INSPIRE Conference 2010 - transformations, SDIs, salt and a cave troll

Phew. What a week it's been.

Last week saw the annual INSPIRE conference, held in the beautiful city of Krakow.

With a delegate attendance of over 600 across the four days, the conference agenda was packed with hands on workshops, packed plenary sessions, seven presentation tracks and a comprehensive exhibition.

As silver sponsors of the event, we spent alot of our time getting to meet the delegates down in the exhibition area (did you know it was a converted car park?!).

And when we weren't doing that, we were either taking the other sessions in, presenting our own findings or hosting workshops and demos.

It was a jam-packed agenda. And if I had to sum up my thoughts, here's what I'd say:

INSPIRE is now on the agenda for organisations across Europe in a very serious way.
Transformation and schema translation were the buzz words of the conference.
INSPIRE forms part of a bigger process in data harmonisation and consistency.
Cross boundary data (across EU/non-EU zones) is an unnecessary challenge.
Open Standards are key for interoperability and future proofing (think OGC and ISO).
Real implementations and examples of deployments of INSPIRE services demonstrate real business and organisational benefits.
Spatial Data and National Spatial Data Infrastructures continue to be top of the agenda for INSPIRE.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is key. Working out the TCO of an open source versus commercial off-the-shelf implementation (or perhaps a combination of the two) is important for implementations.
Eye candy is important for exhibitors (think maps, mash ups, 3D visualisations and Google Earth).
The Wieliczka salt mine is a beautiful tourist attraction well worth a visit, but beware the cave troll guarding the entrance ;)

Did you attend the conference? Have you got any thoughts or take-outs? Let us know in the comments below.

You don't have to miss out

At the conference we unveiled our web feature service (GO Publisher WFS 2.0) product and offered delegates the opportunity to take out a pre-release version, free for 30 days. The great news is that you don't have to miss out.

You can register for your copy of the pre-release version here: http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/campaigns/prerelease.htm

And this is what you can expect:

INSPIRE ready
Off-the-shelf software based on open standards
Works on top of your existing infrastructure - no need for change or costly investments
Easy to use, easy to deploy, point and click user interface
Full support for the OGC WFS 2.0 web feature service standard
On-the-fly-schema translation
Stored queries
Temporal queries
Proven, robust and scaleable

Our CTO, Eddie Curtis also held a workshop and hosted subsequent demonstration sessions on Schema Translations for WFS 2.0. Once again, if you'd like to see a repeat of the popular 20 minute sessions, get in touch with me at melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com as I'm currently arranging some webinars.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Leave us a message in the comments if you're feeling INSPIRE'd, INSPIRational, un-INSPIRE'd etc etc... (Sorry, couldn't resist it.).

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com | www.twitter.com/sflakesoftware