Om mijn kantoor goed op temperatuur te houden in de winter en tegelijkertijd minder energie te verstoken heb ik een aantal aanpassingen gedaan zoals vloer isolatie en CV in plaats van gaskachels. Via Duurzame Buren, twitter (Ecowonen) en direct met mijn buren heb ik advies ingewonnen over effectieve maatregelen. Honderden Duurzame Buren delen hun persoonlijke ervaringen rond duurzaam bouwen en wonen, energiebesparing en -opwekking. Wat werkt, en wat niet?

The day of Christmas Eve seems to be a good day to look back on an in many respects enervating year.

With GeoCat we've been working on some great projects that have helped to advance our dreams and have given a lot of satisfaction. I will mention a few here. What is great about these projects is that they have helped us advance the GeoNetwork opensource project significantly. Considering that one of my main reasons to leave the security of a United Nations job for a less secure private company adventure was that it would help GeoNetwork opensource to develop faster, I feel really proud about my team and about the GeoNetwork core developers!

Interesting GeoCat projects

The Dutch National Georegistry (NGR) has been a project we've worked on since GeoCat started back in 2007. The official launch happened during the GSDI conference in Rotterdam in 2009.

This year we've worked on improving it, updating the National Metadata Profile validation and improving INSPIRE related OGC CSW support among others. We've also worked together with Geonovum and the Dutch Kadaster to ensure the NGR can be moved onto the operational infrastructure of the Kadaster. The Kadaster will be responsible for all operational aspects of the central part of the Dutch SDI.

Support to Scandinavian National SDI's

GeoCat worked hard to support Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Scotland with their catalog implementations. These countries have joined their efforts and resources to take GeoNetwork opensource to a level that meets their national and INSPIRE requirements. Much of the custom development of their catalog implementations is done by the countries themselves, while GeoCat has taken up most of the generic requirements and implemented them in GeoNetwork. The three released versions of GeoNetwork v2.6 include a lot of what has been developed in the context of this project. The project will continue in 2011 and the resulting operational catalogues should appear in due course. Looking very much forward to that!

The Dutch Waterboards - Het Waterschapshuis

In collaboration with Nieuwland consulting GeoCat is working for Het Waterschapshuis to develop a central geo infrastructure (Geo-voorziening). Het Waterschapshuis is the executive agency on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for the 26 regional water authorities (Waterschappen) in The Netherlands, a government body comparable with the Provinces. The Geo-voorziening will be operational early 2011 and will provide country covering data layers related to all water management aspects The Netherlands has to deal with. These layers correspond to data required by the INSPIRE directive. The metadata descriptions of these layers will be catalogued in a central repository that will feed its content into the National GeoRegistry (NGR). The individual Waterschappen will be able to upload the data subsets they are responsible for. These subsets will be aggregated into nationwide OGC WMS (INSPIRE View) services. The GeoCat Bridge extension to ArcMap acts as a Bridge between the Waterschappen and the Geo-voorziening to upload and regularly update data and metadata. It will also allow a Waterschap to upload other (locally interesting) data layers to be served on the infrastructure. The data is loaded into PostGIS and served using GeoServer and GeoNetwork opensource.

GeoCat Bridge

At the FOSS4G2010 conference in Barcelona we launched the first version of GeoCat Bridge. Bridge helps GIS professionals to deploy metadata and map services quickly from their ArcMap (ArcView, ArcEditor & ArcInfo) desktop applications.

Vandaag lees ik de opiniestukken van de Volkskrant over Wikileaks en er blijft slechts één gedachte hangen: Ongelofelijk...

Het lijkt echt bon ton om Assange & Wikileaks af te schilderen als gevaarlijk en niet deugend. Ik vind dat ongelofelijk hypocriet. Hoe graag had eenieder van deze criticasters slechts één van de headlines die Wikileaks veroorzaakt heeft zelf willen brengen?

Waar komt de kritiek vandaan?

Bij mij komt een paralel naar boven met hongersnood:

Als er één kind met een naam en een gezicht op TV komt terwijl het crepeert van de honger of ziekte staat een land op zijn kop.

Als het er 1 miljoen zijn die van de honger creperen kunnen we ons er niks meer bij voorstellen en vallen we als in een reflex terug op een ontkenning van het echte probleem (een miljoen kinderen die creperen). We gaan dan klagen over het corrupte bewind in Afrika en gaan korten op hulp. Kortom, let's shoot the messenger.