In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

A new product on the map, GeoSolutions announced the 1.0.0 version of the open source MapStore software, a "simple and intuitive way to create, save and share maps."

What it is? "MapStore is based on the GeoExplorer Open Source framework and is licensed under the GPL license.

With MapStore you can mashup contents from Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Bing or specific WMS services provided by you or third party content providers. MapStore uses internally GeoStore, (the GeoSolutions Open Source engine for resource storing and retrieving) for managing users   as well as maps definitions. Moreover MapStore uses Http-proxy to communicate with remote servers, such as the third party WMS services used in your maps.

Visit our online demo or download the MapStore binary, read the Quick Start guide and start to create and share your own maps. If you need more info, please check to the complete documentation wiki."

I'd like to introduce a new location-based game: Kort.

This web app motivates users to help improving OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Game-like elements are used like credit points and badges in a mission to resolve missing spatial data. Kort combines the concept of gamification with volunteered geographic information and is targeted to non-specialists. Within three weeks more than 1,000 users registered and it has been translated into 11 languages!

After having signed in with OSM or Google account, credit points (so called 'Koins') are collected by the players on a mission task. Examples are POIs without a name, where users have to enter the missing label. All proposals for solutions are then validated by other players. If a proposal has passed validations (around 3 depending on error type), it is considered complete.

Data errors are downloaded every night from a project called KeepRight. The data covers many parts of the world except for parts of North America and others. The final task of integrating the passed proposals into OpenStreetMap has not been realized yet. It can be done manually, though. This an other enhancements like moderating campaigns are planned in the near future.

The project has been implemented by two computer science students during their bachelor thesis at the Geometa Lab of the University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil (Switzerland). It's based on HTML5, free (open source) and it runs on iPhone and Android, and in Chrome.

For more information visit http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KortGame

I am glad to announce that Slashgeo.org is a proud media partner of FOSS4G 2013, to be held in Nottingham, UK, on September 17-21, one of the dominant geospatial conferences.

Here's what it is: "FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, organized by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). In 2013, FOSS4G will be held in in the United Kingdom for the first time, at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (AGI) annual GeoCommunity Event at the same venue, and delegates will have an opportunity to attend both events for a full week of Geo-Goodness!

Expect a vibrant mix of workshops, papers, seminars, birds-of-a-feather meetings, and great social events, in a fantastic location. Key dates and travel information will be published shortly, from early September 2012, so check back for updates, follow us on twitter, or sign up to our mailing list for more information."

We'll try to have one or two Slashgeo Editors on the site at FOSS4G 2013. Slashgeo had the chance to be active and cover 4 recent OSGeo FOSS4G events.

That's the name of a story discussed over Slashdot Have a Wi-Fi-Enabled Phone? Stores Are Tracking You. This topic has been covered quite a few times, last occurrence was 5 days ago.

Their summary: "Call it Google Analytics for physical storefronts: if you've got a phone with wi-fi, stores can detect your MAC address and track your comings and goings, determining which aisles you go to and whether you're a repeat customer. The creator of one of the most popular tracking software packages says that the addresses are hashed and not personally identifiable, but it might make you think twice about leaving your phone on when you head to the mall."

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 8.6 for download from source forge:

• geotools-8.6-bin.zip
• geotools-8.6-doc.zip
• geotools-8.6-userguide.zip
• geotools-8.6-project.zip

This release is also deployed to the OSGeo Maven Repository. For more information on setting up your project with Maven consult the Quickstart.

About GeoTools 8.6
This is a bug fix release containing fixes and improvements, including:

• Several fixes in the WFS client, making it work against TinyOWS and ArcGIS WFS server
• Improvements in usage of filter fuctions from SLD (some functions did not properly convert their arguments from string to numeric)
• Removed tiling artifacts when rendering oversampled grid coverages
• Sped up the usage of FIDFilter objects in map rendering

Full details are available in Jira's release notes.

Upgrading from GeoTools 2.7

For those migrating from GeoTools 2.7, upgrade instructions are available. No additional GeoTools 2.7 released are scheduled. Thanks for using GeoTools, and Enjoy!
The GeoTools Community
http://geotools.org

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.2.4, now available for download.

