Locate16 Trip Report
This is a guest post by Daniel Honaker about AGI’s attendance at Locate16. - Sarah
What a difference a year makes! Locate15 was held last year in Brisbane, Australia, and it was the first time that AGI attended as an exhibitor. The Locate conference is the national conference of the spatial and surveying industries of Australia and New Zealand. We thought Cesium would be well received as a technology for improving the way people consume geospatial products, and we were right: we had a good amount of curiosity and some great discussions. However, aside from our friends at NICTA and QUT, there were not many people who had heard of Cesium and far fewer who knew AGI was the parent company.
Last week Locate16 was held in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s amazing how things have changed. Seemingly everyone who stopped by our booth had at least heard of Cesium. And we were thrilled to see that many of our fellow exhibitors were using Cesium in their applications! From our conversations it seems that our commitment to open standards and open formats was a huge reason for the uptick in adoption.
We also found that a large number of users discovered Cesium through the National Map project, which is built on the Cesium platform. The Australia government’s Department of Communications has championed an open data agenda since the 2013 elections, striving to make public sector data more accessible. This has resulted in a 13-fold increase in the number of datasets available on the data.gov.au website. Cesium is a perfect tool for visualizing and analyzing these datasets, which has led to an increased awareness of Cesium throughout the Australian government and in the private GIS sector.
Another great Cesium success story in Australia is Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube Globe. The Cube Globe is an impressive two-story high interactive display, allowing visitors to explore various layers of Queensland geospatial and economic data. It was featured in the G20 summit in late 2014 and was a huge hit among the delegates. It was exciting for us to see how many attendees had heard of The Cube, and we’re happy that Cesium could play some small role in its success.
The Locate Conference is committed to collaboration within the spatial and surveying industries. As part of that commitment, the first day of the conference was open to the public so that end users, educators, and students could check out the latest technologies. Our booth was an especially popular destination for students, for whom open-source projects are incredibly valuable and increasingly prevalent in the classroom. Cesium’s inclusion in the OSGeo-Live platform was mentioned by a number of the students and educators we spoke with. We’re happy to know that future generations of GIS professionals are learning the Cesium platform and we wish them the greatest success!
It was a great week in Melbourne and a great show put on by the Locate staff. We’re so grateful to all the attendees who stopped by to share their interests and learn a bit more about the Cesium project. We definitely look forward to seeing you all again next year!