Open GeoData

Open Geodata

URL = https://www.osgeo.org/

Description

"OSGeo is an Apache-inspired software foundation for free and open source geospatial tools - Geographic Information Systems, web mapping, tools for spatial applications. It was started when Autodesk decided for strategic reasons that the future of their web mapping software was in Open Source; they approached the Open Source GIS community, which had been thinking about starting a foundation for awhile, and offered the use of their formidable marketing machine. OSGeo has 8 projects in incubation, about another 8 circling around. As well as supporting software development projects, there are a couple of non-software committees (activity groups) within OSGeo - education, and geodata.

Why is a software foundation supporting open access to geodata activities? Partly because the domain demands data in order to do work - if you’re working on apache, you can just start writing HTML pages; if you’re working on openoffice, you can start creating a document - but it’s impossible to develop or to usably distribute Open Source GIS software without real world data to test against." (http://blog.okfn.org/2006/08/01/geodata_in_open_source_foundation/)