Arnulf Christl

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Arnulf Christl works at metaspatial as Geospatial Systems Architect as consultant, prototyper and project manager. He frequently appears at conferences, workshops and seminars and publishes most everything he presents online.

Contents

Roots

Arnulf on a trip in Peru in January 2009

Arnulf Albrecht Benno Christl was born on April 28th, 1970 in Frankfurt, Germany to his mother Anna Maria Martha Gerlinde Christl, née Korff and his father Rudolf August Christl. His brother Heino is 5 years older and lives in Harrogate, UK, Wolfgang who is 10 years older lives in Munich, Germany, Almut, 11 years older lives in Munich and the outback of Canada and Georg who was 12 years older lives no more.

After stays in Indonesia, Germany and Uruguay Arnulf settled down again in Germany where he completed the formal joiner apprenticeship program with journey-level status. Since many years his better half is Athina Trakas who is currently working for the OGC.

Etymology of the Names

Etymology of the name Arnulf. Photo taken from a computer screen at the Wortreich exhibit in Bad Hersfeld, Germany

Arnulf is a combination of the two names "Arn" (Old High German "Adler" meaning "eagle") and "Ulf" (Old High German for Wolf meaning "wolf").

Albrecht was just added because my mother was unsure whether my father (who at the time of Arnulf's birth had already moved to Indonesia) actually favored "Albrecht" or "Arnulf". No Internet no mobile, so we ended up with three first names.

The name Benno commemorates "Benno Ohnesorg", a German university student killed by a policeman during a demonstration in West Berlin in 1967.

Christl is a common name in Bavaria and was given to early Christian converts. Some algorithms tend to "correct" this name by adding an "e" after the "t" which makes this a common female name - and in that process Arnulf's gender also gets changes resulting in spam frequently being addressed to Frau (Mrs.) "Christl Arnulf". On other occasions the "l" is misread as an "i" resulting in "Christi" a name more commonly found in Italy.

Studies

Arnulf went to primary school in Buchenau (ZX Spectrum), Germany then moved to Montevideo, Uruguay where we first visited the Deutsche Schule Montevideo, then the British Schools of Montevideo where he received the International Baccalaureate in 1987 (Commodore C64 even then avoiding Mac boxes). During apprenticeship he visited the Konrad Zuse School in Hünfeld, Germany (but without any digital background). In 1991 Arnulf moved to study at the Geography Department of the Phillipps University of Marburg, Germany. Here he bought his first PC a discarded office IBM with monochrome amber monitor and 2 floppy drives only which he later pimped with a 2.2MB and later evenb with a 10MB hard drive. Shortly after arriving in Markburg he started to work as UNIX administrator (Sun Solaris Sparc Station 10) at the department where he also got in touch with his first GIS software named CATLAS (by Siemens Nixdorf). In 1994 he worked as GIS analyst at the university of Edmonton, Alberta in Canada. After coming back he move to Bonn and continued his studies at the [www.uni-bonn.de University of Bonn].

Practical Work

He started to work as a freelance developer in Bonn and implemented desktop GIS applications on the API of the software WinCAT, later dubbed SICAD Spatial Desktop. He is not ashamed to admit that he did this on Microsoft Windows platforms and that he knows them all starting with DOS and ending with NT4. He was so good at it that colleagues awarded him the nick F1 (Help). Privately he stuck with OS/2 until it was just impractical to do so. With increasing experience he started to also provide practical consultancy and give trainings. In 2002 Till Adams put him in contact with MapServer which triggered Arnulf's Open Source carreer. It was the starting point of the natural evolution that most every developer eventually goes through when adopting Open Source development methodology and Free Software business models. It was also - unfortunately - more or less the end of his career as a core software developer. His influence on software development of the OSGeo project Mapbender which he founded in 2001 moved to the architecture level. Being the only one-eyed money monger between all the blind developers he was became responsible for the operational side of the project. Eventually he came back to the command line as an operating system and SQL practitioner. He feels too old to do anything about this by now and is happy dealing with architectures, interoperability and connecting people. Later he was voted into the OGC Architecture Board where he advocates REST architecture paradigms (consider moving this bit out of the "Practical Work" section... :-) and Open Access to information.

