In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Still catching up my August holidays, here's the recent geospatial open source and open data geonews.

In general news:

• O'Reilly publishes an article named With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger: "There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t."
• Esri published an update on their relation with open source: "Esri has always hosted open code and samples in a variety of ways, but more can be done. Focus and motivation needs to be improved, and Esri is now making it a priority to improve its open source participation. More of Esri’s code should and will be open sourced in the coming days, weeks, months, and years." They are also on Github now, http://github.com/esri and http://github.com/arcgis
• sxdf
• India launched the beta of their open data portal
• MapQuest have a New Geocoding Service and Updated APIs Based on Open Data
• OpenGeo shares an article named Haitidata.org: using open source geospatial for disaster response planning
• FOSS4G software getting adopted, gvSIG 1.11 now official part of the standard software portfolio in the City of Munich and Luxembourg using open source GIS for cadastre
• DM shares a 2-parts article named Designing an Open Source Geospatial Solution to Manage Airport Noise and Operations
• For the curious ones, here's the new OSGeo Board and Charter members refreshed

In software news:

• The OSGeo-Live 6.0 GIS software collection has been released
• A serious OpenLayers competitor, Leaflet 0.4 has been released, actually, they're at version 0.4.3 now
• Believe it or not, MySQL inches closer to PostGIS with support of true spatial relationship functions
• Here's a short entry on Surface Interpolation in GeoServer and there's a new release, v 1.4.3, of GeoServer-Manager
• Nathan is enthusiastic about Five new awesomely awesome QGIS features, here's more on the Latest Style User Interface Improvements
• There's a new winGRASS 7 with R-integration
• Where's MapGuide Open Source? Here's MapGuide state of the union address (or: Results of the user/developer survey)

Here's the recent Google-related geonews. I'm pretty certain most of you learned of the major 8.9 magnitude Japan earthquake near Honshu that happened a few hours ago. We'll share news of it when related maps and geospatial news will be available. You're always welcomed to contribute.

From the official sources:

• Google announced new 3D imagery of central London’s buildings and trees in Google Earth
• Japan's Hiroshima Peace Memorial in now available in Street View and the GEB mentions other new Street View imagery in Japan
• Google is encouraging Latitude adoption with check-in offers in Austin, Texas
• Google Maps now allows you to find electric vehicle charging stations
• A few days ago, Google shared post-earthquake images of Christchurch, New Zealand
• The Photos layer from Google Maps is now available to Maps API developers

From other sources:

• The GEB mentions another way to build 3D building models using satellite imagery via a stereographic pair
• The GEB has an entry on using Google Earth to map all facilities in Haiti that need Internet access
• The GEB mentions a detailed Shaker village modeled in Google Earth, head to Wikipedia to learn who Shakers are

Here's recent Google Geonews.

From the official sources:

• There's new oblique imagery for several U.S. cities in Google Maps
• There's an obligatory entry named Haiti, one year after the earthquake
• Google offers an entry named Rebuilding L’Aquila in 3D with Google SketchUp, referring to the April 2009 earthquake in Italy
• You can now Discover New Places From Your Hotpot Friends on Google Maps, and the related iOS new feature, Google Places with Hotpot for iPhone
• Google is proposing Map Maker to build a better map of Southern Sudan, OpenStreetMap efforts for Sudan doesn't seem very active
• In the Augmented Reality realm, Google Goggles gets improved and can even solve your Sudoku

From other sources:

• Via Ogle Earth, we learn from Google that there is now 800 million Google Earth 'activations', that's a very significant amount. In August 2009, they we are 500M, up from 400M in July 2008. How is that calculated? See this 2008 entry
• The GEB has an entry on viewing SketchUp models in your hand with augmented reality
• Here's the USCG MISLE public database in Google Earth, MISLE standing for 'Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement'

I've been overly busy lately, the consequence is you're getting your geonews in batch mode a little later than usual. Here they are!

On the Google front:

• Google provided an early look at HotPot, a local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends
• Google Boost, a local business advertising program, is now available to about 10 U.S. cities
• There's new panoramic photos in Google Earth

On the ESRI front:

• ArcGIS 10 Service Pack 1 Released
• V1 mentions GIS Tutorial books for ArcGIS 10
• SS informs us that Esri Adds an iOS App to Help Link Your Health to Your Environment

On the Microsoft front:

• There's a white paper on the new spatial features in the upcoming MS SQL Server

On the open data/open source front:

• O'Reilly is enthusiastic about Boston real-time transit data now available
• Here's an entry named Government institutions and OpenStreetMap in practice
• Also interesting is USGS Trialling OSM Software Stack for Editing
• A new feature for the Java Topology Suite: Single-Sided Buffers in JTS
• News of the integration of a 3D globe directly in QGIS, and while we're at it, a summary of the QGIS hackfest
• New releases: Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.6
• Shapely 1.2.7 has also been released
• Here's a discussion on ExifTool to modify location (GPS) metadata of your pictures

In the miscellaneous category:

• I do have to have to mention that we're in the Geography Awareness Week 2010
• While we already discussed worldfile basics, here's to refresh our minds: the WorldFile explained
• Vietnam ojecting to China's depiction of disputed islands in Map World
• The FGT blog mentions the release of Dinamica EGO 1.6, software for spatial environmental modeling
• V1 discusses ‘What is driving the need for real-time geodata, and how does that impact the spatial information sector?’
• In another entry, V1 discusses the Strategic Citywide Spatial Planning of Port-au-Prince, Haiti
• In a last V1 entry, BIM – CAD – GIS Integration is discussed

In the maps category:

• A quick look to the map of landlocked and double-landlocked countries
• Here's Cartograms of the 2010 U.S. Midterm elections
• Might be useful, an Easy Magnetic Declination Value Website