In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent geospatial open source and open data news.

New and updated software:

• In case you don't follow our press release section, Geopaparazzi 2.4 has been released, a reminder: "Geopaparazzi is a tool developed to do very fast qualitative engineering/geologic surveys."
• And so was MXD2Map version 1.0, "MXD2map is a free converter for the generation of UMN MapServer-compatible Map files from ESRI ArcGIS MXD files."
• degree 3.1 web services have been released
• ImageI/O-Ext 1.1.2 has been released
• Here's about POIProxy, "a service that handles requests to any public POI service providing a well defined REST API"

Other open source software-related news:

• SS shares an entry on InSTEDD GeoChat - not be to confused with Esri's GeoChat or the other open source MapChat - InSTEDD's open source GeoChat "is a collaboration tool that allows anyone to chat, report and get alerts on their phone"
• All the talk videos of FOSS4G 2011 and State of the Map 2011 are now available
• Here's an entry on QGIS's pie charts for symbols

In the open data category:

• Montréal, Canada, joined the increasing number of cities opening their geospatial data to the public [French press release]
• V1 mentions the Alberta Oilsands map-based portal, which he qualifies as open and transparent
• Mapperz discusses Openptmap, an OpenStreetMap-related effort to show public transport lines

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. Some of those news seem important enough to deserve their own entries, but I dare share them in a single one. Yes, that's another unusually long post. Normal posting frequency should resume next February!

From the open source / open data front:

• SS shares an entry named MIT Releases Smartphone Data Tracking Tools as Open Source Software, it's called Funf
• There's now an OpenStreetMap Inspector, a quality evaluation service to help improve OSM data
• Here's a short entry on using OpenStreetMap data, tidbit: the entire database is 250GB
• Here's an entry on generating contours using GDAL (via shell or QGIS)
• Paul explains Indexed Nearest Neighbour Search in PostGIS
• Here's the FOSS4G 2011 WMS Performance Shootout 2011 slides, and I haven't shared this yet, James Fee's Guide to what was important at FOSS4G 2011

From the Esri front:

• Mandown reports that Esri updated their deprecation plans for ArcGIS 10 and 10.1
• SS indicates Esri Releases a Map Story on Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions

From the Google front:

• Finally, single-language labels made their way to Google Maps, that's making it much less confusing
• Here's in simple words why Google offers Google Maps / Earth
• Ogle Earth shares an entry on using Google Earth to hunt illegal mining in Goa, India

From the Microsoft front:

• Bing Maps added detailed airport maps, 42 U.S. airports so far 

In the miscellaneous category:

• SS reports that TomTom Launched a Geospatial Platform with Oracle: "The service will offer geocoding, vehicle routing and mapping information, all hosted on Oracle’s 11g database."
• V1 writes about INTERGEO, the German geospatial conference that attracted 17,000 attendees, making it one of the largest geoconferences in the world (the largest?)
• James Fee linked to the U.S. and Canadian top 10 largest cities GIS web maps
• We mentioned it before, but here's another article on the completion of the ERS satellite missions after 20 years
• O'Reilly shares an entry named Why indoor navigation is so hard and another entry on the state and future of local news
• If you have interest in the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification), here's data model diagrams
• MapQuest launched a Mobile Flash Maps API
• VerySpatial mentioned the National Geographic Challenge game for the PS3, XBox360 and Wii
• On a more serious topic, VS shares an entry on The Geography of the Death Penalty

Slashdot discussed a few geospatial-related stories:

• Don't you wish you were a student again, Put On Your 3D Glasses — Class Is About To Start
• Not the first time we hear such news (from any OS phone), HTC Android Backdoor Leaks Private User Data, including GPS locations
• US Military Seeks Non-Cooperative Biometric Tracking Technology
• A story named California Governor Vetoes Ban On Warrantless Phone Searches, including GPS logs
• An on the same theme, a Senator Goes After 'Brazen' OnStar Privacy Shift
• With a search, you'll find plenty of similar stories, German Researchers Crack Mifare RFID Encryption, in other words, RFID can be of great use, but can't be considered secure 
• There's also a story about using stereo-vision mapping to visualize the oldest submerged city

In the maps category:

• TMR shares a few map books for Fall 2011
• Here's the first global map of ocean salinity
• Here's the Japanese tsunami mapped in detail for the first time

In the coming days, I'll be at Géomatique 2011, the major geospatial event in the province of Québec. Slashgeo is a media partner of the event.

Here's the recent open source geospatial news in batch mode, which includes everything about FOSS4G 2011 on the geoblogs that we haven't mentioned yet.