Business Career

Currently Arnulf works under his label metaspatial (business), is president of OSGeo (voluntary), and member of the architecture board of the OGC (voluntary).

Overview

Details

In 1998 Arnulf founded CCGIS as a privately owned business in Germany specialized in providing spatial technology. Every year staff grew by one or two people. Since 2001 he shared responsibilities with Peter Stamm and focused again more on the technology. With the loss of their technology provider SICAD (taken over by ESRI in 2002) CCGIS started to adopt Open Source Software technologies and consequently Free Software business models. In 2003 he co-founded the Geo-Consortium together with seven companions from affiliated companies focusing on providing comprehensive geospatial training services. In the following years he dedicated his time to organizing user meetings and conferences including the yearly recurring FOSSGIS event. In 2007 the companies CCGIS, KARTA.GO and Geo-Consortium merged into the WhereGroup where Arnulf continued to serve as CEO until summer 2008 concluding the merger. In September 2008 Arnulf was elected president of OSGeo (consider moving this bit out of the section "Businesses" as it is honorary (unpaid).

Organizations

Arnulf is a member of various organizations. Three of them are of special interest to him and get him involved more deeply.

Open Source Geospatial Foundation

Arnulf is founding and charter member of the Open Source Gesopatial Foundation. He is on the board of directors and was elected as president of OSGeo in 2008. OSGeo is the result of a long standing wish of the users of the MapServer software to have a legal entity representing the software community similar to the Apache Foundation. He took part in building this organization for several reasons. One was to make sure that it would not flounder and fail because that would be worse than to have no organization in the first place. Another reason was that he wanted OSGeo to be truly and wholeheartedly a Free and Open Source Software shop and not something half baked.

Open Geospatial Consortium

Arnulf is an active member of the Open Geospatial Foundation (OGC) since CCGIS became Principal Member of the OGC in August of 2006. This put Arnulf right between BAE Systems, Google, Oracle, the US Homeland Defense and other weird players in the spatial big shot's arena. His mission is to introduce Open Source methodologies to the OGC process and provide Free Software advocacy for the specialized players of the geospatial realm like CadCorp, Autodesk or ESRI. He sees advantages in adopting REST architecture paradigms for spatial Web Services and tries to get them solidly grounded within the OGC community.

metaspatial

metaspatial was founded by Arnulf in March 2010. It is the most recent of his undertakings in the geospatial realm and bundles the know-how and experience of many years of work and learning and provides for his Financial Background.

Others

Internet Society
German Unix User Group

Arnulf is a member in a number of other organizations:

Current Work Scopes

Arnulf works as spatial systems architect and consultant under his brand metaspatial leveraging the OSGeo SDI stack. He is consultant and project lead for large organizations, gives talks at conferences and conducts workshops. He runs all software for which he provides consulting and workshops on his own servers at http://arnulf.us. He has fun giving database trainings that run exclusively on the command line as well as orchestrating SDIs with nothing but a web site.

He is an active member of OSGeo and current president (an unsolicited occupation). He furthers OSGeo's mission spreading word on Free Software business models and Open Source development methodologies.

Notes on Personality and Temperament.

Publications

Arnulf has written loads of stuff on Spatial Data Infrastuctures, GIS, Open Source Business Models and published articles in magazines and books. You can find a list with a selection of some of his Publications and most of the documents for download.

Freedom of the Mind

Arnulf is an avid reader of literature focusing on the human mind, knowledge, science and society. He relentlessly partakes in Wiki style collaboration and he (obviously) is the Lowest Troll of this Wiki.

Arnulf has no idea what this Wiki is all about but he deeply trusts that Seven will help him find out.

Retrieved from "http://www.arnulf.us/Arnulf_Christl"
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