In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Some time already since we heard of this open source geospatial ETL tool, GeoKettle 2.5 has been released. Unless I'm mistaken, the other open source geospatial ETL tool formerly named 'Spatial Data Integrator', now known as 'Talend Spatial Module', is at version 5.2.1.

From the announcement: "GeoKettle 2.5’s new features include:

• WFS (OGC Web Feature Service): Input step for the retrieval of geospatial data directly from an OGC Web Feature Service;
• CSW (OGC Catalogue Service for the Web): Input and Output steps, introduced in version 2.0, that now support reading from Deegree and MDWeb CSW. The CSW Output step now supports transactions (metadata insertion, update and deletion), tested with in Deegree and GeoNetwork;
• WPS (OGC Web Processing Service): Client step has been added to invoke remote geoprocesses exposed as WPS, briging new geoprocessing capabilities, tested with Deegree, GeoServer, PyWPS, Zoo WPS and 52North WPS implementations;
• Use of the new version (1.9.1) of the GDAL/OGR codebase for the OGR Input and Output steps for even more advanced and powerful capabilities;
• Use of the new version (1.13) of the JTS library to benefit from performance enhancements and bug fixes;
• New conversion functions have been added to the Calculator step (more build and convert capabilities with WKT, GeoJSON, GML, KML, …);
• Use of an up-to-date version of the EPSG database, the definition of custom projection introduced in version 2.0 remains possible;
• Dedidicated installers (Windows, Linux / Debian or Linux / Red Hat, Macintosh) are now available, making the installation experience easier (zip archive still available);
• Sextante Module: Adds advanced vector-based geoprocessing capabilities based on the Sextante library."

You didn't misread, that's the name of an official Esri blog entry, Going Open-Source with Esri.

From the entry: "We’ve also been a big supporter of the open-source community, providing code and sponsorships for efforts relevant to the users of our system. Popular tools such as GDAL/OGR, PostgreSQL, Dojo, MongoDB, and others have all been actively supported by Esri. We are embarking on a new set of initiatives to subtly change from contributing to the various open communities to being more active members of these communities. [...]

The software that we are publishing as open-source cuts across many domains – not just the web. There are mobile phone libraries and applications, desktop extensions, big data analytis tools, and of course many web application templates in ActionScript, Java and JavaScript. Right now there are nearly 50 repositories at esri.github.com, and we have a lot more that we are getting ready to release. [...] You can see my slides on Github."

The Getty Conservation Institute and the World Monuments Fund are working together to create a new open source software purpose built to help inventory and manage heritage places.

Called Arches, the software incorporates a broad range of international standards and meets a critical need in terms of gathering, making accessible and preserving key information about cultural heritage.

The project is open sourcing an early version of the alpha software code, and those interested can download it, try it out, and we would welcome their feedback. The Arches project website just recently went live at www.archesproject.org.

This is the initial first phase – the software won’t be widely available until later this summer after feedback from people in the field.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source front:

• 3D and open source with WebGL mixed with games gives you Voxel.js: Minecraft-like Browser-Based Games, But Open Source, which can certainly be reused for other geospatial projects
• Never mentioned here before, an QGIS for Android in development, and on a similar topic, QGIS Globe works again
• OpenStreetMap's new editor named iD gets a new home and updates, ideditor.com
• After last year's success, NASA launches second International Space Apps Challenge, open data and open source
• MapBox-related news:
  • Of course, MapBox Maps Now Embed On Twitter
  • You can now embed MapBox interactive maps in Apple iBooks Author software
  • An entry on Using Google Fusion Tables to Add Real-Time Feeds to MapBox Maps

On the Esri front:

• The ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map first updates for 2013

On the Google front:

• A nice Side-by-Side Router, allowing you to see directions for driving, transit, bicycling and walking on a same map
• You can learn a bit more, Details of Google's Project Glass Revealed In FCC Report

In the miscellaneous category:

• Microsoft shares a Bing Maps for Windows Store Apps Training Kit
• And if developing for iOS, Apple Reaches Out to LBS Developers with iOS 6.1 POI Search API
• Pretty interesting on the future of 3D photography, Light Field Photography Is the New Path To 3-D
• Not the first time we hear about similar protections, In Brazil, Trees To Call For Help If Illegally Felled
• Satellites (including footprints) and iPad / iPhone: New iOS app to view the SES Astra satellite info
• I did not know that February 2nd is World Wetlands Day
• Interesting on the Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence, the world needs need more geospatial experts
• Which is also true considering 95% of of Public Safety Agencies Under-utilize Computer Mapping and GIS
• A topic we discussed recently, Analytics for people, the next big thing in retail
• If you have an interest in check-ins, 500 Million Foursquare Check-ins Visualized

In the maps category:

• A different kind of map, Swiss Historical Maps Allow Journey Through Time In Your Browser
• Map of the Geography of Abortion Access in the US
• On the geography of languages, here's entries named World Maps of Language Families, World Maps of Language Families, Continued, and Remaining Language Families and Geographical Language Groups
• Let's close this batch mode edition by another funny xkcd on mapping

A new product on the map, GeoSolutions announced the 1.0.0 version of the open source MapStore software, a "simple and intuitive way to create, save and share maps."

