FOSS4G North America Conference 2013 Preliminary Program

GeoJSON is Spectacularly Wrong
Sean Gillies, New York University
GeoJSON is not just wrong, it is spectacularly, 45­helium­weather­balloons­and­a­lawn­chair
wrong. It invites coordinate order confusion. There is no language for defining schemata. It
doesn't conform to ISO 191**. It is not even a real standard! And yet somehow people seem to
find it good enough for everyday use, applying it to solve real problems without suffering major
catastrophes. How can this be? How can something so wrong feel so right to developers?
GeoJSON is a success because it has low technical and social barriers to entry and because it
is incomplete and imperfect. I will discuss these properties and their happy consequences along
with the overall strengths and weaknesses of the format, and offer some new patterns for using
the format.
Geospatial with MongoDB ­ What is it good for?
Cameron Goodale, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
With all of the hype surrounding the scalable document store called MongoDB I would like to
present how my team used MongoDB for a simple single page web­app using Leaflet and
HighCharts.js to help scientists visualize carbon dioxide from both remote sensing satellites and
ground based stations. We are now looking to move into a more traditional open source GIS
stack with PostGIS and GeoServer. My goal is to have the new GIS stack up and running in time
for this talk.
­ Project Overview ­ Demonstrate the motivation for the web app, and also dig into why we
decided to use Mongo instead of PostGIS to start. (we needed json for the app, and mongo is
schema­less, plus we had no idea what our input data would be from one month to the next, and
the web scale hype surrounding MongoDB).
­ MongoDB is NoSQL ­ People tend to forget that these NoSQL technologies are not direct
replacements of RDBMSs. In this section I will reflect on some of the gotcha's people should be
aware of when using Mongo (lazy inserts, eventually consistent data, fire and forget paradigm)
and some of the steps
­ Why are we now moving toward PostGIS and GeoServer ­ Spoiler Alert: Users are asking for
more features like WMS/WFS now. They like the web­app just fine, it is a quick look tool to show
patterns in the data. Now users want to consume the data in their own desktop clients and
perform much deeper analysis.
­ Recap our Experience ­ Mention what MongoDB is good for and maybe help others understand
when MongoDB makes sense and when it's time to use a more traditional GIS stack.