Foss4g NL: morning sessions (sovereignty + geoserver 3)¶

Increasing our digital sovereignty - Ronald Stolk¶

There are public values we have: autonomy, humanity, justice. Things like inclusivity, academic freedom, security, etc. Those public values are under threat in our digital environment, mostly due to Big Tech.

Digital sovereignty suddenly became more acute due to the geopolitical influence on our digital environment. Big Tech standing in the front row at Trump’s inauguration… The International Criminal Court being locked out of their Microsoft accounts was a huge warning. You can only guarantee the public values if you’ve got digital sovereignty.

Big tech has lots of risks. You don’t have a control over your own data. LinkedIn’s search (owned by Microsoft) takes into account the emails stored in Microsoft’s systems, for instance. Lock-in with options of a “kill switch”. Influence due to censorship or suppression of “woke” opinions.

Warning: don’t trust all the “sovereignty washing” being done by Big Tech: “we now have EU storage, so there are no sovereignty problems anymore”. That’s just not true. Just like “vegan chicken filet”.

What can you do? Well, investigate what you’re using. Do you have an exit strategy? What is the most at risk?

• Access: lots of organisations work with Microsoft’s login system (“Entry ID”). Exactly the same system that was used to block the International Criminal Court…

• Data: is it stored using open standards? Do you have it stored locally? Or is it somewhere in the cloud? Make sure your crown jewels are stored somewhere (geopolitically) safe.

GIS data luckily is often public. In the Netherlands you have several public repositories. But lots of data and research is stored in public clouds. And what about climate research data from the USA?

Look at open source software. It is of really good quality! Also look at Nextcloud, Peertube and Mastodon (alternatives for Microsoft, Youtube and Twitter), those are for instance available through the Dutch universities’ IT organisation (SURF). Universities can go to that organisation also for big data storage and compute. There are also European options, like EOSC.

They’re looking at a digital emergency kit: what if a researcher gets cut off from US Big Tech systems, how do we get that person back online quickly?

AI: how open is your LLM? look at open source models, like DeepSeek, Qwen, MiMo, Llama.

The three northernmost provinces in the Netherlands want to be the third digitization region of the Netherlands. Eindhoven/Brainport focuses on hardware (ASML is headquartered there), Amsterdam is software (mostly big tech like). Groningen wants to aim at smaller-scale sovereignty solutions. One of the elements is the AI fabriek, part of a set of EU AI factories.

Say hello to GeoServer 3 - Jody Garnett¶

GeoServer version 3.0.0 was released last month

In 2024 they had an upgrade cascade challenge. Java upgrade, spring upgrade (twice!), spring security upgrade. Moving from Java EE to Jakarta. Going from Java 11 to 17 meant that the important imaging library wasn’t available anymore, which was a big problem.

Doing all this at the same time would take lots of work and lots of money. Several companies (CampToCamp, GeoSolutions, GeoCat) cooperated to make the changes, supported by a fundraising campaign. They managed to get all the main upgrades working in a solid week of programming.

UI upgrades. Documentation is now in markdown. Docs and UI have dark mode now. Forms are in two columns, and they use tabs to clear up the form. Search works better. And you have breadcrumbs now, so you can keep track of your context. Full-screen map preview. More information on a layer’s page, also for people that aren’t logged in. CORS support via the admin interface, you don’t need to edit an XML anymore.

Upgrading: you can just upgrade, there are no changes to the data directory!

• Some rarely used modules have been moved to extensions.

• There’s a new OAuth/OpenID connector.

• Netcdf can be a single file now, you don’t need the old directory of indexes anymore.

Tip: upgrade quickly. The security landscape is under stress. Lots of issues are being found in all open source projects. They’re happy that GeoServer upgraded to lots of newer major versions of the dependencies: it allowed them to keep up-to-date with the latest security releases. Update early and often.

In response to a question: the Docker image is ready.

Creating map viewers with generic geo components - Jaap-Willem Sjoukema¶

The Dutch “Kadaster” (the country’s central mapping agency) created “GGC”, generic geo components. They have multiple websites (kadaster, pdok, etc) that all use the same geo components but have a different look-and-feel. They are based on OpenLayers, Angular and Cesium.

Since May this year, the components are open source.

Some component examples:

• Map, both 2D and 3D.

• Location search.

• Selection/filtering tools.

• Feature information.

• Legend.

The idea is that a competent programmer ought to be able to make a map viewer in one day.

There are some restrictions at the moment:

• The coordinate system is hardcoded to the Dutch Rijksdriehoek, but they’re going to change it.

• It are Angular components, not “web components”. There’s a talk later in the day about “GeoBlocks”, which is a similar system that is web-component-based.

Unrelated photo: we have two offices in the center of Utrecht. As a handy connection, we’re using a radio link (“straalverbinding”) between the two. We have line of sight. Above our radio link you see the newly renovated main church tower of Utrecht, the highest in the Netherlands.