At Smallworld EMEAI 2011

I started my trip to the Smallworld EMEAI conference in Salzburg this morning. I'll be in Salzburg by Monday night and ready to conference the next day. According to @botezmi (http://twitter.com/botezmi), close to 800 delegates will be in attendance! No wonder it took some effort to find a reasonably priced hotel room near the conference venue. I imagine that the large delegate number is due to the inclusion of the SWUG annual meeting with the GE event.

I will be based at the Realworld booth and will be demonstrating some new Web Maps Connector features. Please come by to see how you can integrate Bing, OpenStreetMap, Google, DigitalGlobe, MapQuest, ArcGIS and various other region-specific data providers directly into your Smallworld environment.

If that doesn't interest you, my colleague Graham Garlick (author of the internationally popular Dialog Designer) has loaded me up with some of his latest cool products so ask about those and I can show you examples of how we are pushing Magik to the edge.

Finally, to all you tweeters out there, please tweet conference events on the hashtag #swuc.

Bis Dienstag!

Exporting internal world geometries from Smallworld using FME

I recently had a reader ask me...

I exported from Smallworld into ESRI shape format using FME. However, I noticed that the only features/collections that have a shape file output are the objects in geographic world. I checked the logs of objects in internal world but the log shows that the features were skipped. I would like to ask if you know the approach in these types of objects.

My response...

Have a look at method fme_tics_client.int!create_feature()

You will see a line that looks like...

geoms << rec.geometry_set_for_world(world)

... that is the one that is causing only geometries in the main GIS world to be considered.

You could try replacing that line with something like this...

geoms << geometry_set.new_from_iter(rec,:all_geometry|()|,_false)

... I haven't tested this, but I expect it might work. Use at your own risk :)

Going to 2011 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference

I am excited to announce that I will be attending the 2011 Smallworld EMEAI Users Conference in Salzburg, Austria this year. I will be there from 10-12 May. Last year in Noordwijk I was able to meet many people for the first time and I am looking forward to reconnecting in Salzburg. Additionally, this years Users Conference will be held in conjunction with the Smallorld User Group e.V. annual meeting so I will also get to practice my German... und darauf freue ich mich schon!

My main purpose in attending is to help promote my company's (iFactor Consulting) Web Maps Connector (WMC). Like last year, the good folks at Realworld Systems have offered me some space in their booth to run some WMC demonstrations. I am looking forward to meeting with customers and resellers and plan to show support for some exciting new data vendors and formats. I will post more as the time draws closer.

I will be tweeting on hashtags #swgis and #swuc and encourage everyone else to do so as well.

Please come by the booth for a demo. If you are not interested in Web Maps Connector, please come visit anyways and we can talk about the Smallworld community, OpenStreetMap, cycling and even beekeeping :)

Bis bald!