In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• Here's an excellent and funny presentation of Leaflet: Past, Present and Future
• GitHub just added mapping capabilities: any GeoJSON file hosted on GitHub can be mapped with MapBox Streets 
• Mapnik 2.2.0 has been released
• Here's CLAVIN (Cartographic Location And Vicinity INdexer) is an open source software package for document geotagging and geoparsing that employs context-based geographic entity resolution (via O'Reilly Radar)
• A new book available, The QGIS Training Manual, by Rüdiger Thiede, Tim Sutton, Horst Düster, and Marcelle Sutton
• Here comes QGIS Enterprise, it's QGIS Desktop + Server + Web Client along with support and maintenance contract
• Yes, in QGIS 2.0 we'll get data-defined symbol properties, and here's on the new QGIS 2.0 APIs
• Mapbender has been resurrected into Mapbender3: "the back office software and client framework for spatial data infrastructures" 
• Something new, GeoThink.ca - Canadian Geospatial and Open Data Think Tank
• Here's some nice javascript examples dealing with projections and other geostuff, mostly from D3.js, some are pretty impressive
• Here's all OpenGeo presentations videos from FOSS4G-NA 2013, and why not, here's the GeoServer presentation from GeoSolutions
• About the same time, OpenGeo also launched MapMeter, a monitoring tool for spatial deployments such as GeoServer
• From the gvSIG blog, I learned about available Emergency mapping symbology

From the Esri front:

• An entry named From ArcMap to ArcGIS Online: well-prepared geographic information for the web
• Here's the OGC summary of what happened with the GeoServices REST API standard submitted by Esri
• There's now ArcGIS Online admin tools available on GitHub
• News that Esri looks to link CAD Software to ArcGIS Online

From the Google front:

• Google announced today nothing less than 1,000 new Street View locations to Google Maps
• Road traffic information is important to Google, Google To Buy Waze For $1.3 Billion and the official Google announcement
• There was a Google ocean bathymetry update earlier this week
• Wonder what Google Glasses looks like inside? Via Make, here's What's Inside Google Glass
• That's a topic we mentioned before, recently discussed over Slashdot, How Google Street View Keeps an Eye on Things Where There Are No Streets
• A book's voyage recreated in Google Earth: “Sailing Alone Around the World” in Google Earth
• I tried the new Google Maps interface, and I admit, this is an excellent improvement

In the miscellaneous category:

• Via APB, the well known Stamen Design launched their Map Stack that makes designing maps free, easy and fun
• APB links to an article named The Revolution Will Be Live-Mapped: A Brief History of Protest Maptivism
• In case you missed it, Landsat 8 data is available for download since May 30th
• Earlier this week, Microsoft announced 270 terabytes of new Bird's Eye imagery
• Geoff mentions that the Time required to create 3D city models dropping rapidly, now less than a week for a textured 3D model of a whole city
• Google Glass will have competition, Atheer Offers a Wearable Display That's Glasses, Not Glass, but it's clearly not as sexy or wearable
• In Apple's iOS new 'Today' feature, there's Traffic Information on Frequently Visited Locations
• A quick one on 3D printing, "Anti-Gravity" 3D Printer Sculpts Shapes On Any Surface
• A generic article on drones / UAVs gathering location-based science data easier and cheaper than ever
• And now those drones can be accurately guided by thoughts 
• Frank at VerySpatial offers a long entry on the geography of cars
• The same site made me aware of the course on Teaching World Music with Geospatial Technology

In the maps category:

• Here's 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is: median income, poverty line, inequality, food stamps, and diplomas
• Here's a Map of All American Rivers
• Funny name, WWF's ArkGIS: mapping the changing Arctic landscape
• Here's bedmap2, an ice and bedrock map Antarctica

This news made it outside the traditional geospatial community, Slashdot's story is named GIS Community Blocks Esri's Geospatial 'Open Standard' REST API.

Their summary: "The developer of ArcGIS, Esri, has dropped its bid to have the GeoServices REST API recognized as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium, after a community backlash against 'providing a vendor with significant market advantage, erring on the creation of a state-sanctioned monopoly.'"

