In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's the recent Esri-related geonews in batch mode.

From official sources:

• Here's a list of What’s New in ArcGIS Online for March 2013, a lot of new features
• There's also new data, DigitalGlobe and community imagery added to the World Imagery map and new updates to the Ocean Basemap
• Crowdsourcing works for Esri too, New community contributions added to the World Topographic Map and a second entry on the same topic and other contributions
• Other related additions include using Bing basemaps in ArcGIS Online and using Stamen and MapBox tilesets as basemaps in ArcGIS.com
• Here's the announcement of Esri Maps for Office 2.0 Released: "Esri Maps for Office is a powerful add-in for Microsoft Office that brings the capabilities of Esri’s mapping platform to Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint users."
• Amongst updates, ArcGIS API for JavaScript Version 3.4 Released and if Flex is not dead for you, ArcGIS for Flex 3.2 Released
• Three new beta SDK available: ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Windows Store apps Beta is available, the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt 10.2 beta is now available and the new ArcGIS Runtime SDK for OS X Beta is available
• And if the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS is of interest to you, there's the MapKit 2 ArcGIS Project on GitHub

From other sources:

• Directions Mag offers an article named Esri Certification Exams - Are you ready?

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source front:

• Here's a DM summary entry on FOSS4G-NA 2012 that I haven't shared yet, and it's pretty informative
• There's a new video showing us uDig features
• Here's examples of using QGIS in local government, related to QGIS, here's an entry on What's New in QGIS Plugins
• A technical entry on dynamic WMS styling with GeoServer with SLD
• Here's an interesting web browser memory usage experiment for OpenLayers

From the Google front:

• Google announce new StreetView imagery for Israel in an entry named Exploring Jerusalem’s Old City streets with Street View
• There's also an update to the Google Maps API deprecation policy and Terms of Service
• The GEB reminds us the options we have for Sharing your favorite locations in Google Earth

On the Microsoft front:

• You can now Find Venue Maps, Businesses and Buildings Faster on Bing Maps
• Bing Maps is Reducing the Complexity of Rendering Shapes

Discussed over Slashdot:

• A "Big Brother Chip", the Broadcom 4752, that acts as a ubiquitous location chip using everything available: "global navigation satellites, cell phone towers, and Wi-Fi hot spots, coupled with input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, step counters, and altimeters"
• A GPS system that will speed up tsunami warnings
• The Physical Travelling Salesman Challenge
• Using satellite imagery to counting Emperor Penguins from space

Directions Mag articles of note:

• The Top 10 Things You Should Know about GIS Certification, including "In 2012, more than 5,000 people are active GISPs." and "Eight states have recognized and endorsed the GISP"
• A Q&A entry about Is Intergraph’s New GeoMedia Smart Client for You?

In the everything else category:

• The ESA mentions Envisat's mapping of ice shelf disintegration in Antarctic and update on the investigation of Envisat woes, being offline since early April
• @Thierry_G links to interesting impressions on the Where 2012 conference titled From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle, asking where is the geospatial excitement today?
• Via Paul I found this extreme video example of augmented reality
• APB has an entry on TomTom’s New Global Geocoder Targets Power Users
• SS shares a perspective named Have the geospatial technology frontiers changed much in three years?
• SS also shares an interesting summary of a session on capacity building and the expansion of the global geospatial marketplace to a billion plus people

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly shares two visualizations, one on The history of shipping routes and the other on Mapping the Titanic's passengers

Last time I aggregated articles from Directions Magazine was early March. Here's selected articles published on DM since then.

