In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Having two daughters at home does require a lot of energy! That's why this edition of the 'pertinent geonews in batch mode' covers the last two weeks.

On the open source front:

• A new GeoServer 2.1 workshop is freely available
• From the OSGeo-discuss list, I learned about Open Indicators Consortium's Weave (in beta), an open source visualization environment supporting geography
• The MapFish Framework version 2.2 has been released
• ImageI/O-Ext 1.1.0 has been released
• uDig gets its plugin Image Georeferencing View at version 1.0
• The Orfeo ToolBox 3.10 and Monteverdi 1.8 have been released
• GeoTools 2.7.2 has been released

On the Google front:

• Google their biggest ever update of Street View imagery, available for 13 countries: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
• Google added lots of oblique 45 degrees imagery to Google Maps
• If you visited Google Maps, you probably noticed the new interface

On the Microsoft front:

• Microsoft announced that Bing Maps unveiled exclusive high res imagery with Global Ortho Project
• They also offer a new Microsoft Local Impact Map
• Their dev tip is Uploading Excel Data to the Bing Spatial Data Services

In the miscellaneous category:

• Via AGISRS, I learned about the charter edition of LiDAR Magazine is available free online
• Via email, I learned about the new online SDI Magazine, SDI meaning spatial data infrastructure in this context
• Regarding MapQuest, you can save maps and directions to your mobile and you can now add your business to MapQuest
• APB mentions TimeClock for iPhone, an app that logs your time spent at a specific location, such as work 
• MacRumors details the diverses mapping companies for iOS 5 in an entry named Evidence in iOS 5 that Apple is Building Its Own Mapping Solution
• Via a Twitter friend, I tried Rome's '3 Dreams of Black' interactive 3D music "video" in WebGL, reminiscent of Arcade Fire's interactive Google Maps / StreetView video

Slashdot ran a couple of geo-related discussions:

• Supreme Court To Weigh In On Warrantless GPS Tracking
• Tracking Bracelets for Autistic Kids and Senior Citizens
• Franken Bill Would Protect Consumers Location Data
• Weather satellites are losing funding

In the maps category:

• TMR shows a map of the increase of the new Normal Temperatures, years 1971-2000 vs 1981-2010, for the U.S., scary
• The same site mentions ESA's map of of the Arctic Sea Ice
• MapTogether mentions Mapnificent, allowing you to learn how far you can go from a certain point in a certain time using public transit

Here's the recent geonews that we haven't already mentioned in batch mode.

In addition to last Friday's FOSS4G geonews:

• There's a new open source Microsoft Bing Maps Android SDK available
• MapFish 2.1 has been released, and it's now BSD-licensed instead of GPL
• Here's news of what's coming for OpenLayers 2.11
• Shapely 1.2.9 has been released

In the miscellaneous category:

• The FGT blog is excited about Voyager, a tool to catalog and search your local geospatial datasets (free and paid version available)
• Several sources have mentioned that the U.S. data.gov and other open sites are closing
• Kurt offers an entry on the U.S. marine cadastre
• There's a first GLONASS smartphone available in Russia
• I smiled when I read the newly introduced "NoGIS" term, remisnescent of WebGIS and neogeography, James Fee shares what he thinks of it
• Slashdot discusses ESA's GOCE satellite detailed information about the Earth's gravitational shape
• If you're that curious, the last Google imagery update included the set from the upcoming 'The Hobbit' movie shot in New Zealand
• The Geonames blog shares an update on the geolocation of Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia Web Services

In the maps category:

• TMR links to NYT day-by-day situation map of the Libyan uprising
• JF mentions a nice Census map analysis of New York City using Google Fusion Tables
• Here's a map of Canada's ridings for the national election early next month
• TMR also shares a map of the decline of ozone in the Arctic
• The prolefic TMR also mentioned the book "Railway Maps of the World"
• Ok, maybe not newsworthy, but here's 25 Mind-Blowing Aerial Photographs Around the World

The open source web mapping framework MapFish 2.0 has been released. From the announcement: "The highlights of the release are:
* MapFish 2 comes with GeoAlchemy, and uses GeoAlchemy internally. Among other things, this brings MapFish support for PostGIS as well as Spatialite, MySQL, and Oracle Spatial.
* MapFish 2 is based on Pylons 1.0, the first stable version of Pylons.
* the API of MapFish 2 is incompatible with that of MapFish 1.2, see to know how to migrate your applications.
* the client plugin installs OpenLayers 2.9.1, and GeoExt 0.7 in the application, and does not longer install MapFish Client."