In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

After the buzz generated by the publication of the first edition of FOSSGIS Brasil magazine, we will treat a very important subject that has everything to do with opensource geospatial technology: education.

It is known that formal education in Brazil is not in it's best shape, nevertheless, many teaching and research institutions have been searching for alternatives to provide quality educational support and improve instruction for students and citizens.

Within this context, many institutions have seen in open source software, an option, since this kind of software is free of licesing fees and helps students to understand better the word "cooperation".

Following this line of thougth, this edition will address the use of open source GIS softwares in schools and universities, showing that it is possible to provide quality teaching with this type of software, as it is done in IFPB Geoprocessamento major.

We had the pleasure to interview in this edition Prof. Jorge Xavier da Silva, emeritus teacher of UFRJ and mentor of the the first 100% brazilian GIS: SAGA-UFRJ.

Still in this edition you will be able to check out articles about WKT Raster, a PostGIS alternative to storing and manipulating rasters, Quantum GIS, Kosmo GIS and the second art of the Mobile GIS article, presentend in the first edition, amongst others.

We all hope that you like this new edition, and leave out your comments on our website. To download the second edition of FOSSGIS-Brasil, just go to the following link:

http://fossgisbrasil.com.br/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=2

Sincerely,
FOSSGIS Brasil Team
http://www.fossgisbrasil.com.br/

Good news, JTS 1.12 has been released. It matters since a lot of other open source software uses it. GEOS, which recently went to 3.3.0, is a C++ port of the JTS. We also mentioned a month ago the new JSTS project, the JavaScript port.

From it's main website, JTS is: "The JTS Topology Suite is an API for modelling and manipulating 2-dimensional linear geometry. It provides numerous geometric predicates and functions. JTS conforms to the Simple Features Specification for SQL published by the Open GIS Consortium."

What's new for 1.12:

• "Single-Sided Buffers
• MinimumClearance function
• nearestNeighbours methods for STRtree
• Vector2D class for vector operations
• DD (DoubleDouble) enhanced precision arithmetic
• improved robustness for Delaunay and Voronoi computation
• enhanced geometry digitization in the TestBuilder, along with a dynamic grid"

A Broad Range of Topics Are Addressed in More Than 140 Presentations

DENVER, June 15, 2011 -- The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference has just announced the lineup of presentations that features more than 140 individual talks with noted plenary speakers. FOSS4G is the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software. The selection of presentations was very competitive, with 300 submissions for roughly 150 session slots.

The five-day event includes two days of workshops followed by three days of sessions that cover a broad range of technical topics, tool-specific tutorials, application case studies, lightning talks, panel discussions and overviews.  The breadth of content address a full range of technical expertise, applications, regional interests, and business purposes.

Among the program highlights regarding the use of open source software are:

• A full-day introduction to geospatial open source with case studies and business cases
• Workshops and tutorials on popular open source geospatial tools such as PostGIS, GRASS, GeoServer, GeoNode, MapFish, Geomajas, Spatial Wiki, GeoTools, etc.
• Workshops and sessions organized by educators for educators
• Sessions regarding open spatial data and spatial data infrastructure directives
• Timely sessions addressing such applications as mapping the BP oil spill, monitoring flood waters, and responding to the earthquake in Japan
• Several sessions of five-minute lightning talks

Plenary speakers and topics for the event include:

• Michael Byrne, Geospatial Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, talking about the National Broadband Map, which is based on an open source software stack, and implements some innovative ideas regarding open data
• Peter Ter Haar, Director of Products at Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of Great Britain, speaking about their experience with open data initiatives and open source software
• Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, talking about the past, present and (mainly) future of this wiki-style collaborative geospatial data creation phenomenon
• Paul Ramsey, a team member of OpenGeo and founder of the PostGIS spatial database discussing different open source business models
• A panel on "Open x 4" that will discuss various aspects of openness for open source, open data, open street mapping, and open standards

The event has strong support from major sponsors that include Esri, Google, OpenGeo, MapQuest, Newmont, RadiantBlue, and Safe Software. Additional support at the bronze level include AppGeo, Azavea, Camptocamp, EOX, GeoCat, GeoIQ, GeoSolutions, Korem, MapGears, Metaspatial, Oracle Spatial, SkyGone, Spatial Networks, Spatialytics and Terrestris.

You can view the full program at http://2011.foss4g.org/program/session-schedule. The deadline for early registration, with the cheapest price, is June 30.

About FOSS4G
FOSS4G is the global conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial that is organized by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) with support from an all-volunteer organizing committee and professional conference management from the Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA). The 2011 FOSS4G event in Denver marks the first North American event in four years, with the prior three events taking place in Barcelona, Sydney and Cape Town.

SOURCE: FOSS4G Organizing Committee

RELATED LINKS:
http://2011.foss4g.org/ FOSS4G Denver 2011
http://www.osgeo.org/ Open Source Geospatial Foundation
http://stateofthemap.org/ State of the Map Conference
http://www.gita.org/ Geospatial Information Technology Association

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.1.1.  This release is primarily a bug fixing release, with patches and enhancements submitted from many users.  The GeoServer development team would like to thank the contributors for their development efforts, the users for their feedback and the companies the provided sponsorship to implement new features and bug fixes.  In particular, we would like to thank the following contributors whose patches have been included in this release:

• Rudi Hochmeister for improvements to our logging configuration and documentation.
• Gianna Barrotta, Andrea Di Nora and Pietro Arena for the addition of three new WPS processes.
• Robert Coup for efforts to bring KML and GeoRSS formats in line with normal URL-assembling practises.
• Matt Bertrand for adding character set support for to uploads.

