A City of Cornwall employee has been recognized for his efforts in creating a unique on-line mapping site for the City.
GIS Applications Specialist Denis Lalonde of the City of Cornwall (Ontario, CA) received the gold medal prize in the Best Web GIS category of the Best Geographic Information System Challenge Awards from the Ontario URISA chapter.. The awards are organized by the Ontario chapter of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA).The app is built on MapGuide Open Source [link and "open source" added 5/29] and includes city businesses, transit routes and times, property lines, addresses, subdivision plans, zoning, municipal utilities, points of interest, historical air photos.
Open-source development, because of its collaborative nature, moves faster. One dude writes it, another improves upon it. ESRI, a vendor of proprietary geographic information systems, and Microsoft, our database vendor, don't offer some of the advanced features my staff has created for a location-based business app using open-source tools PostgreSQL and PostGIS.
Because of the speed of innovation and advanced features of open-source products, we were able to create an app with a far faster end user response time than if we had relied on the two proprietary vendors. I'll take the agility any day, even though the skeptics have warned me of the dire consequences of using an open-source database.
- Jonathan Feldman, contributing editor for InformationWeek and director of IT services for a rapidly growing city in North Carolina writing in a commentary titled Open Source: Why Are You Still Waiting? at InformationWeek.
Although some of the proprietary vendors such as ESRI were demonstrating at the [FOSS4GNA] conference, it's unclear what unique capabilities they can continue to provide given all the open source choices.
- From a recap of FOSS4GNA by Jim Collinsworth (published May 22 - not sure why) on the BreakThrough Technologies blog