• While we have already published quite a lot on the upcoming Google Earth Builder product, you might be interested in this additional generic article named Google Earth Builder Launched: Cloud Platform for Geospatial Data Storage and Processing
• DM shared their interesting geojargon survey results, letting us know, out of 538 respondents, which geospatial terms are well known and which ones aren't
• Here's a article named How Much Do GIS Consultants Charge in 2011?, from the tables provided (generated out of only 23 survey responses), the average for all types of GIS work seems to be between 86$ to 111$ an hour
• DM continued to provide regular coverage of GIS certification, this time with these articles: The Great Debate: To Certify or not to Certify, That Is an Absurd Question, Special Session on GIS Certification with David DiBiase, GISCI President, and Sheila Wilson, GISCI Executive Director and a last article on the GISP’s Code of Ethics and Rules of Conduct
• Here's an article on the Couchbase company and the CouchDB database system. The article is named Couchbase: Taking NoSQL and Geo to the Next Level. We mentioned GeoCouch in the past.
• Here's an article named Keeping the Patent Trolls at Bay - Defending Your Location-based Patents and Your Business and a related one named Microsoft and Google Fight Back Against Store-locator Patent Suits
• DM shared an article named The Case for Real Estate GIS in China
• In a praise for cloud GIS, here's an article named It’s Time to Change: How SaaS Will Enable the GIS Industry to Move Forward and Engage With New Market Opportunities
• Here's a article on Five Ways GPS Vehicle Tracking Can Reduce Fuel Costs

Here's the Friday geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• FGT mentions OpenCPN, an open source marine navigation software
• A year ago we mentioned MapGuide Maestro 2.0, the map authoring tool for MapGuide Open Source, they're now at MapGuide Maestro 3.0 and here's part 1 of a comprehensive walkthrough
• Here's an entry on Debian 6 "Squeeze" and its full support of geospatial software
• There's now a tour for the OpenGeo Suite
• APB shares an entry on Oregon TriMet moving from ESRI to geospatial open source software
• GeoCommons is doing fine, with now over 50,00 unique datasets and 400,000 attributes that you can map

From the ESRI front:

• The FGT blog shows screenshots of ESRI's Sketch-A-Map website to manually annotate maps
• Geogeeks offers an entry named Learn The Benefits Of Earning An Esri Technical Certification
• The FGT blog mention ESRI’s GovMaps.Org Beta website, currently offers a searchable catalog of 88  data layers

In the miscellaneous category:

• Kurt mentions NASA's GeoPapers tool, similar to their Google Spatial Scholar proposal
• APB mentions the upcoming SpacialDB, a new commercial spatial database that "Instead wouldn't it be great if you could just sign up and instantly load location data and access spatial functions from your existing app? SpacialDB is built to do just this."
• O'Reilly discusses Cartagr.am, a web map that displays geolocated images as basemap
• SS has an entry on the new U.S. government Geospatial Platform website
• Vector One has an entry named smart forests, wiring nature with geospatial technologies
• SS mentions that Drones Fly Imagery Missions Over Japan

In the maps category:

• Here's cartogram that shows earthquake risk vs population
• TMR links to a map named The 12 States of America that show how income inequality has fractured the nation and how median income has changed over the last 30 years
• Via SS, here's a forecast map of the nuclear radiation plume from Japan

Here's the articles publish last month over Directions Magazine that I wanted to share with our users.

• An informative article named NoSQL Databases:  What Geospatial Users Need to Know. If you never heard of NoSQL, now is the time to learn about it.
• An article on "GISCI's Executive Director Sheila Wilson writes about the addition of an exam to the GISP certification process. She addresses "the history of the debate, where we stand now, and the options being discussed by the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI).""
• An article on the economics and ROI of DEM data in the case of the recent Australian floods: "David Hocking, chief executive officer of the Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) in Australia, looks at the government’s position of slow investment in developing a nationwide digital elevation model (DEM) despite the financial impact of the floods."
• An informative aggregation of reactions to the U.S. Nationwide Broadband Map. There's also and Q&A with Connected Nation, a non-profit organization that is promoting broader adoption of broadband access.
• An article on Loc8 Codes, a system to tackle the problems of addresses in Ireland.

I haven' t aggregated and shared Direction Magazine articles for a while, there you go! Here's the recent DM articles published in the last month that I found interesting.

• A month ago, DM shared their own summary of ESRI's GeoDesign Summit 2011, a topic we discussed in the past. From the article: "Much of the work of some GIS practitioners is to document "what is." They do not get involved in what's to be. Geodesign is not necessarily something they'll run into. Others who are more tied in to any type of planning and looking forward to the next iteration of the built environment may well run into geodesign."