On the FOSS4G 2011 Conference front:

• Interesting numbers, "By 2011 there are now 19,471 unique subscribers to OSGeo, more than 400 mailing lists, and more than 15 million lines of code, with 740 contributors, and 269 that have contributed for more than 12 months."
• Slashgeo editor Nicolas summarized Brian Timoney's excellent talk at FOSS4G 2011, and if you want to hear it yourself, here is that 14-minutes impassioned talk on the state of the geospatial industry, Brian demonstrate how much better we could do
• Here's the slides of Paul Ramsey's keynote
• Here's Jody Garnett's updated slides on the WPS Shootout
• Here's the entry to read about Open Source and Open Data at the U.K. Ordnance Survey
• If you haven't read too much about it already, here's an entry on the case study of the U.S. FCC National Broadband Map based on open source geospatial software
• Here's the what's coming to PostGIS 2.0 slides [pdf]
• I heard comments that 30-minutes talks at FOSS4G 2011 was too short for the presenters to dive into their subjects, would you agree? If you're interested in what could be improved see this recap of FOSS4G 2011 by OSGeo's president
• Here's Directions Mag complete wrap up of the conference

In other news:

• I was surprised to read that Tyler Mitchell won't be the OSGeo Executive Director anymore
• GWT-OpenLayers version 0.6 has been released, that's the wrapper library for using OpenLayers in Google Web Toolkit applications
• MapFish is now an official OSGeo project
• This entry reminds us of the comprehensive list of web mapping toolkits (there's too much of them!)
• SS mentioned GrassrootsMapping.org, which is a crowdsourcing aerial image project with goals similar to OpenAerialMap.org

On the fourth day at FOSS4G 2011, the first plenary sessions involved the presentation by the national mapping agency in UK Ordnance Survey, which really exposed the challenge this kind of organisation such as making data free as much as possible, but at the same time supporting data collection, integration, delivering and proper communication with the user community. His message was in clear to all managers in public mapping agency: be brave and progressive in your way of thinking as well as try to optimize the location of the line to draw between free open data and premium paid datasets.

On the presentation session, many new projects arising from the industry were demonstrated. First, OpenLayers version 2.11 supporting new improved features for mobile technology was presented. In previous edition, OpenLayers had poor navigation and interaction in mobile phones. Since the Lausanne OpenLayers Code Sprint in 2011, touch events across the library, such as pan, zoom, draw/edition, selection and geolocation position has been developed. The library has been reduced to increase performance. The demo version can be try here : http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/mobile.html. At the same time, when the best OpenLayers developers are experiencing hard challenges in mobile development (e.g. no standard across mobile devices), it might be because that it is really a challenge for most geospatial developers.

Another convergence of new project is the Nodejs and Mapnik as tiling solution. In a presentation on tiling, Nodejs, as a javascript for server-side development, has been demonstrated to be effective for Service-oriented Architecture (SoA). For the need of authentification, distributed rendering, styling and tiles in a non-monolithic servers, the Nodejs-Mapnik has been a good solution. This event-driven and scalable solution has demonstrated the use of the Nodejs-Mapnik combination. However, some down-side have been identified as Nodejs is evolving so fast that it is not stable in its version compared to Mapnik.

A presentation on the status of OpenAerialMap by Schuyler Erle has exposed the need of imagery for OpenStreetMappers especially during humanitarian crisis, which users really need access to imagery to do their work properly. The example of Haiti is one of the best one and when images were donated to the Humanitarian OSM, it really serves the need of supporting emergency responders. Mapserver and Tilecache have been used by Chrisopher Smith to give imagery access to organisations in the field. Schuyler also exposes the architecture of the OAM in 3 main server components : 1) a central index servers for metadata cataloging imagery, 2) an images server to store the raw imagery data as archives and 3) a web server to publish tiles for mappers around the world in a GIS cloud computing type of environment. What’s now? The project is having problems finding volunteers to contributes, as well as corporate support and the lack of partnership with source imagery is lacking. As this project is valuable as OpenStreetMap, but as an infrastructure driven project, the OAM needs contributions from potential users, imagery providers, public organisation and university. Who is interested?

While the presentation was on its first day in Denver, Peter Batty starts by exposing the overall success of the 2011 edition (and the slow Wifi network at the conference Hotel...) as well as the force of the open source community. In his opening ceremony, he has compiled the registration and the FOSS4G 2011 had more than 900 attendees with almost half of the crowd from the USA, around 150 Europeans and Japan as the only Asian country represented.

