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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

Today, most of the UK and Northern Europe woke up to the news that an Icelandic Volcano had errupted causing a plume of volcanic ash to rise to 55,000ft high: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8621407.stm.

Timely, decisive airspace information.

Whilst it won't affect air qualty on the ground, at that height, it can affect aircraft engines. Nats ( the UK Air Traffic Control Service) and Eurocontrol (the European air safety body) have worked to close down UK airspace causing many flghts to be delayed or cancelled for much of the day. The Met Office are serving specific weather updates to help with predictions on how the weather systems will carry the smoke plumes and which areas might be affected.

Here at Snowflake, we're pretty excited about this.

We're currently involved in the development of the next generation of air traffic control systems through the OGC's OWS-7 testbed where our GO Publisher product is being used to send notifications about flight path obstructions including volcanic ash plumes and extreme weather. GO Publisher serves data to allow air traffic controllers, airlines and pilots to make rapid and well informed decisions about diversions and alternative flight plans.

Aviation Conference

What's more, we'll be unveiling the findings at an international Aviation Conference - The AIXM/WXXM event in Washington on 4-6 May - http://www.aixm.aero/public/standard_page/2010_05_aixm_met.html.

 Come and see us at the exhibition.

Aviation expertise

We've been working in the Aviation industry to provide specific solutions for many data exchange and interoperability challenges. Read more about it on our Aviation webpages: http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/markets/aviation/index.htm

Take a look and get yours today

• Read more about the work we did on the OGC OWS-6 Testbed: http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/markets/aviation/solution.htm
• Find out about our work in the Aviation arena: http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/markets/aviation/index.htm
• Trial and download the core engine behind the sucess - GO Publisher: http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/products/gopublisher/eval.htm
• Keep up to date with the Twitter #ashtag

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | www.twitter.com/sflakesoftware

With the arrival of OS Open Data I thought I'd dust off my old skool data skills in an attempt to create the first derived dataset from OS Open Data. Using our GO Publisher product I mashed OS Code-Point Open with the WOEIDs of Yahoo! GeoPlanet Data and created a derived product in KML , here's the detail ...

1) First things first, make sure that historic open data licence is covered in the header ...

2) Convert to KML (something a little more internet friendly than the default CSV)

3) Sort out the spacing on the Code-Point Open Post Code making it single spaced. 

4) Convert the coordinate system to WGS84. Note: Where the Positional Quality value of 90 (geometry unknown - usually 0.0, 0.0) there is NO Point geometry. You'll notice that the Post Code value is in the kml:address tag and so if you display in Google Earth it will geocode any missing geometry on the fly for you.

5) Put all the Code-Point Open properties in the kml:ExtendedData tag

6) Process the Post Code to create a new Out Code property also in kml:ExtendedData

7) The cool bit ... Cross reference the post code to Yahoo! GeoPlanet Place postcode, attaching woeid and parentWoeid to the original OS Code-Point Open data.

All credit goes out to our GO Publisher Community Edition product which let me do all of this so quickly. Here's some screenshots and there's some sample data for comment at the end of the post.

You can access the first cut sample data here:

http://www.snowflakesoftware.com/webservices/opendata/cpoww-sample1.kmz

Just click on the link and it should open up in Google Earth, if not open Google Earth first then click on the link.

I'll put this sample out for comment, if people are happy with it I'll create a national set for you all.

Enjoy

Ian

Yesterday, Geonovum released their final report on “Harmonisation of StUF and NEN3610”, a report set up to test the viability of a new schema produced by Geonovum.

The full report (in dutch) can be found here:http://www.geonovum.nl/sites/default/files/standaarden/20100115_Rapportage_harmonisatie_StUF_en_NEN3610_versie_1_0_definitief.pdf

And here's just a small selection of what you can expect from Snowflake in the New Year:

• Our Brand New : INSPIRE training course - starting January 12, 2010
• Celebrating the 10 year sucess of EDiNA's Digimap service using GO Publisher WFS
• Visit us at DGI 2010: 25 - 27 January, QEII Centre, London - see us in the exhibition at stand 48
• Look forward to new product releases for GO Publisher & GO Loader

Not forgetting the highlights from 2009:

• Attending the successful GSDI conference in Rotterdam
• Our very own Ian Painter, MD, getting 'ranty' at the AGI Annual Conference
• Resigning our multi year agreement with our German partner, grit.
• Launching our brand new, free, GO Publisher Community Edition.
• Launching our Community Forum - Have you had your say yet?

We're looking forward to more of the same, and even better in 2010.

Happy Holidays.

Melissa Burns | Marketing Manager | melissa.burns@snowflakesowftare.com