In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

GeoServer Beginner's Guide is a new book from Packt that teaches the readers to build custom maps using the dynamic real-time geospatial information. With the help of this book, readers will learn sharing of real-time maps quickly.

About the Authors:

Stefano Iacovella, a GIS developer, consultant and course instructor, has a Ph.D in Geology. He has been using GeoServer since the release of Version 1.5; configuring, deploying, and hacking it in several projects. Some of the other GFOSS projects he mainly uses and likes are GDAL/OGR libraries, PostGIS, QGIS, and OpenLayers.

Brian was the founding partner and Chief Technology Officer for IntelliTours, a GPS-guided multimedia tour in the past. A combined passion in Drupal and scalable GIS solutions led him to adopt GeoServer for rapidly changing geospatial data stores.

Filled with plenty of examples along-with screenshots and code, the book begins with installation instructions and moves on to core topics such as accessing geospatial data from database, building custom maps, creating styles for lines, points, and polygons for great looking maps. Readers will also learn to easily integrate geospatial data into web-based applications.

This book takes readers through topics such as configuring Geoserver proxy for remote data access using REST, tuning Geoserver instance for performance, displaying data on web-based interactive maps, and embedding images to visualize data for web visitors. In addition to these, readers will also learn advanced topics for extending GeoServer's capabilities.

The chapters emphasized in this book are:

Chapter 1: GIS Fundamentals

Chapter 2: Getting Started with GeoServer

Chapter 3: Exploring the Administrative Interface

Chapter 4: Accessing Layers

Chapter 5: Adding Your Data

Chapter 6: Styling Your Layers

Chapter 7: Creating Simple Maps

Chapter 8: Performance and Caching

Chapter 9: Automating Tasks: GeoServer REST Interface

Chapter 10: Securing GeoServer Before Production

Chapter 11: Tuning GeoServer in a Production Environment

Chapter 12: Going Further: Getting Help and Troubleshooting

Web developers with knowledge of server side scripting and experience in installing applications on the server will find this book interesting to read. For more information, please visit the book page at: http://www.packtpub.com/geoserver-share-edit-geospatial-data-beginners-guide/book

We mentioned in January the upcoming FOSS4G-NA 2013 conference in Minneapolis May 22-24. Yesterday, the organizers announced the preliminary program and early bird registration deadline.

The keynote speakers according to the preliminary program pdf:

• "Eric Gundersen, CEO at MapBox. With names like USA Today and Foursquare leaving Google Maps in favor of MapBox, Eric will be discussing the business proposition and value of commercial open source geospatial. Hear why “giving away the code” does not mean giving away the farm.
• Bibiana McHugh, IT Manager of GIS and Location­Based Service, Portland TriMet. A true instigator, Bibiana started what became Google Transit. Her team has made nearly all TriMet data accessible for anyone to use and develop on. She will touch on aspects of making open source successful in government, working with the developer community and open data.
• Erek Dyskant, Sr. Analytics Engineer at Democratic National Committee. Regardless of your political affiliation, it is clear that the Obama Campaign must have done something right. Erek will provide a more technical discussion on how they used an open source geospatial stack to support the campaign and describe what drove the intentional choice of using open source.
• Paul Morin, Director of the NSF and NASA funded Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota. He makes maps for Wired, Scientific American and National Geographic and is co­author of “Exploring Geology” one of the best selling introductory geology textbooks. Morin contributed to David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet and is the US representative for geospatial data to the Antarctic Treaty System. His group of less than two dozen people are mapping both the Arctic and Antarctic at sub­meter resolution with a combination of open source and proprietary tools, and a lot of imagery."

There are a lot of NOSQL databases around today, but if you want to do some geospatial stuff, the latest release of MongoDB may be a good option.

One of the new features is the ability to store GeoJSON, so besides point data you also can store lines and polygons.

From MongoDB.org: Geo Capabilities: MongoDB 2.4 introduces GeoJSON support, a more accurate spherical model and enhanced search including polygon intersection. Currently 2dsphere supports the Point, LineString and Polygon GeoJSON shapes.

Other key features are:

• Hash-based Sharding
• Capped Arrays
• Text Search (Beta)
• Geospatial Enhancements
• Faster Counts
• Working Set Analyzer
• V8 JavaScript engine
• Security

Full Article

[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

11th March 2013 FOSS4G keynote speakers are announced: The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software, is fast approaching. The conference will be taking place in Nottingham, UK from 17th – 21st September 2013). It is therefore with great pleasure that OSGeo is able to announce four world renowned speakers from the open source community as keynote presenters.

Paul Ramsey co-founded the geospatial software company PostGIS in 2001 and has continued to support the open source geospatial community with his work in government and industry, winning the Sol Katz Award in 2008. Kate Chapman, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, is the Acting Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping support communities, governments and humanitarian responders in their utilization of the free and crowd-sourced map OpenStreetMap for crisis response and contingency planning.

They will be joined by Ian James the Chief Architect at Ordnance Survey responsible for the overall systems architecture. His 20 years’ of working in information systems has enabled him to work on a wide variety of Geospatial production systems, but more recently as the Technical Architect for the UK Location Programme. Finally we will hear from Edward Anderson (Open Development Technology Alliance at the World Bank) who coordinates the World Bank’s ICT Knowledge platform’s programme to use digital engagement tools for building greater public transparency and civic participation, as well as more accountability around public services.  His varied carrier from aerospace engineer has led him to working and building new technical communities between NASA, Google, Random Hacks of Kindness, and CrisisCommons amongst others.

