infra-structure. It gives an overview about management of automated- and profile-based installations and points out details about the integration of LinuxCOE within openQRM.
Related Urls :
LinuxCOE Home page : http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/
LinuxCOE demo-site : http://www.instalinux.com/
openQRM Home page : http://www.openqrm.org/
openQRM Project page : http://sourceforge.net/projects/openqrm

About the speaker

Matthias Rechenburg is project manager of the openQRM project. Since many years he is involved in all kinds of data-center related open-source projects like high-performance and high-availability clustering, consolidation, network and enterprise storage management. Currently, his most serious interests are about the virtualization technologies, their features, capabilities and integration by a unified virtualization layer. He lives in Bonn, Germany, and is working as a freelancer developing for Qlusters. Mostly, he enjoys to code in his home-lab, but also likes travelling, meeting other Linux-people and joining all kinds of Linux-related events and congresses.

Hardening Unix-Systems with Systrace

by Stefan Schumacher

This Lecture will introduce Systrace. Systrace is a mechanism developed by Niels Provos to monitor and restrict system calls.
It has been implementend for NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux and MacOS X and allows system administrators to create very fine grained security policies.
Systrace allows one to "firewall" system calls.
It can monitor programs and alert the user if a probably malicious system call is about to be issued.
Additionally, it can be used to let SUID root programms run under a non privileged account. Systrace can grant root permissions only to single system calls and therefor tighten possible security holes extremely.
A German language article about Systrace has been published in Chaos Computer Club's "Datenschleuder" #91 starting at page 40.
A PDF is available at http://ds.ccc.de/pdfs/ds091.pdf

About the speaker
Stefan Schumacher is involved in the NetBSD and PostgreSQL projects. He works as a freelance IT security consultant (www.kaishakunin.com) and is into cryptography, IT security, security management and networks.
He studies educational science and psychology at Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg/Germany and works there as a database developer and network admin in a linguistic research group.
He works with NetBSD since 2001 and administers several NetBSD production servers.

Prerequisites

Deeper knowledge of Unix internals (kernel, system calls, kernel tracing) is required. This is not an all beginners introduction.

My digital photos love Linux

by Andreas Jahnen - CRP Henri Tudor

In digital photography the classical photo album is not of much use. This session will show the potential of different open source projects to manage, improve and edit digital photos. Besides common needed photo improvements (crop, sharpen, color manipulations, perspective corrections, ...) the topics stitching and high dynamic range imaging (HDR) are discussed. For the different applications, samples are shown to demonstrate the power of the tools, but also the limitations are discussed. The following programs will be presented: photo management with Digikam, image manipulations with the Gimp, photo stitching with Hugin and HDR editing with Qtpfsgui.

Download presentation support (8,2 MByte)

About the speaker
Andreas Jahnen has studied computer science at the Fachhochschule Trier until 1999 and got is MSc in Science in 2005. Since 1999 he is working as a research engineer at the Centre de Recherche Henri Tudor. His main research interests are in the moment medical image processing, especially image quality quantification. He is as well member of the Steering Committee of the FREE AND OPEN SOURCE INNOVATION PLATFORM.

MySQL High Availability

by Kris Buytaert

MySQL databases are becoming more critical every day. So what are the alternatives to make sure your MySQL data stays secure.
This session will introduce you to the different methods of making MySQL High Available as well as the pitfalls in those methods.
We'll have a strong focus on configuring, deploying and managing MySQL Cluster, and how to integrate it with your environment so that not only the data stays available but also your MySQL Daemon.
However MySQL Cluster isn't a one size fits all solution so we'll need to look at other alternatives also.

About the speaker
Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium , Europe ant the rest of the universe. He is currently working for Inuits, and starting up some new projects still in stealth mode. Kris is the Co-Author of Virtualization with Xen , maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and author of different technical publications. He is a frequent speaker at different international conferences.
He spends most of his time working on Linux Clustering (both HA and HPC), Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test
Kris Blogs at http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/

OpenMoko

by Ole Tanga

OpenMoko is the GNU/Linux distribution that runs on the free phone Neo1973 from FIC. It is completely Free Software. Being able to completely control a cell phone gives new posibillities that people only dreamed of. Have you ever had a mobile phone where you have been annoyed by some of the functionality and thought: "If only I had the source code I could have fixed this annoying thing"? Then you are not alone. The phone Neo1973 from FIC runs a completely free operating system. Because it is free it is possible try out completely new ideas - even ideas that the phone companies make no money from. The presentation will be about the possibilities and how you can take part in this revolution.

About the speaker
Ole Tange has worked as Hostmaster for .dk, as a security consultant, as network admin, as site reliablility engineer, and is now working as developer. He has worked with UNIX since 1991, GNU/Linux since 1992, and in 1996 he deleted his Microsoft Windows partition. He has done lots of presentations on security, Free Software, and IT political issues (such as software patents) - both for the general public and to polticians. He is best know as the person behind Parallel, the patented webshop and wordprocessor and Remindmail He sees a completely Free phone as the most disrupting that has happened since the introduction of GNU/Linux.

OpenSolaris - what it is and why you should care

by Thomas 'Mike' Michlmayr

Sun has opensourced Solaris 2 years ago. The talk will give an introduction to the community, the software and the latest developments around OpenSolaris.

About the speaker
Thomas 'Mike' Michlmayr is a UNIX System Architect working for the Data Centre of a large institution in Luxembourg. In his spare time he's tracking the progress of free and open-source UNIX software.

Getting one million to know Linux: why it matters and how we do it

by Olivier Cleynen

The objective of the GNU/Linux Matters non-profit organization in 2008 is to get one million Windows users to know Linux and understand the notion of free software.
In this talk, Olivier will try to show the relevance of down-to-earth communication, basic marketing, and wide-scale international Internet presence, for free software and GNU/Linux in particular. The conference will relate the experience and growth of the GNU/Linux Matters projects and community. It should also give any free software developer insights about how market planning and business-thinking can help make more successful end-user software.

About the speaker
Olivier Cleynen is originally from the aerospace engineering and product design sector. He is passionate about advocacy for free software and co-founded GNU/Linux Matters, the non-profit behind GetGNULinux.org. An enthusiastic participant in the community, he also enjoys walking, windsurfing, photography, and riding old bicycles very fast in traffic.

Prerequisites
In order to feel comfortable in this conference, participants should bring along a basic understanding of the notion of free software, of the organization of the community behind it, and perhaps a mug of coffee.

Free Software Events in Europe

by Sven Guckes

There are quite a few events on Free+Open Source Software in Europe by now. So many in fact, that you have to make a decision on which to attend. But what can you expect of those events? How many people will attend? What exactly happens on those events? What is the main focus there? And how does the place look like anyway? I will give some example of Germany and Austria, and a few of BeNeLux and France. I would like to encourage you to take a look at those events and participate - as an organizer, lecturer, helper at a booth - or simply as an auditor.
Please come and exchange your ideas with the maintainers of the projects!
Maybe some of the projects will find a translator for the documentation or a contact person in another country.
Optional info:
hacker spacers, campaigns+groups, and some tips for your own event.

About the speaker
Sven Guckes: maths & cs, freelancer, lives in Berlin.
Sven is an advocate of Free Software who has
given several talks in AT,DE (BE+NL, too).
specializes in texttools and text interfaces.
see also: http://www.guckes.net/sven/