Cheers to 2024
2024 was a power packed year with much progress on many fronts, work and personal. Here’s the annual rundown:
Sol Katz Award: without a doubt, being chosen as the recipient of the 2024 Sol Katz Award has been a major and defining milestone of my worklife. Presented at FOSS4G Belém, it is an honour and a privilege to be selected for this award, in honour of Sol Katz, a true pioneer in our domain and community. I am also honoured to be among many leaders and legends who have previously won this award. I will always remember this moment and am truly thankful.
Having been involved in OSGeo from its humble beginnings, I love the community, geospatial and open source. It has been a privilege to watch it grow and to help in that growth. Let’s keep moving forward, together to advance our community, free and open source geospatial software, and to lower the barrier for everyone. Thank you!
WMO: WIS2 standards approved! The Guide to WIS2, Manual on WIS2 and as well as Transition Guide were all approved and headed to publication. The pre-operational phase helped ensure we are ready for operations (on 01 January 2025) with a solid team effort on Global Services Testing. Last but not least, mad progress on the various WIS2 Reference Implementations (3 wis2box releases, 2 wis2-gdc production deployments, and a shiny new Global Replay service and WIS2 Global Broker). Thanks to numerous dedicated experts, this year was all about standards, schemas, codelists, source code and containerization 🙂
OGC: OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval – Part 2: Publish-Subscribe Workflow was approved. As well, OGC API – Records recently reached completion (1.0.0) and will be going for final approval in the coming days/weeks. Finally the geospatial metadata story comes with a formal OGC API. I was also fortunate to help deliver the OGC API workshop as part of the GISE Hub Winter School on OGC Stack (which included delivery of the Diving into pygeoapi workshop as well).
OSGeo: We had another successful joint sprint with OGC in February. The annual FOSS4G global event in Belém was fantastic, and I was happy to provide two workshops, numerous presentations and a keynote, which were also given at FOSS4G Europe (workshops, presentations). I am thankful for being re-elected to serve on OSGeo’s Board of Directors and was happy to help move forward the OSGeo / OGC collaboration piece in 2024.
pygeoapi: the OGC API Reference Implementation continued to chug along (new providers, refactoring for the long term and solidifying API compliance), with our first ever code sprint and 3 power packed releases (and one bugfix release). Monthly community meetings resumed and the codebase continued to solidify, backing numerous high profile applications.
pycsw: running closely along OGC API – Records development and STAC API implementation, we migrated to YAML based configuration, added ISO 19115 Part 3 XML support, STAC collection level querying and transactions.
MSC GeoMet: the national weather/water/climate API platform continues to grow. In addition to new datasets, we have embarked on containerization for the platform (OpenShift), as well as development on data cubes for numerical weather prediction data (i.e. EDR and Zarr).
On the personal side, worth noting:
- another year (circa 2012) of not smoking (yes I continue to remind myself). Hoping (again) to get in better shape in 2025
- construction time again: our major home renovation (and temporary displacement 🙂 ) finally started in the fall
On deck for 2025 (should really be called “the year for major software release candidates”):
- WMO: sustainable improvements and amendments for WIS2 are expected as we roll into operation. In addition, stay tuned for developments on WIS2 and APIs (big data / discrete sampling, bringing the user to the data), as well as development of a FOSS framework for WMO. A wis2box 1.0 RC1 is also in the works
- OGC: OGC API – Records will finally hit the streets, and new work in an OGC API wide Publish-Subscribe specification will pave the way for guidance on Pub/Sub in all OGC APIs
- OSGeo: the global event in Auckland (November) promises to be a can’t miss event, and I look forward to providing presentations and training on Geospatial Python, pygeoapi and OGC at the event
- pygeoapi: we should have a 1.0 RC1 soon, further cementing the project’s stability on route to a final 1.0
- pycsw: expect a 3.0 RC1 here as well, soon after OGC API – Records is officially ratified
Wishing everyone a safe and happy 2025!