Thanks also go to LISAsoft for sponsoring this release.

--
The GeoServer Team

Via AGISRS, I learned that last Friday was released Opticks 4.7.0, an open source remote sensing and imagery application that we mentioned a few times in the past. Opticks's IDL, Spectral and Python extensions were also updated.

Instead of the what's new, here's a reminder of what Opticks is according to their main page:

• Free and open source
• Supports the following file formats: NITF 2.0/2.1, GeoTIFF, ENVI, ASPAM/PAR, CGM, DTED, Generic RAW, ESRI Shapefile, HDF5, AVI, MPEG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP
• Zoom, pan, rotate spatially large datasets
• Quickly layer GIS features, annotations, results, and other information over your data to provide context
• Many image display controls such as colormap, histogram, transparency, etc.
• Support for datasets larger than four gigabytes
• Analysts can quickly combine steps using graphical wizards
• Support for processing data in it's native interleave of BIP, BSQ or BIL
• Get extensions to drop in new capability.

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."

Here's the geonews in batch mode, covering a bit more than a week (exception made of a few minor geonews I forgot to mention in our last 'batch mode' edition).

On the open source / data front:

• A new MapGuide Instant Setup utility has been introduced
• Here's a detailed entry on scale-dependent generalization in PostGIS and QGIS
• Here's an entry on time and elevation support in GeoServer
• If you're new to OpenStreetMap or want to introduce new people, here's OpenStreetMap editing for beginners videos
• Plenty geoblogs mentioned the Magicshop Frontdoor (Beta) tool, with which you can easily improve address search results for Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap

On the Google front:

• Ogle Earth mentions Google JV applied for online mapping license in China
• Ogle Earth also mentions the constraints on high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel in Google Earth/Maps
• There's New Building Maker cities available in Argentina and Canada
• Google unveiled the new My Places tab on Google Maps, "which helps you quickly view and interact with your saved maps, starred locations, and rated businesses"
• ​They also introduced descriptive terms in Local Search results
• The GEB mentions the Touristo and Skydiver games for Google Earth
• Some readers like to know when there's new imagery available in Google Earth, well, there is 

On the Microsoft front:

• An entry on The Value of Bing Maps Spatial Data Services

In the miscellaneous category:

• Mapperz informs us of the Yahoo! Maps APIs Service Closure, due 13th September 2011     
• James Fee summarizes What Was Up at the Pitney Bowes Business Insights Conference, with news of MapInfo 11, and APB has more on MapInfo Spatial Server
• APB shares a long article named Intergraph and ERDAS: From GeoMedia to IMAGINE-The Big and Little Picture for this Geospatial Marriage, Spatial Sustain also shares an entry on the same topic, named Intergraph ‘Reinforces the House’ Under Hexagon
• A study concludes that Schematic Transit Maps Affect Passengers' Travel Choices
• Slashdot discussed a story named New Projects Use Phone Data To Track Big Cities' Mass Transit Use
• Slashdot also offers a story named NASA's Aquarius Launched To Help Map the Oceans' Salt
• Still from the same site, we learn the Nissan LEAF Leaks Speed & Location To RSS Feed
• And last story from that site, if you're interested in tools to map wifi networks, this discussion named What's Killing Your Wi-Fi? will interest you

In the maps category:

• The Strange Maps blog offers maps of the U.S. States, with what they do best and worse, worth a quick look of you're American
• Slashdot mentions a map of the Universe called the 2MASS Redshift Survey
• Not a geographic map, but O'Reilly has an article on generating a map of your LinkedIn contacts with InMaps, I found the result pretty interesting

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."

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode, covering the last 10 days.

From the open source front:

• With GDAL being widely used, here's a comparison of the efficiency of various compression algorithms of GDAL
• Here's an entry on the rule-based styling feature of QGIS
• Here's another review of the OpenLayers 2.10 Beginners Guide by Jody Garnett, a particularly well documented review
• Here's the interesting raw survey results on the priorities of the OSGeo, looks like people want a certification program from the OSGeo
• Here's MapGuide Application Development tips

From the Esri front:

• Here's an entry named Demystifying The Esri Landsat Image Services And ChangeMatters Viewer

From the Google front:

• O'Reilly offers an entry on Google Correlate, named Your data, Google's computing power, with an example using US state-based data
• Here's tips on building useful tours in Google Earth
• Here's their official entry on the latest imagery update for Google Earth / Maps

In the miscellaneous category:

• There's a series of entries on the new GeoCommons 2.0, with details and screenshots, some aggregated highlights,  and how GeoCommons can work with Google Fusion Tables
• TMR informs us Pentax announced a GPS unit for its Digital SLRs
• Here's an entry on the updated MapQuest Android app
• TMR informs us that Garmin added cameras to the GPSMAP 62 Series and announced new eTrex and Rino GPS units
• Here's an discussion on the evolution of monolithic vs. distributed architectures in GIS
• V1 discusses how Greece economic woes partly come from lack of maps and GIS
• V1 also offers a perspective named How Do Geographic Information, Mapping and GIS Connect with News Media Today?

In the maps category:

• TMR links to an interactive map of pedestrian deaths in the U.S. down to the local level with StreetView of where the deaths have occurred. From 2000 to 2009, 47,700 pedestrians were killed in the United States
• Here's a dramatic map of the state of fish stock in the Atlantic
• TMR links to a map of measles cases across Europe
• NASA released a new map of carbon stored in tropical forests

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."