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)

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below.

From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server 2008 Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."Story imported from the previous Slashgeo.org Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo.org!. Thank you for your understanding.

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below.

From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server 2008 Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."