In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Via James I learned that earlier this month was released Natural Earth v2.0.0. A quick reminder: "Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." We mentioned this dataset in the past quite a few times.

From the 2.0.0 release notes: "The 2.0.0 release focuses on 7 major areas and is available to download today à la carte at NaturalEarthData. ZIP combo downloads of all vectors: SHP (279 mb) or SQLite (222 mb) or QuickStart kit for ArcMap and QGIS (165 mb). [What's new:]

• Economic geography
• Remastered geometries
• Introduc Gray Earth rasters
• New file name and field name schemas
• Address user submitted bug reports
• Moved to GitHub
• Adopt semantic versioning"

 Here's recent FOSS4G and open geodata related news in batch mode.

• What can't be missed is the Open Source Geospatial Foundation fifth birthday. There's also a cake and various ideas for celebrations. I vividly remember OSGeo's initial press release, which I helped translate at the time. The highlights shared by Daniel (first link):
  • OSGeo went from 8 founding projects in 2006 to 20 software projects today (including 6 in incubation)
  • OSGeo's annual FOSS4G conference turned into a truly international event, visiting 4 continents over 5 years
  • Over 20 local chapters are active around the world, promoting OSGeo's software and mission in their local language and communities.
  • Daniel also reminds us that GRASS GIS, the open source desktop GIS, goes abck to 1982, MapServer around 1995 and GDAL/OGR in 1998.
• If you have interest in OGC Cataloging Services and metadata, there's a new open source CSW server in Python project named "pycsw"
• Here's an entry on Web based printing with QGIS server and another one named importing a DBF containing X-Y Values into QGIS
• Via this weekly summary, I learned about Maps4Mac open source app to get OpenStreetMap data in MacOS X

Regarding open data:

• MapQuest announced extented use of OpenStreetMap data in their entry named MapQuest Opens Up The Americas, Completes World Routing, Adds New Open Services, there also is an entry specific to MapQuest's introduction of alternate routes.
• MapQuest imagery and OpenStreetMap tiles were added to the open source GeoExplorer
• While I found little information about it I learned about OpenTouchMap, based on OpenStreetMap data, here's the OpenTouchMap.org website
• Natural Earth vectors are now available in the cloud, we mentioned NE data now being public domain last December