In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Every year, NORAD tracks Santa as he makes his trip around the globe on Christmas Eve. The NORAD Tracks Santa program is popular, receiving 19 million unique visitors last holiday season.

This year, as part of the NORAD Tracks Santa team, Analytical Graphics, Inc. used Cesium, an open-source WebGL virtual globe, to build a 3D web map for visualizing Santa’s location. The app goes live on December 24th at www.noradsanta.org. In the meantime, there is a tech write-up with screenshots showing the global terrain, imagery, and water. There are also instructions for making sure your computer will be able to run the app.

Here's the recent FOSS4G geonews.

In open source software updates:

• GEOS, the Geometry Engine Open Source, got to version 3.3.6
• The popular GeoServer got to version 2.2.2
• Another bug fix release is the OpenGeo Suite version 3.0.1
• It's not the end, GeoTools 8.4 was released

In the everything else category:

• Here's an entry on the GeoServer CSS module, that presents itself as an alternative and improvement over the SLD (Style Layer Descriptor) OGC standard: "GeoServer CSS is inspired by the web—and by great tools like Carto, Cascadenik, and MapCSS. Like these tools it provides a concise styling syntax modeled on CSS but differs in that it’s goal is to improve the experience relative to SLD while preserving CSS concepts like cascading. While we ultimately aspire to a common CSS-like styling language for web cartography, we hope that GeoServer CSS is much easier than SLD and will be familiar enough for web designers to use."
• Arnulf links to the SplashMaps Kickstarter project that uses open data, "real outdoors maps; based on open data, on light, weather friendly fabric" (image below)
• Geoff shares an entry on the Cesium open source WebGL virtual globe and mapping Javascript library, we mentioned Cesium before
• You can now connect ArcGIS to the open source TileMill with Arc2Earth Sync
• I learned a new term today, here's an entry named Improving Population Density Maps Using Dasymetric Mapping
• Here's a Money Journey map that visualize transactions with the Open Bank Project data
• Here's an update on the Geometry Clipping Contest, and QGIS beats ArcGIS
• You heard of it already, but here's again on the topic, Why are we building OpenLayers 3?

There is a new project on Github that has made a 3D view for OpenLayers!  It integrates AGI's new open source WebGL globe (Cesium) and uses the OpenLayers drawing & navigation tools to interact with the globe.  Support for WMS layers and feature importing are next on the to-do list.

A live demo can be found here:
http://jktaylor.github.com/openlayers/examples/adapters/editingtoolbar.html

The source code is available here.