• If you have interest in the US federal government, this article on the Esri Federal User Conference is for you.

• We discussed a few times geospatial professional certifications, this next DM article named Revisiting the Path to GISP: Is it Time to Add an Examination? provides and update: "Those who found the first implementation of the certification less than satisfactory are likely to be at least intrigued by the new vision, which includes an examination based on the newly minted U.S. Department of Labor's Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) and other "industry-validated competency specifications." Feedback is requested between February 1 and 28, 2011 via the GISCI website. A decision on implementation is expected in April." Others wonder if crowdsourcing the certification mechanism could work.

• The last DM article I want to share with you is named Demonstrating to Executives That Your Geospatial Solution is Delivering Value. From the summary: "Senior executives often fail to grasp the value that the solution brings because they are not directly connected to it. This article, by PA Consulting’s Ross Smith and Andrew Sheahen, advocates the development of an ROI-based business case that looks beyond the technology and is based upon the business value that will be delivered by the program."

Here's recent ESRI-related geonews.

Most anticipated is certainly the release of the File Geodatabase API announced last month.

• From the official page: "The File Geodatabase API provides a non-ArcObjects based means by which advanced developers can work with File Geodatabases. A common user scenario is to open File Geodatabase tables in non-ESRI applications to view or modify data. This API provides access to the low-level File Geodatabase file I/O modules." 
• James Fee notes: "First off there is no raster support. Second you are totally on your own here. You have total control over screwing up your geodatabases here."

Other news:

• Mentioned last month, mandown informs us that the new ESRI Technical Certification is now open, in short: "The Esri Technical Certification Program recognizes qualified individuals who are proficient in best practices for using Esri software. Esri Technical Certifications are awarded in different areas of expertise at both an Associate and Professional level. The program is open to Esri users worldwide."
• APB mentions that the NOAA Coastal Service Center offers free LiDAR Data Handler for ArcGIS

Here's the usual Friday geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / open data front:

• A Wall Street Journal article on OpenStreetMap getting noticed by Microsoft and MapQuest
• Autodesk's CEO shared interesting comments on open source and MapGuide: "He commented that the effort has been a success based on the large number of users, but that Open Source was a bit of a ‘last gasp of the commoditization of desktop software.” He mentioned that the push toward mobile and cloud computing have eclipsed the interest in open source as a means to extend software capability, and that the phenomenon in the geospatial space that made this the right move doesn’t translate well to other markets that Autodesk serves."
• If you're into MapGuide and FDO, see this MapGuide Wishlist and this FDO wishlist
• An entry named 3D visualisation and DEM creation in QGIS with the GRASS plugin
• Also about QGIS, an overview of QGIS for MapInfo users, an entry on Quick graticule in QGIS and a new QGIS 1.6 brochure is available
• An entry about a workflow for creating beautiful relief shaded dems using GDAL
• libspatialindex 1.6.1 has been released
• OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.3.1 Released

From the ESRI front:

• The new ESRI Technical Certification Program has been announced
• ArcGIS 10 Data Interoperability Extension Service Pack 1 Released
• ArcGIS API For Microsoft Silverlight/WPF And ArcGIS API For Windows Phone 2.1 Now Available

From the Microsoft front:

• Microsoft reminds us of their nice Destinations Maps map app
• Bing Maps introduced mall directory maps

In the miscellaneous category:

• Three Russian GLONASS satellites were lost in the Pacific at launch
• Nigeria is launching two new OE satellites next February, the first one was in 2003
• SS shared an entry on Autodesk’s Project Galileo, promising to meld CAD, GIS and BIM
• Here's a followup entry on Free Shapefiles of Countries of the World
• A friend sent me a link to this article named Five good reasons why publishers should care about geolocation
• The U.S. Census Bureau started providing 2010 Population Estimates

In the maps category:

• An informative entry named the Uses and Misuses of the Mercator Projection
• Maps of Internet users and Internet penetration
• A map of Forest Restoration Potential