The world-wide community of "open source geo" supporters and promoters gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland this year at FOSS4G 2006 – Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics, sponsored by OSGeo and held at the local university campus. T-MAPY company was represented by Tomas Krecmer, Tomas Novotny, and Jan Kamenicky.

Lectures, workshops and panel discussions were held September 12th through 15th. The conference organizers managed to create a truly very pleasant atmosphere for discussions that took place not only on campus but also in a downtown bar that had been recommended to us. Each attendant was thus drawn into the geo-issues for the entire four day period. All workshops were indeed practical, each participant was equipped with a notebook with pre-installed environment and access to the internet. The free WiFi access was available to the attendees throughout the conference facilities.

One of the nice features that is usually common at all conferences is the fact that the conference discussions are often of as much value as the workshops themselves. Knowing this, the organizers booked a Thursday afternoon boat trip to the Chillon Chateaux. The geo discussions took place in the castle’s romantic chambers and lasted till midnight.

Since we utilize open technologies in many of our projects, we have been paying a very close attention to the promising development in this field. Especially expanding the PostGIS capabilities in close cooperation with MapServer possibility is very interesting. In Switzerland, the Czech community managed to come to an agreement with the creator of PROJ.4 and the library will include the option of "GIS JTSK" variant featuring interchanged coordinates. Also, the GRASS options on the server side offer some interesting tools.

As members of the T-MAPY team, we were extremely pleased to see our applications remain on the top of the list. The difference consists in the fact that the active participants in the field develop individual, supporting technologies while we are involved in the development of complex solutions integrated into information systems. This conference provided us with many impulses that will certainly be, after testing, integrated into our new projects.