Secondly, Arnulf Christl presents, by showing OSGeo/FOSS4G geek T-shirt, the diversity of OSGeo around the world. Thirdly, Paul Ramsey, with his unique sense of humour, speaks about the Open source business model in his own language as it can be defines by each corporation and organisation that is working in FOSS4G as long as it keeps code alive. 

Afterward, technical and academic session were exposing what’s hot in terms of geospatial open source software. Presentations on Map tiling and the new trend as managing map tiles in a database such SQLite with MapProxy. At the same time, the Apache module called geocache, renamed MapCache, was presenting its benchmark as well as its integration in the MapServer stack. In the Geonetwork presentation, the newest 2.8 geodata catalog release now separates the client and server product, the interface of metadata editor has been improved and a tool to add shapefile on-the-fly as a layer has been developed. With a strong presence of ESRI a the FOSS4G, the City and County of Denver showed that using OpenLayers in combination with ArcGIS Server is quite effective and how their contribution to the AgsjsAdapter.js to support the ArcGIS tiles version 10 was beneficial.

A discussion on the WFS-Transactional versus the REST/geoJson has been helpful to understand the performance implementation of this OGC standard with GeoServer/MapFish and to raise issue on the gml format as a WFS lack of documentation and fully compliant readers in the market.

With the ongoing INSPIRE project in Europe, a suggestion of using OpenStreetMap as data transfer catalyser was done and seriously discussed. The idea was in fact when local and national government will transfer their data in INSPIRE geospatial infrastructure, they could import their own data into OpenStreetMap infrastructure, then transform and extract the information from OSM to the INSPIRE specifications. GeoScript has been presented in a full packed room and demonstrated as a geoprocessing library in a variety of scripting environment (JavaScript, Python, Scala, and Groovy) based on GeoTools. A real life presentation shows how a the Quebec Public Safety ministry has been using open source software stack (MapServer, Tilecache, PostGIS, GeoExt and OpenLayers) in a web application (G.O.LOC French description: http://geoegl.msp.gouv.qc.ca/accueil/portail_geo/goloc.htm) and by developing web map services to support 9-1-1 emergency call centre.

This open source collaboration project with partners organisation, such as Quebec National Public Health Institute, has been helpful to first responders and emergency manager to actually open the used of geodata in real life-saving situation.

While the FOSS4G 2011 just began Monday, it looks that the number of attendees for the overall conference would beat the best ever in Spain last year. The first two days of the Conference started with one of the moment always appreciated by the community: the workshops. This year in USA around half of the audience of the workshops were newbies in geospatial open source community (mainly from the Colorado area) and the other half were developers, users and experts of the FOSS world.

I have attend two workshops on Monday, the first one was: Introduction to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This organisation has been involved manly since the Earthquake in Haiti by sharing mapping resources with the affected people when needed. I found particularly interesting at the workshop is the “Walking papers” application. This idea is a way to “round trip” map data through paper, to make it easier to perform the kinds of eyes-on-the-street edits that OSM needs now the most, as well as distributing the load by making it possible for legible, easy notes to be shared and turned into real geographical data.

Walking Papers is a website and a service designed to close this final loop by providing OpenStreetMap print maps that can be marked up with a pen, scanned back into the computer with a cellphone, georeferenced automatically by the service and traced using OSM’s regular web-based editor, such as Potlatch or JOSM.

The second workshop I went to on Monday was: FOSS4G routing with pgRouting tools, OpenStreetMap road data and GeoExt. This workshops has been given in previous edition, but this time in Denver new improvement have been made. One of the topics discussed in the workshops was that pgRouting functions is an effective way to trace in one or two seconds a shortest path based on more than 500000 features by using the wrapper with bounding box. Even if pgRouting was quite effective for the OpenStreetMap data of Denver during the workshop, it does not mean that all parts of the world are well covered with topological streetsline. The osm2pgrouting is a great tool to prepare OSM datasets to routing and show if the datasets needs be cleaned and snapped. At the same time, Daniel Kastl from Georepublic, as one of the trainer at the workshops, said that pgRouting was made first for geospatial analysis and will never be as effective as the one implement in Google Maps, because the Google routing engine is precalculated and can be effective for entire continent. This pgRouting has not published a new releases since 2010 and any developer involvement or corporate supports is welcome. The entire workshops can be found at this address: http://workshop.pgrouting.org/.

I have made a pause and I went to see the Monday Night football at the Mile High Stadium in Denver were fans were predominantly in orange jerseys to support their home Team! It was great game, in a very nice Stadium that has quite a lovely view of the City by night.