This is a topic we covered 2 weeks ago. You can also read a useful summary and quotes from OGC officials named OGC heed community pressure regarding "GeoServices REST API": "“Considering the breath of discussion both internal and external to the OGC process since the vote announcement, the SWG members feel that the vote cannot continue until the many questions raised have been addressed. Issues regarding OGC process, vendor advantage, duplication of capabilities, etc. have now overshadowed technical discussions of the merits of the specification. By withdrawing the OGC GeoServices REST API candidate standard, the necessary discussions regarding OGC process, policy, and position can continue separately.”"

The recent geonews in batch mode, covering a larger timespan than usual.

On the open source front:

• The OSGeo presented an Open Letter to OGC on the GeoServices REST API standard, and it's pretty well documented and informative
• Here's an interesting entry on comparing OpenLayers and Leaflet
• The schedule for FOSS4G-CEE 2013 is now known
• Sean pointed me to  Tom MacWright's online GeoJSON editor
• In releases, there was GeoServer 2.3.2 released and GeoTools 9.2 Released
• Getting closer to QGIS 2.0, here's nice examples of the alpha channel in QGIS color ramps
• If you did not see the press release, OpenGeo is not non-profit anymore

On the Google front:

• The influx of Google Glass stories continues, now Facial Recognition Comes to Google Glass
• Here's Kurt's list of maps-related videos from the Google I/O 2013 conference

On the Esri front:

• ABP reminds us of Esri's Severe Weather Map, including tornadoes...
• An entry on why Esri is excited about the Android Location APIs
• Data updates, World Topographic Map updated with content for the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States
• along with other updates, including Additional DigitalGlobe and community imagery added to the World Imagery map
• Also updated, ArcGIS for Windows Phone and ArcGIS API for JavaScript v3.5 Released

In the everything-else category:

• MapBox tells us they got a huge satellite update, now cloudless and with aerial imagery, but also interesting are the OpenStreetMap updates making they way to MapBox maps in only 5 minutes
• Here's a Make article on mapping buildings with a Kinect
• Some of you might be interested by the GiT4NMD conference, Geo-information Technologies for Natural Disaster Management
• Space Daily share an article named World's major development banks look closer at Earth observation
• Here's links regarding the history of apostrophes in place names
• Via SL, an article named China's Drone Program Appears To Be Moving Into Overdrive
• Those interested in the exciting MapBox work may also want to read about vector tiles of MapBox Streets
• While CAD and GIS have come closer, they remain distinct, here's an entry named Integrating geospatial into construction: the challenge
• Geoff also shares two other interesting entries, one named Economic value of big geospatial data could reach $700 billion/yr by 2020 and the other Estimating the economic and financial impact of poor data quality

Slashdot discussed a few minor geo-related stories:

• One involving GPS named Researchers Are Developing Ad Hoc Networks For Car-To-Car Data Exchange
• Privacy stories goes on, UK's 4G Network Selling Subscriber Tracking Data To Police, Private Parties and this one Congress Demands Answers From Google Over Google Glass Privacy Concerns
• Along with new challenges to locating North itself, Global Warming Shifts the Earth's Poles

In the maps category:

• Here's The Best Geographic Visualization I’ve Seen In Ages according to VerySpatial, basically a circle centered in Asia where over half of the world's population resides
• In Paris? Apple Maps for iOS Adds 3D Flyover Coverage in Paris
• MapBox shares a Q&A of the City Guides by National Geographic mobile app

Bloggage update: Vector online GIS appears to be gaining traction. These emerging technologies contrast with Esri who offers a slew of tools on the desktop and in arcgis.com like mature web mapping services and model building. But these newcomers offer a service to process GIS functions online and allow to load data direct from web source further augmenting their web performance. Here I compare how I used a 180K vector dataset from NOAA NGDC described previously on these alternate methods. 

Chris Holmes shares a pretty insightful and informative letter in an entry named 'Opening Esri'. Esri's closer relationship with open source started with providing code on GitHub last September and even up to last February's official entry named going open source with Esri.

From the Chris Holmes entry: "So I wanted to give to Esri a measurable roadmap of actions to take that would signal to me a real commitment to ‘open’. [...] Each piece of Esri technology ideally could be used stand alone with other pieces. Stated another way, there should be no lock-in of anything that users create – even their cartography rules. [...] it is a business risk, since it opens up more potential competition. But it’s also a big business opportunity if done right. And reaches beyond mere business to being a real force for good in the world, becoming a truly loved company, with lots of friends."