Further information on the speakers is available at: http://2013.foss4g.org/programme/keynoters/

Each of these speakers will be bringing with them a wealth of knowledge of working with open source tools and data in a wide variety of application areas that will act to set the tone of the entire conference. As thought leaders in their respective fields, expect to be challenged in how Open Source software and data is being used, and can be used in the future, to change the world to a better place.

The theme for FOSS4G’13 is “Geo for All” which reflects an aim to encourage attendance from anyone considering using open source and geospatial software for the first time. The numerous current initiatives propelling Open Data have highlighted to an even wider audience the benefits of using geospatial data to gain additional insights into their data, Add the current economic climate, and the interest in open source geospatial solutions grow ever stronger. These speakers provide an excellent opportunity to provide insight into the rising prominence of Open Source software and data.

About FOSS4G (2013.foss4g.org): FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and organised by a Local Organising Committee. FOSS4G will be held in in the United Kingdom for the first time in 2013, at the East Midlands Conference Centre (http://www.nottinghamconferences.co.uk/emcc/) in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (www.agi.org.uk) annual GeoCommunity event held in the same venue. These two conferences form a part of the geospatial focused events happening across the UK in September (www.maptember.org).

About OSGeo (www.osgeo.org): The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use. The foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/The foundation's projects are all freely available and useable under an OSI-certified open source license.

Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at http://2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/

Here's the geonews in batch mode, unusually covering 4 weeks, thus a much longer issue.

On the open source / data front:

• With the GeoPackage standard in the oven and its opportunity to replace the aging shapefile format, read this very pertinent summary named Takeaways from OpenGeo’s Comments on OGC and the Proposed GeoPackage Specification
• An interesting entry on TileMill for Raster Analysis
• In the same vein, expanding TileMill's Building Symbolizer to Visualize Complex 3D Structures
• EasySDI V3 is now available
• The open source virtual globe Marble 1.5 is now available for MacOS X

On the Esri front:

• A book review of "Python Scripting for ArcGIS" by Paul A. Zandbergen
• A new version, and here's what’s new in ArcGIS Explorer Desktop 2500
• The ArcGIS Query Analysis Add-In is available for download
• Here's the ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map February updates and here's the previous update
• ArcGIS applied to tennis, Using spatial analytics to study spatio-temporal patterns in sport
• APB shares a Esri Federal GIS Conference News Roundup

On the Google front:

• Google announced that Public Alerts for Google Search, Google Now and Google Maps available in Japan
• The official entry on Expanding Street View in Europe
• The GEB again mentions Tracking Satellites in Google Earth, this time linking to the new SightSpaceStation website

On the Microsoft front:

• A new Bing Maps Tech Preview at TED Conference: "a new twist: the ability to mine Flickr for geotagged photos and overlay onto Bing Maps streetside imagery for a perfect visual lock"
• Bing Maps got a major overhaul, 46.7 TB of new imagery and a Silverlight version of Bing Maps... I though Silverlight was abandoned?
• Here's the entry on the New Top of the World and High Resolution Satellite Imagery
• An entry on Bing Maps REST Service Tips & Tricks
• And New to REST Services: Elevations API and 3D Elevation Models with Bing Maps WPF
• And training for apps builders, Bing Maps for Windows Store Apps Training Kit

Geospatial-related discussions over Slashdot:

• Startup Uses Radiation Fear To Map Cellphone Coverage
• Fox News: US Solar Energy Investment Less Than Germany Because US Has Less Sun, comparing maps, it's simply far from the truth
• The US Redrawn As 50 Equally Populated States
• Drones Still Face Major Hurdles In US Airspace and AirBurr UAV Navigates By Crashing Into Things
• Canon Demos New Head-Mounted Augmented-Reality Display
• Texas Bills Would Bar Warrantless Snooping On Phone Location

In the everything else category:

• A lot of sources mentioned 3Doodler: The World's First 3D Printing Pen, while not entirely geospatial-related, 3D printing is mainstream now
• APB shares an entry on a Free e-Book on Online GIS which compares ArcGIS Online, CartoDB, CloudGIS, GeoCommons, MangoMap and MapBox
• Trying to amend myself for not having shared this before, here's How Interactivity Works with UTFGrid for web maps, along with a visual demo, and an example using OpenLayers
• APB has an entry named U.S. House Representatives Introduce Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act
• Everything is a geospatial sensor, Rain tracked with mobile network
• A milestone release, MapBox iOS SDK Goes 1.0.0 + New Features
• MapQuest Introduced Free Travel Blogs to help people share their travel adventures
• Mapperz mentions that the USPS Mapping Tool allows you to pick your own delivery routes
• APB links to an article named How Google And Bing Maps Control What You Can See

In the maps category:

• In 2008, we presented a world map of undersea internet connections, here's the interactive Submarine Cable Map 2013
• Scary, maps of the U.S. Geography of Sin, and here's the U.S. Geography of Happiness

You can now register to the FOSS4G 2013 conference.

The details: "There are three things you will need to plan:

• Which conference package do I want to book – Full, Day or Student?
• Which extra items do I want to book – workshops, icebreaker, closing party?
• Where am I going to stay – hotel on site, university accommodation, somewhere else?

Details of all the options are shown here. Note that the accommodation options are available once you’ve ticked your registration options checkbox(es), so you don’t need to book accommodation separately. It’s easiest to pay by credit card but if your organisation requires an invoice to pay you can tick that box when you register and we will send you an invoice.

• Please note that you must pay the full amount in £ sterling including any bank charges. 
• Invoices must be paid within 14 days of receipt to secure your room reservation and delegate place.

Early Bird prices are available until 31st May 2013 but we recommend booking as soon as you can as there are only a limited number of hotel rooms on the site."

Slashgeo is a proud media partner of FOSS4G 2013.