In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

http://www.stateofthemap.org/ to be held in Birmingham, UK 6-8th Sept 2013 is now open for Early Bird registration. Accommodation on-site at Aston University is also available for those who get in quick.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source front:

• Wonder where GeoTools is? Here's the Status of GeoTools presentation from FOSS4G 2011
• Here's about Metatools, a metadata management plugin for QGIS, now at version 0.2
• Here's the GeoServer Aggregating DataStore, enabling the republication from several data sources, including remote ones
• The slides and videos of OpenStreetMap's State of the Map 2011 conference are now available
• Sean Gillis' at it again, he started a new project called Fiona, an OGR API which wants to be "a clear alternative to the complex layers and cursors and fussy geometry objects of OGR and ArcPy"
• Ok, not directly geospatial, but Gource is the nicest tool to visualize source code changes I've seen yet (works with Git, SVN and others), and here it is showing the changes in QGIS from version 1.6 to 1.7

On the Esri front:

• ArcGIS Explorer Build 1750 is now available
• Mandown summarizes what’s new on ArcGIS Online for September 2011
• There's also an ArcGIS API for iOS 2.01 update for those developing with iOS 5 and another one for ArcGIS API For JavaScript 2.5
• Here's the Best Practices For Using Custom State Highway Shields In ArcGIS

In the everything-else category:

• Here's another entry on the New KML features in Google Earth 6.1
• Iran is releasing Basir, a Google Earth competitor, to counter Google's cultural aggression 
• Microsoft has an entry on the recent updates to Bing Maps: REST API, AJAX Control v7, and Account Center
• We mentioned a few times vertical datums, via Kurt, now NOAA is releasing VDatum, "designed to vertically transform geospatial data among a variety of tidal, orthometric and ellipsoidal vertical datums"
• That's how far sensors can go, millions of geolocated seismic sensors wirelessly connected for oil and gas exploration by Shell and HP
• V1 mentions a comprehensive guide on 3D spatial relationships
• Here's a Maperitive tutorial for Generating OSM Map For Adobe Illustrator
• In the neverending series of cellphone tracking, Slashdot discusses a story named Surveillance Case May Reveal FBI Cellphone Tracking Techniques
• And regarding car tracking Slashdot offers another story named Canberra Police Want Drones To Track Cars
• In the trivia category, Slashdot discusses a story named Swedish Daycare Tracks Kids With GPS Devices

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly mentions the Global Adaptation Index map, which "rates a given country's vulnerability to environmental shifts precipitated by climate change, its readiness to adapt to such changes, and its ability to utilize investment capital that would address the state of those vulnerabilities"
• V1 shares a map of the gas infrastructures in Europe

The upcoming week is looking to be very interesting for the industry of geospatial in the USA as well as the "open source / open data" world. As lucky as I am, I will be the on-site Slashgeo editor representative (Slashgeo is also the media partner for both Conferences) in both events in Denver, Colorado: State of the Map 2011 (Annual conference about the progress of OpenStreetMap and free geo-data in general) and FOSS4G 2011 (global conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, organized by OSGeo).

          
State of the Map 2011 is almost sold out in terms of registration and as the first FOSS4G in the USA, it might be the biggest FOSS4G conference ever in terms of number of attendees. Denver will be THE place to be for sharing new ideas on a Free and Open world which sharing geospatial information and tools is needed from everyone, everywhere and everyday.

First, my planning at the State of the Map weekend event is to look at what is next for OpenStreetMap in terms of quality, real applications, its role when dealing with major disaster event, ESRI/Microsoft contribution to OSM, crowd sourcing with OSM for public organisation such as USGS, etc.

Secondly, the FOSS4G 2011 might be a good gathering for social networking in the open source high tech world, but also to see the new trends coming from the industry, such as WPS, cloud map and tiling services. My planning for the FOSS4G is to attend presentation or workshop related to: geocache, WFS Transactional, WPS project, GIS in the Cloud, mobile applications, PgRouting, PostGIS, Open Data with Open Source, Web Mapping Performance, etc. I will keep you posted with some quick impression and nice pictures of the main geospatial open source and open data social and technical events. Denver is looking open, global and free for the entire week!

Nicolas Gignac, on-site Slashgeo editor representative at the FOSS4G and State of the Map 2011

Still in catch up mode, here's the last three weeks of geospatial open source news in batch mode.

• Of huge pertinence to the geospatial open source and open data communities, the FOSS4G 2011 and State of the Map conferences are set to being in a few days. If you're in the Denver area and still hesiting, don't, they are really worth. I'll have to miss them myself this year, but Slashgeo's editor Nicolas Gignac will be attending and provide coverage.
• Directions Mag share an interview with Peter Batty on what to expect at FOSS4G 2011
• Another recent article at DM is named Open Source Licensing: Risk and Opportunity, risks related to intellectual property and governance
• Sextante, the open source spatial java data analysis library, can now work in ArcGIS, and run SAGA and GRASS GIS in ArcGIS via Sextante, and why not, use Sextante algorithms in ArcGIS Model Builder
• PostGIS's Paul Ramsey continues to share insightful comments in an entry named Open source is not free (as in beer) ...
• Users of Autodesk's MapGuide Open Source will be happy to know MapGuide Maestro 3.5 has been released. We already know that MapGuide Maestro 4.0 is introducing 'Local Conneciton Mode'
• V1 mentions updates to the open source multi-modal routing software OpenTripPlanner, which now supports Canada, Poland, India, Spain, Ireland, and Israel (we covered OpenTripPlanner in May 2005) 
• Tim links to a generic article on Quantum GIS in the GeoInformatics magazine, and here's a tip on modifying SVG symbols in QGIS
• Here's an entry on getting GPS data (GPX format) into SpatiaLite, either from QGIS, CSV or OGR
• Here's web-based PostGIS geometry and raster viewer, no need to install anything
• GeoServer now has extensions to monitor and audit your GeoServer installation