The OSGeo Board is pleased to announce that it has approved the application by the pycsw project to enter the incubation process. Incubation is a stepping stone to becoming a full fledged OSGeo project.

pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python.

pycsw fully implements the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification [Catalogue Service for the Web]. Initial development started in 2010 (more formally announced in 2011). The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation.

pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata. Existing repositories of geospatial metadata can also be exposed via OGC:CSW 2.0.2, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures.

[this story was submitted by a user as a press release (thanks!), I'm republishing it as a story too since it's a pertinent major release]

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.3.0, available for download.

This release contains six months worth of improvements and fixes to the GeoServer code base. Including several important new features and improvements such as:

• A pluggable configuration subsystem (for the catalog and service configuration)
• GeoWebCache clustering and disk quota improvements
• More powerful layer groups and better control of the WMS capabilities layer tree
• Several security subsystem improvements
• WPS process whitelist (control which processes your WPS is exposing)
• WMS dimensions support improvements (units, custom dimensions)
• JSON and JSONP output format support in many OGC operations
• The monitoring module finally graduating to official extension
• Raster re-projection quality improvements and speedups
• INSPIRE module improvements for the WFS protocol
• A newfound ability to catalogue all components of GeoServer via a REST API

For those daring enough to try out nightly builds the 2.3.x series also offers a new scripting extension allowing you to write WPS processes and small applications in your preferred scripting language. Also included as a nightly community module available is a complete WCS 2.0 service implementation.

More information about the new features of the 2.3.x stream can be found in the  GeoServer 2.3-beta release announcement.

The good news do not stop there. GeoServer has finally completed the OSGeo incubation and it’s now an official OSGeo project. Many thanks to all that participated, in particular Jody Garnett for constantly pushing forward, Landon Blake for mentoring us, and all the people that participated to the FOSS4G-AU code sprint in which all of the grunt work of provenance review was done. We want to thank in particular Jody Garnett, Adam Brown, Karin Stronkhorst, Luca Morandini and Joshua Vote for the hard work.

And last but not least there have been some bug fixes since the RC1 release, you can find a full list in the GeoServer 2.3.0 changelog. Included in this list, for those willing to try out nightly builds, is a new fast WMS JPEG encoder based on libjpeg-turbo which should give a nice boost to your raster data serving.

Download GeoServer 2.3, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.  As with any new version, be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.3

[this story was submitted by a user as a press release (thanks!), I'm republishing it as a story too since it's a pertinent major release]

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 9.0 for download from sourceforge:

• geotools-9.0-bin.zip
• geotools-9.0-doc.zip
• geotools-9.0-userguide.zip
• geotools-9.0-project.zip

This release is also deployed to our OSGeo Maven Repository.

This is the first stable release of the 9.x series made in conjunction with the GeoServer 2.3.0 release. This release represents the successful transition of the project to a six month timed release cycle.

This release contains mostly bug fixes since 9.0-RC1. Please see the change log for more details.

Here is a summary of the major news in the 9.x series:

• Feature Collection Clean up: we have retired several methods from FeatureCollection that were only applicable for in memory feature collections. A Quality Assurance review was performed on all FeatureCollection implementations resulting in a great improvement on consistency. Thanks to Jody Garnett and Andrea Aime for this work.
• The Vector Grid module has graduated from the "unsupported" staging area and is now included as an extension. Thanks to Micheal Bedward for championing this work.
• General support for complex features has been factored out into the gt-complex module for reuse.
• FeatureCollection, FeatureIteartor and FeatureReader are Java 7 ready with support for try-with-resource syntax.
• Partial 3D data support has been added with direct support for PostGIS, Oracle, and Property DataStore. Thanks to Andrea Aime for the initial implementation, with a follow-up funded by NTLIS for Oracle support.
• Thanks to Niels Charlier for putting together ReferenceEnvelope3D allowing us to query three-dimensional datasets.
• WMS client support has greatly improved with WMS 1.3.0 now enabled by default during version negotiation. Thanks to LISAsoft and the OGC for supporting this work.
• New OGC models have been added for WCS 2.0 and OWS 2.0 along with XML support.
• Updated to use the latest ImageIO-Ext 1.1.6 and JTS 1.13 releases

The GeoTools 9.0 series contains API changes. Developers are encouraged to review the upgrade instructions prior to use.