On Tuesday, An Introduction to Geospatial Open Source was the last workshops have been to before the formal presentation part of the conference starting on Wednesday. This workshops is given an overall tour of FOSS4G world and its business model and main open source projects.

The upcoming week is looking to be very interesting for the industry of geospatial in the USA as well as the "open source / open data" world. As lucky as I am, I will be the on-site Slashgeo editor representative (Slashgeo is also the media partner for both Conferences) in both events in Denver, Colorado: State of the Map 2011 (Annual conference about the progress of OpenStreetMap and free geo-data in general) and FOSS4G 2011 (global conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, organized by OSGeo).

          
State of the Map 2011 is almost sold out in terms of registration and as the first FOSS4G in the USA, it might be the biggest FOSS4G conference ever in terms of number of attendees. Denver will be THE place to be for sharing new ideas on a Free and Open world which sharing geospatial information and tools is needed from everyone, everywhere and everyday.

First, my planning at the State of the Map weekend event is to look at what is next for OpenStreetMap in terms of quality, real applications, its role when dealing with major disaster event, ESRI/Microsoft contribution to OSM, crowd sourcing with OSM for public organisation such as USGS, etc.

Secondly, the FOSS4G 2011 might be a good gathering for social networking in the open source high tech world, but also to see the new trends coming from the industry, such as WPS, cloud map and tiling services. My planning for the FOSS4G is to attend presentation or workshop related to: geocache, WFS Transactional, WPS project, GIS in the Cloud, mobile applications, PgRouting, PostGIS, Open Data with Open Source, Web Mapping Performance, etc. I will keep you posted with some quick impression and nice pictures of the main geospatial open source and open data social and technical events. Denver is looking open, global and free for the entire week!

Nicolas Gignac, on-site Slashgeo editor representative at the FOSS4G and State of the Map 2011

Still in catch up mode, here's the last three weeks of geospatial open source news in batch mode.

• Of huge pertinence to the geospatial open source and open data communities, the FOSS4G 2011 and State of the Map conferences are set to being in a few days. If you're in the Denver area and still hesiting, don't, they are really worth. I'll have to miss them myself this year, but Slashgeo's editor Nicolas Gignac will be attending and provide coverage.
• Directions Mag share an interview with Peter Batty on what to expect at FOSS4G 2011
• Another recent article at DM is named Open Source Licensing: Risk and Opportunity, risks related to intellectual property and governance
• Sextante, the open source spatial java data analysis library, can now work in ArcGIS, and run SAGA and GRASS GIS in ArcGIS via Sextante, and why not, use Sextante algorithms in ArcGIS Model Builder
• PostGIS's Paul Ramsey continues to share insightful comments in an entry named Open source is not free (as in beer) ...
• Users of Autodesk's MapGuide Open Source will be happy to know MapGuide Maestro 3.5 has been released. We already know that MapGuide Maestro 4.0 is introducing 'Local Conneciton Mode'
• V1 mentions updates to the open source multi-modal routing software OpenTripPlanner, which now supports Canada, Poland, India, Spain, Ireland, and Israel (we covered OpenTripPlanner in May 2005) 
• Tim links to a generic article on Quantum GIS in the GeoInformatics magazine, and here's a tip on modifying SVG symbols in QGIS
• Here's an entry on getting GPS data (GPX format) into SpatiaLite, either from QGIS, CSV or OGR
• Here's web-based PostGIS geometry and raster viewer, no need to install anything
• GeoServer now has extensions to monitor and audit your GeoServer installation

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. Yes, on a Saturday! I'll be away for the next three weeks and dare delay my family's departure to feed you with these.

From the open source front:

• Mentioned before, the open source map design tool TileMill reached version 0.4.1   
• Some recent improvements of QGIS: an extraction projection tool for QGIS, a new MapInfo to QGIS style converter and Shield Labels for QGIS
• Not the first time it happened, a briton got arrested during his OpenStreetMap mapping activities, yes, that was before the recent London riots
• O'Reilly offers an entry named Open source maps tell data journalism stories in Afghanistan
• Paul Ramsey of the PostGIS fame shares interesting arguments on the open source vs proprietary debacle
• Here's an entry on generating elevation maps from along-track stereo pairs using the open source Orfeo ToolBox
• We told you ourselves a few times, but here's how James Fee telling us Why You Can’t Afford to Miss FOSS4G 2011

From the Esri front:

