In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

One of the most popular open source GIS just got updated, Quantum GIS "QGIS" 1.7.0 has been released. That's the last major version before the 2.0 release. "This release includes over 277 bug fixes and many new features and enhancements." Here's the headers of the major additions and changes, head to the announcement to see screenshots and learn more.

• Symbology labels and diagrams
• New Tools
• User interface updates
• CRS Handling
• Rasters
• Providers and Data Handling
• Api and Developer Centric
• QGIS Server
• Plugins
• Printing

In addition to the announcement, here's Tim Sutton's informative thoughts on the future of QGIS, a snippet: "It’s a difficult trade off though – QGIS in many respects is still an immature GIS with many features that people expect from a GIS missing. This is especially true if you consider the ‘core’ QGIS application without the GRASS plugin (which introduces many tools from the excellent GRASS toolset). In order to meet the mainstream GIS user’s needs, we need to close this feature gap – and we have been making rapid strides in this direction over the last few years. But closing this feature GAP means that we don’t tend to have bug fix only releases and a strong focus on code stabilisation. [...] As you can see from the charts, QGIS is becoming more and more popular, we are just shy of 190,000 downloads for the windows standalone installer for QGIS 1.6."

Last Friday was published the FOSS4G 2011 Conference program. We mentioned quite a few times the upcoming FOSS4G 2011 Conference, to be held in Denver September 12-16. This is going to be a major geospatial conference. Slashgeo.org is a media sponsor and should provide, like we did in the past two years, on-site coverage.

From the program announcement: "We are pleased to announce the publication of the FOSS4G 2011 program. You can view the program details here. Selection was very competitive - we had almost 300 submissions for around 150 sessions. [...] Since we were slightly later than planned in publishing the program, we have extended the early registration deadline to June 30.

We have also announced our plenary speakers. They include several speakers new to FOSS4G, and several FOSS4G veterans. Michael Byrne, GIO of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), will talk about their work on the National Broadband Map, which is based entirely on an open source software stack, and implements some innovative ideas regarding open data. Peter Ter Haar, Director of Products at the Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, will talk about their experience with open data initiatives over the past 18 months, as well as how they are using open source. Paul Ramsey will talk on "Why do you do that? An exploration of open source business models". Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, will talk about the past, present and (mainly) future of OpenStreetMap. We will have a panel on "Open x 4" discussing various aspects of openness, chaired by Matt Ball and featuring Arnulf Christl, President of OSGeo, Steve Coast, and Carl Reed, CTO of OGC. Schuyler Erle and Brian Timoney have accepted the challenge of giving us a couple of short and entertaining but also insightful presentations to close proceedings on Wednesday and Thursday. And Jeff McKenna will be leading the ever-popular web mapping performance shootout in the final session. Check the full list to see all the plenary speakers."

Last weekend, Slashdot informed us The National Academies Press are offering all their books, over 4,000 of them, for free in pdf format. With searches, you find plenty of geospatial-related books, for instance:

• Geospatial: 140 books
• GIS: 196 books
• GPS: 218 books
• Remote sensing: 236 books
• Land use: 594 books
• Maps: 356 books
• Location: 562 books

You can even try more specific terms such as:

• Esri: 53 books, or even ArcGIS: 13 books
• Google Earth: 28 books
• PostGIS: 1 book
• OpenStreetMap: 1 book

It's possible you'll find something related to your own interests in there.

After the three recent open source WebGL globes projects announced, via Linfitiniti I learned about a fourth one: the open source Godzi WebGL globe by Pelican Mapping.

Their announcement: "Godzi is our latest free open source software (FOSS) project! Godzi (pronounced “God’s Eye”) is a 3D mapping toolkit for JavaScript and WebGL. It enables you to view interactive 3D global maps in any WebGL-compliant browser without a plugin.

Godzi was inspired by our own industry-proven osgEarth library. Its application-level API provides access to various OGC-compliant web mapping sources. And or course, it works with Pelican’s ReadyMap server technology as well."