If you missed the previous milestones, betas and RCs you can have a look at the complete set of improvements provided by the 9.0 series here:

• GeoTools 9.0 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-RC1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-beta1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-M0 Release Notes

Thanks for using GeoTools!

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 9.0 for download from sourceforge:

• geotools-9.0-bin.zip
• geotools-9.0-doc.zip
• geotools-9.0-userguide.zip
• geotools-9.0-project.zip

This release is also deployed to our OSGeo Maven Repository.

This is the first stable release of the 9.x series made in conjunction with the GeoServer 2.3.0 release. This release represents the successful transition of the project to a six month timed release cycle.

This release contains mostly bug fixes since 9.0-RC1. Please see the change log for more details.

Here is a summary of the major news in the 9.x series:

• Feature Collection Clean up: we have retired several methods from FeatureCollection that were only applicable for in memory feature collections. A Quality Assurance review was performed on all FeatureCollection implementations resulting in a great improvement on consistency. Thanks to Jody Garnett and Andrea Aime for this work.
• The Vector Grid module has graduated from the "unsupported" staging area and is now included as an extension. Thanks to Micheal Bedward for championing this work.
• General support for complex features has been factored out into the gt-complex module for reuse.
• FeatureCollection, FeatureIteartor and FeatureReader are Java 7 ready with support for try-with-resource syntax.
• Partial 3D data support has been added with direct support for PostGIS, Oracle, and Property DataStore. Thanks to Andrea Aime for the initial implementation, with a follow-up funded by NTLIS for Oracle support.
• Thanks to Niels Charlier for putting together ReferenceEnvelope3D allowing us to query three-dimensional datasets.
• WMS client support has greatly improved with WMS 1.3.0 now enabled by default during version negotiation. Thanks to LISAsoft and the OGC for supporting this work.
• New OGC models have been added for WCS 2.0 and OWS 2.0 along with XML support.
• Updated to use the latest ImageIO-Ext 1.1.6 and JTS 1.13 releases

The GeoTools 9.0 series contains API changes. Developers are encouraged to review the upgrade instructions prior to use.

If you missed the previous milestones, betas and RCs you can have a look at the complete set of improvements provided by the 9.0 series here:

• GeoTools 9.0 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-RC1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-beta1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-M0 Release Notes

Thanks for using GeoTools!

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.3.0, available for download.

This release contains six months worth of improvements and fixes to the GeoServer code base. Including several important new features and improvements such as:

• A pluggable configuration subsystem (for the catalog and service configuration)
• GeoWebCache clustering and disk quota improvements
• More powerful layer groups and better control of the WMS capabilities layer tree
• Several security subsystem improvements
• WPS process whitelist (control which processes your WPS is exposing)
• WMS dimensions support improvements (units, custom dimensions)
• JSON and JSONP output format support in many OGC operations
• The monitoring module finally graduating to official extension
• Raster re-projection quality improvements and speedups
• INSPIRE module improvements for the WFS protocol
• A newfound ability to catalogue all components of GeoServer via a REST API

For those daring enough to try out nightly builds the 2.3.x series also offers a new scripting extension allowing you to write WPS processes and small applications in your preferred scripting language. Also included as a nightly community module available is a complete WCS 2.0 service implementation.

More information about the new features of the 2.3.x stream can be found in the  GeoServer 2.3-beta release announcement.

The good news do not stop there. GeoServer has finally completed the OSGeo incubation and it’s now an official OSGeo project. Many thanks to all that participated, in particular Jody Garnett for constantly pushing forward, Landon Blake for mentoring us, and all the people that participated to the FOSS4G-AU code sprint in which all of the grunt work of provenance review was done. We want to thank in particular Jody Garnett, Adam Brown, Karin Stronkhorst, Luca Morandini and Joshua Vote for the hard work.

And last but not least there have been some bug fixes since the RC1 release, you can find a full list in the GeoServer 2.3.0 changelog. Included in this list, for those willing to try out nightly builds, is a new fast WMS JPEG encoder based on libjpeg-turbo which should give a nice boost to your raster data serving.

Download GeoServer 2.3, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.  As with any new version, be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.3