This is the latest release of the stable 2.2 series. The changes that might interest the most users are:

• the monitoring extension module just got promoted to official extension [GEOS-5538]
• the status page does not throw errors after catalog reloads anymore [GEOS-5371]
• one critical fix in the REST configuration of freemarker templates [GEOS-5533]

The changelog also contains the following minor bug fixes

• [GEOS-5338] – Filter function IEEERemainder mishbehaves in SLD
• [GEOS-5537] – Tiling artifacts with RasterSymbolizer using bilinear interpolation (when oversampling raster)
• [GEOS-5551] – WFS 1.0 capabilities will NPE with misconfigured OGR and XSLT output formats
• [GEOS-5565] – workspace admin unable to create sql view
• [GEOS-5570] – QueryProcess fails if called with an OGC filter (either 1.0 or 1.1)
• [GEOS-5197] – Use the layer abstract as the GeoRSS channel description
• [GEOS-5561] – Missing i18n support for ReprojectPage
• [GEOS-5562] – Missing i18n support for WorkspaceEditPage
• [GEOS-5563] – slight mixed up order of Y-parameters in AffineTransformPanel

Also, looking at the corresponding GeoTools release changelog we have the following extra goodies in:

• improvements in the WFS cascading, we can now better interact with remote WFS servers running on TinyOWS and ArcGIS
• imageio-ext was upgraded to version 1.1.6, which means from now on GeoServer uses GDAL 1.9 to extends the range of raster formats it supports

Download GeoServer 2.2.4, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source front:

• MapBox acquired the MeatText mobile social mapping app and is open sourcing the app with MapBox code
• You can now even publish any map you have in ArcMap directly to MapBox from the main ArcMap UI by using the latest Arc2Earth
• James shares an entry named CartoDB and MapBox Fight On
• If you missed the press release, pycsw Receives OGC Compliance Certification and Reference Implementation Status‏
• There's also a new Open Source Geospatial Lab established at University of Newcastle, United Kingdom

From the Esri front:

• Here's the announcement of the Operations Dashboard and Collector for ArcGIS: "Operations Dashboard provides a common operating picture for monitoring events. Operations Dashboard integrates maps and a variety of data sources to create comprehensive operational views that can include charts, lists, gauges, and indicators which update automatically as underlying data changes."
• Here's an excellent summary of what are Esri GeoDatabases, trying to reduce confusion about it

From the Google front:

• Google invites us to Discover Israel on Google Maps with new panoramic imagery
• Funny, Google felt obliged to explain that a donkey found on StreetView was not hurt by Google's car
• And Google released new imagery to Google Earth today

In the miscellaneous category:

• DM shares an article named Attention Shoppers! aisle411’s Indoor Location App is a Hit with Top Retailers, where you'll learn that "Routing applications are no longer limited to streets. It’s now possible to route customers within malls and other shopping centers, and even within individual stores."
• APB informs us that China Mandates Swapping out other GNSS for Beidou in Commercial Vehicles
• A Microsoft patent for silencing your phone based on where you are, such as in a movie theater
• Bing Maps also added the Elevations API to their REST Services

In the maps category:

• A nice graph and overview maps of which cities will be impacted by sea level rising, Los Angeles and Amsterdam comes next

We mentioned the first JS.geo 2013 event and Peter Batty shares his wrap-up of the event. I strongly recommend reading the full entry if you have any remote interest in web mapping technology.

From the entry: "D3 supports a new format called TopoJSON, which is similar to geoJSON, but supports topology to eliminate redundancy. For polygon data this can reduce data volumes by around 80% (compared to regular geoJSON). It also lends itself to robust simplification of polygons. [...] Several presentations, including this one by Aaron Ogle, confirmed the impression I had that the Leaflet JavaScript mapping API has great momentum. [...] Brendan Kenny from Google gave an interesting talk on WebGL, which brings high performance 3D (and 2D) graphics to (most) web browsers [...]"

The open source javascript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps named Leaflet is very popular and seriously competing with OpenLayers, and it just got better, Leaflet 0.5 has been released.

From the announcement: "Rejoice, everyone — after 4.5 months of development with 26 contributors involved since the previous major release, I’m happy to announce the release of Leaflet 0.5 stable, hooray!

0.5 highlights include IE10 touch devices and Metro apps support, retina-enabled markers, a much better panning inertia implementation, hand cursors for dragging and a new zoom control design. But the real power of this release comes with about a hundred of subtle improvements and bugfixes, improving usability, performance and overall “feel” of browsing the map even further."

The details of FOSS4G North America 2013 have been announced­. Everything is there, from registration, the call for presentations, the gala and the code sprint.

Amongst the keynotes they propose: "Eric Gundersen, CEO, MapBox.  With big names converting from Google Maps to MapBox (USA Today, Foursquare, etc.), Eric will be discussing the business proposition/value of open source geo.

Erek Dyskant, Sr. Analytics Engineer, Democratic National Committee. Whether you were happy or sad with the outcome of the recent election, they must have done something right!  Erek will talk about how open source solutions were used to empower tacticians with geospatial data, and describe what drove the intentional choice of using open source."

Last year, Slashgeo had the chance to be a media partner of the first FOSS4G-NA 2012.