With GEOS 3.2 released in 2009, it's nice to have GEOS 3.3.0 now released. This link also provide details on the JTS features missing in GEOS. Here's the full change list for GEOS 3.3.0. In short, in addition to the usual bug fixes, "this release introduces a fair amount of new C-API interfaces and a brand new PHP binding."

A reminder of what GEOS is: "GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source) is a C++ port of the  Java Topology Suite (JTS). As such, it aims to contain the complete functionality of JTS in C++. This includes all the  OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL spatial predicate functions and spatial operators, as well as specific JTS enhanced topology functions. GEOS is available under the terms of  GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)."

It was just last week that we announced the JSTS project, the JavaScript port of the JTS.

Hibernate Spatial 1.1 is out.

The major improvements are:
- Support for Hibernate 3.6.x
- Added Dwithin() and transform() HQL-functions
- added dwithin() and havingSRID() methods to SpatialRestrictions
- Added a SpatialDialect for MySQL InnoDB
... and many more minor improvements and bugfixes.

More information in the release notes.

Hibernate Spatial is a generic extension to Hibernate — the popular Object/Relational Mapping tool for Java. Hibernate Spatial provides a standardized, cross-database interface to geographic data storage and query functions. Like Hibernate, it is released under the LGPL open source license.

Hibernate Spatial implements most of the functions of the OGC Simple Feature Specification and supports Oracle 10g/11g, Postgresql/PostGIS, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, MySQL and H2/GeoDB. To learn more, check out the tutorial.

[Editor's note: we mentioned the initial release of Hibernate Spatial over a year ago]

Two open source projects have been updated: Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.7 have been released. In a few words: "Geopublisher is a tool for geographers to create and publish maps without any knowledge of HTML, SLD, Servers etc. and AtlasStyler is a graphical interface to create OGC SLD/SE documents without the need of hacking any XML."

Here's the highlights of what's new, for Geopublisher:

• Automatic on-line publishing on geopublishing.org
• New HTML editor
• Rewrite of the "Personalize logos and icons" dialog
• Support for languages, that are not official ISO languages

​For AtlasStyler:

• New concept of "RulesLists" 
• Scale-dependency
• Support for styling raster
• Improved WFS compatibility

We did mention these tools a few times in the past. If you wonder who's using them, see the provided examples of freely available atlases.

Via the OSGEo-Discuss list I learned about the release of GeoNetwork opensource version 2.6.4: "This is a minor release that adds a number of improvements and fixes a large number of bugs." Follow the link to learn what's new and fixed.

Here's a reminder of what GeoNetwork opensource is, from its official site: "GeoNetwork is a catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources. It provides powerful metadata editing and search functions as well as an embedded interactive web map viewer. It is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world."

You can visit the GeoNetwork gallery to learn more about who's using it. We mentioned GeoNetwork several times in the past.

The first official release of JGrasstools has been released as 0.7.0.

We have worked about a year to prepare not only the algorithms contained in this release, but also the supporting the evolution of the OMS3 framework to gain the main objective of the JGrasstools library: the possibility to link together models in a most possible flexible way, being it along a timeline or in standalone mode, being it in complex and recursive way or in simple standalone mode.

JGrasstools represents the effort to extract the processing power of JGrass to library level.

For documentation, downloads, you can read the whole story at he release notes page.

[Editor's note: we mentioned JGrass a few times in the past, JGrass is built upon GRASS GIS and uDig]

MapServer 6.0 has been officially released.  It brings a number of improvements and enhancements, outlined in the official release announcement.

Notable improvements include the implemntation of single-pass queries, and an overhaul to the rendering API and espression parser.  Some of the new features that look pertty interesting include OpenGL rendering support, KML output, combining mupltiple layers, and clustering points.

The changes do require careful migration, so be sure to refer to the 6.0 migration guide.

[Editor's note: MapServer, in addition to being open source, is one of the oldest, most stable and efficient existing web mapping server, having won most FOSS4G benchmark shootouts so far, well, at least in 2009 and 2010 ;-)]