FalconView is a Windows based Mapping/GIS application.  It has been widely used throughout the US Department of Defense and allied countries for over 16 years and has over 55,00 users in over 15 countries.  In 2009, We were asked by the US government if we would consider releasing the software as Free and Open Source Software.  We were intrigued by the idea but were unsure of the obstacles which we would need to overcome in order to move away from our closed source development model.   The problems would be compounded because the software contained components which were controlled by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as well as DoD owned components.

With the help of the Government we were able to receive export approval to release almost all of FalconView as Open Source. Along the way we discovered many benefits and  "discovered" the thriving community of FOSS4G.  We have incorporated several open source libraries including GDAL/OGR, LibKML and PostGIS and have begun re-architecting much of our Data Architecture to embrace OGC standards.

This paper will outline the process we went through to convince our sponsors that an Open Source Model could fit within the DoD's requirements for development and release of software, as well as the steps we took to receiving a Commodity Jurisdiction approval for release of the software.  We will also describe the architectural changes we made to align ourselves with OGC standards and the Open Source libraries which helped us implement the changes.

Spatial data traditionally has been displayed using maps and tables. Maps, though good in showing the spatial extent, are not always optimal in showing (aggregated) geo-statistical data. The human mind can easily be tricked into believing that a bigger country has a bigger share of the pie. Tables show the individual records, but still lack the overview of aggregated data, also tables are notoriously hard to read.

To view the information in an aggregated form one has to build complex queries. These are often slow and do not scale well and the user either has to interpret the resulting map or compare numbers in a table. The first being not very precise the second not very intuitive.

Within EuroGeoSource, a cross European project that allows users to identify, access, use and reuse aggregated geographical information on geo energy and mineral resources, we have come up with a new way. The users are not typical GIS experts and do not have the knowledge to build custom spatial queries. Instead based on the user requirements we have determined the most important types of aggregation (eg. by country, by deposit-type etc).

The user can search for one or more commodities. Using MapQuery and gRaphael, an SVG chart library, we than present the aggregated information in interactive (pie) charts. He can use the charts as a selection method, for instance by clicking on a single country in the 'countries chart' he will see all the occurrences of the commodity in that country on the map.

The result is a fast and intuitive way to search for aggregated data. Providing overview on the distribution of data in multiple domains and still giving access to detailed data in a traditional GIS manner.

GeoServer's RESTConfig service is commonly used to automatically publish geospatial data to GeoServer's OGC services. However, RESTConfig allows reading and writing nearly all aspects of a GeoServer configuration. Participants in this tutorial will learn about the GeoServer configuration system, basic REST requests, and the usage of gsconfig.py, a Python module which allows using the simple but powerful Python scripting language with RESTConfig to automate administrative tasks.