• The File GeoDatabase API version 1.1 has been released, in includes a .NET wrapper and bug fixes
• James Fee mentions PgMap and QMap to connect to spatial databases with ArcGIS 10.1 without SDE

From the Google front:

• In their learning series, here's an entry on GIS with Google Earth and Google Maps
• Google shares an entry on famine crisis relief in the Horn of Africa
• Here's the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall in Google Earth
• Google invites us to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial with Google Maps

On the Microsoft front:

• Microsoft updated their Bing Maps Account Center with three main improvements: Direct Publishing of Data Sources, Map Navigation for Data Editing, and Enhanced POI Data Search
• Here's an entry named KinectFusion Provides Low-Cost and Accessible 3D Interior Mapping

In the miscellaneous category:

• The Spatial Law blog shares a long entry named Geolocation and Privacy: Are We Going the Right Way?: "However, many of bills are so broadly written that if they were to become law they could apply to a broad range of geospatial products and services, including satellite and aerial imagery, GIS and GPS."
• VerySpatial mentions the launch of the augmented reality Layar Vision app to "recognize real-world objects and then trigger digital content based on that object"
• The GEB shares satellite imagery on the Japanese Tsunami that created some massive icebergs
• MacRumors details an Apple patent on schematic maps: "[...] a new maps application that could display a simplified subset of information most relevant to a user seeking specific information or routing."
• In special remote sensing news, Slashdot mentions a camera reaching its target by being thrown by a grenade launcher
• MapQuest tells us how free listing works on their MapQuest Local Business Center

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly discuss maps of the recent London riots
• Mapperz mentions the release of USGS historical maps

Top 10 Reasons to Attend FOSS4G 2011 in Denver
The Event Presents Great Value and Rare Opportunity

DENVER, July 27, 2011 -- The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference is the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software. The event presents a number of unique learning opportunities at a great value compared to similar professional conferences.

Following are the Top 10 reasons to consider attendance at this event.

1. Open source software for geospatial is gaining strong momentum with high performance and high-profile use cases, and you need to know what's available. If you are currently using closed source commercial software, you owe it to yourself and your organization to understand the capabilities, cost justifications, and the community of open source geospatial software developers.
2. Location: Denver is the recognized geospatial hub of the United States with many commercial geospatial data providers, commercial software companies, engaged software developers, and a wide array of federal agencies that create and manage geospatial data and applications. Coming to this hub will expose attendees to an engaged and vibrant community to interact and learn from.
3. Location: This is the first of these global gatherings to take place in North America in the past four years, and will likely not be repeated soon. The event makes its way around the world on a yearly basis, and if you live and work in North America, this is a chance to catch it while it's close.
4. Location: The weather and touring possibilities make it an excellent draw for global participants. The timing coincides with peak golden aspen viewing in the mountains, with typically clear and crisp autumn weather. Denver is also a key jumping off point for tours of the scenic American west, including many of the large national parks that are within a day's drive.
5. Gain a global perspective with presentations from speakers from around the world.
6. An introductory immersion welcomes newcomers with concentrated content to get you up to speed. With an all-day planned as an introduction, it's a prime opportunity to understand what's available and at a very low cost of only $149 for the day.
7. This is the top educational event for detailed workshops and sessions on tools, custom development, and applications. Again, there is great value here with Monday workshops at only $149 each, and one-day registration at only $349.
8. Evening social gatherings, big party night, and informal meetings make this a prime event to meet peers and extend your social network.
9. The event draws top developers in the community who are developing the next-generation tools. If you are looking for top talent to act as consultants in creating custom tools or to integrate FOSS solutions with your commercial implementations, this is the marketplace to meet them.
10. It's rare to encounter such a dedicated group of individuals on a mission to change the world with software. Be part of the movement to extend the reach and possibilities of Open Source Software for Geospatial and put a little passion in your work.

If you still aren't convinced, you can watch this video http://vimeo.com/osgeo/foss4g2011 from the local committee with a personal appeal, and insistence, that you come to FOSS4G in Denver.

About FOSS4G
FOSS4G is the global conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial that is organized by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) with support from an all-volunteer organizing committee and professional conference management from the Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA). The 2011 FOSS4G event in Denver marks the first North American event in four years, with the prior three events taking place in Barcelona, Sydney and Cape Town.

SOURCE: FOSS4G Organizing Committee

RELATED LINKS:
http://2011.foss4g.org/ FOSS4G Denver 2011
http://www.osgeo.org/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation
http://stateofthemap.org/ State of the Map Conference
http://www.gita.org/ Geospatial Information Technology Association