In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

[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!

While cleaning up old emails I ended up on this scientific article named Metrics to Measure Open Geospatial Data Quality published last year by Jingfeng Xia. Data quality is a topic we discussed before.

From the conclusion: "Because of the uniqueness and complexity of geospatial data, quality control is always a challenge to data providers, managers, analysts and data service providers. Metrics developed to measure data quality need to reflect the nature of the data, and therefore must be diversely structured to handle maps, coordinates, attributes and other types of geospatial data. A list of dimensions with clear and accurate definitions will provide necessary standards for the measurement. When the practice of open access is also considered, several more layers of complexity are added and additional tasks are created to solve issues pertaining to web communication, data usability, data integrity and related issues. Both quantitative metrics based on objective measurement and qualitative metrics based on subjective measurement are essential to the quality control of geospatial data."

Bloggage update: Recent mass shootings in the US and elsewhere affect me in a particular way. The Guardian had excellent coverage, not only in statistics but also the attendant data in their outstanding Data Blog. Whilst I created maps in Google Fusion Tables before, look no further for great uses of Google's new rendering tools! The issue is complicated: if the rate of assault and murder is overwhelmingly tipped toward firearms, their numbers are in slight decrease. World map also shows that whilst the US has the most guns per capita, it certainly doesn't have the highest homicide rates globally.

It's easy to love MapBox for the way they push geospatial innovation. Last week they introduced MapBox Satellite.

What it is? "We’ve been working hard to bring MapBox users a fast, beautiful satellite and aerial imagery layer that integrates seamlessly with MapBox Streets and custom overlays. We’re happy to announce that it’s available today and included in MapBox Basic plans and above.

We are approaching MapBox Satellite in three main phases. Today marks Phase 1 completion with full world coverage to zoom 12 and full U.S. aerial coverage to zoom 17. Phase 2 will arrive in early 2013 as we deploy full U.S. and Europe coverage to zoom 18, followed by an aggressive Phase 3 rollout schedule for the rest of the world to zoom 17 during the first half of 2013."

Here's a really nice entry named Open Aerial: The Data Behind MapBox Satellite: "MapBox Satellite is powered by raw imagery from multiple sources that is then processed by MapBox using open source tools. All the data you're about to see is free, open, and if you're a U.S. taxpayer, available thanks to you."

Earlier this week, Statistics Canada started to make freely available data from the 2011 Canadian Census. Here are the release dates for the reminder of the data.

​While this is excellent news, I invite you to read the informative DataLibre.ca article: "Upon playing with the data dissemination interface today, my concerns were re-affirmed.  The data are free but not necessarily accessible, in the sense that the methods used to disseminate and discover these is complicated, unclear and there are some favourite geographies missing – most notably Dissemination Areas (DA) [editor's note: it's there, see at bottom of the full article] while others are hidden – Census Tracts (CTs). For example, if you go to the Census Profile and you want to look up 5 cities at once you cannot! You can only look up one city at a time, which also means you can only download one geography at a time.  There are over 2000 cities in Canada and if you want to know who the top 30 are in terms of population, then its “Houston we have a problem!” sorta."

This is major news for anyone using DEM datasets. Here's about a new elevation dataset named Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 - GMTED2010. Here's the USGS report about GMTED2010 and the description and download site on USGS's EROS.

From the article: "The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) have released an updated and more accurate global elevation model that pulls data from Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED®) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); Canadian elevation data; SPOT 5 Reference 3D data; data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); and updated Antarctica and Greenland terrain models. This new elevation data called Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010),  replaces the thirty year old GTOPO30 terrain model.

GMTED2010 is a suite of seven raster data products: minimum elevation, maximum elevation, mean elevation, median elevation, standard deviation of elevation, systematic subsample, and breakline emphasis. The spatial resolution of GMTED2010 ranges from 30, 15 and 7.5 arc-seconds (approximately 1 kilometer, 500 meters and 250 meters, respectively)."

You might be interested in the ASTER GDEM and the SRTM-DEM CGIAR-CSI v4 datasets, amongst other DEMs.

I first heard about it from Mapperz, Nokia introduced Map Creator. You can head to maps.nokia.com/mapcreator to try it yourself.

From the Nokia announcement: "We’ve just launched Nokia Map Creator, a fun tool on maps.nokia.com that literally lets YOU map out your local neighbourhood! You can also use Map Creator to make small edits and additions to existing maps. The tool is super simple to use. The best thing about it is that your work will be visible to all maps.nokia.com users—immediately! Your Map Creator content will also be shared via regular map-data updates for Nokia Maps on mobile and web, after NAVTEQ validation checks. [...] Map Creator already lets you draw streets and footpaths. You can also name new streets and add key information such as driving directions, vehicle type characteristics or paving type. But that’s just the start! You will soon also be able to add even more types of map content such as parks, forests, lakes and rivers. In short, all the types of content you are familiar with seeing in Nokia Maps!"

We mentioned Nokia quite several times in the past, especially since they bought NAVTEQ a few years ago. This Nokia announcement is reminiscent of TomTom MapShare announced in 2007 and of Google Map Maker that appeared in 2008. Like many others have adviced, if you want to have full access to the street data you contribute, there's really only one OpenStreetMap.org.

Slashdot is discussing a feature I haven't heard before, Making Sensitive Data Location Aware.

Their summary: ""In a breakthrough that could aid spies, keepers of medical records, and parents who want to prevent their kids from 'sexting,' a team of Virginia Tech researchers has created software to remotely put smart phones under lockdown. The phones are given permission to access sensitive data while in a particular room, but when the devices leave the room, the data is completely wiped. A general, for example, could access secret intelligence while visiting a secure government facility without fear that his or her smart phone or tablet computer might later be lost or stolen, the team's lead researcher said. 'This system provides something that has never been available before. It puts physical boundaries around information in cyberspace.'" [Slashdot editor adds:] Unless the phone or other device can also take screenshots, or doesn't have that software installed."

Outage issues from service providers and differing strategies in response to that are the subject of this latest blogpost. A very brief overview on how to store, edit and protect your data online from my own experience, echoes slashgeo's poll on Google vs. Esri web pre-eminence - there likely will be a dichotomy of open and custom solutions.