Last week I attended GITA’s 2008 Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference in Seattle, WA. As a whole, I was really happy with the event. I attended a couple of pre-conference knowledge immersion seminars – one titled “Strategies for Enterprisewide Web Services” and one titled “Mobile Technology for the Enterprise”. I then attended the entire conference followed by the Oracle Spatial User Conference the day after the conference. I’m not going to go into great detail about the conference as I’m sure you can find a lot online that’s been covered by other users.
I must say that Oracle has done some impressive things with Oracle 11g and their support for LiDAR data, TIN exports, and overall 3D data storage. Additionally Safe Software has done some really cool things embracing Oracle 11g. At the Oracle Spatial User Conference, Safe demonstrated extracting 3D data from 11g, and transforming the data into a 3D PDF. Once in the PDF environment, you could pan, tilt, zoom, and fly around. It was really cool to be able to do a virtual flyover both around and into a building. You can see the demo on the Safe web site. Just look for the .wmv titled “FME and Oracle Spatial”.
Anyhow…I did have some time to sit down at the Intergraph booth and talk to a few people. I’ll cover some of the things I discussed in upcoming posts.
And finally, on a complete side note. I was really surprised at the size of the booth at the GITA conference. It was really great to see such a large presence at a conference. I’m used to seeing the one small table in the corner. Not this time…. Very cool.