What it is? "MapStore is based on the GeoExplorer Open Source framework and is licensed under the GPL license.

With MapStore you can mashup contents from Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Bing or specific WMS services provided by you or third party content providers. MapStore uses internally GeoStore, (the GeoSolutions Open Source engine for resource storing and retrieving) for managing users   as well as maps definitions. Moreover MapStore uses Http-proxy to communicate with remote servers, such as the third party WMS services used in your maps.

Visit our online demo or download the MapStore binary, read the Quick Start guide and start to create and share your own maps. If you need more info, please check to the complete documentation wiki."

Submission for papers in the Academic Track of FOSS4G 2013 is now open at http://2013.foss4g.org/ojs/

The FOSS4G 2013 Academic Track is bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in the geospatial and the free and open source fields.

With the Academic Track motto “Science for Open Source, Open Source for Science”, we aim to attract academic papers describing:

• The use of open source geospatial software and data, in and for scientific research
• Academic endeavours to conceptualize, create, assess, and teach open source geospatial software and data.

Based on these categories, to promote a strong connection between the Academic Track and the other elements of FOSS4G 2013, we hope for contributions within the following themes:

• Data Quality, Software Quality and Service Quality
• Community Building
• Doing more for less: Assessment of costs and benefits of open source applications and open source business models
• Use of Open Data to inform public services
• FOSS and FOSS4g: Is spatial special?
• Architectures and frameworks for open source software and data
• Teaching Geospatial Sciences with open source solutions
• Open Source GIS application use cases: Government, Participatory GIS, Location based services, Health, Energy, Water, Climate change, etc.
• Human Computer Interfaces and Usability in and around Open GI systems

We invite academics and researchers to submit full papers in English, of maximum 6,000 words, before the deadline of 1 February 2013. Templates for submissions in a variety of formats can be found here, and detailed requirements, regarding layout, formatting and the submission process, can be found on the FOSS4G 2103 Academic Track submission pages at http://2013.foss4g.org/ojs/

Your contributions will be reviewed (double-blind) by a diverse reviewing committee of experts in the field, who will be asked to assess the papers on originality and academic rigour, as well as interest for the wider FOSS4G community. We expect to select 20-25 papers for presentation and publication. From this selection, a maximum of 8-10 papers will be given the opportunity for inclusion in a special issue of the renowned international journal Transactions in GIS [1]. The remaining papers will be published in the online OSGEO Journal [2].

We would like to specifically invite “early stage researchers” (PhD students, PostDocs) to use this opportunity to aim for a high-ranking publication.

Authors of all selected papers will be expected to present their work in detail in a separate Academic Track (with 20-30 minute slots), and will also be given the opportunity to pitch the central theme of their paper in short ‘lightning’ talks to the larger community, to generate attention and cross-pollenate with industry, developers and users.

Important Dates:

NOW: Submission open at http://2013.foss4g.org/ojs/
1 February 2013: Deadline for submission of full papers
1 April 2013: Reviewing decisions
1 May 2013: Paper revision deadline
15 September 2013: publication of selected papers
8-10 papers in Early View (on-line) Transactions in GIS
others in on-line OSGEO Journal
17-21 September 2013: FOSS4G Conference
early 2014: printed issue Transactions in GIS
For questions, comments and remarks, do not hesitate to contact the Academic Track co-chairs:

Franz-Josef Behr (Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences): franz-josef.behr [at] hft-stuttgart.de
Barend Köbben (ITC-University of Twente): b.j.kobben [at] utwente.nl
[1]: Transactions in GIS. Published by Wiley; included in ISI, with an impact factor of 0.54; edited by John P. Wilson, David O’Sullivan and Alexander Zipf. Print ISSN: 1361-1682 Online ISSN: 1467-9671. http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-TGIS.html

[2]: OSGEO Journal, the official Journal of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation; http://journal.osgeo.org/index.php/journal

I'd like to introduce a new location-based game: Kort.

This web app motivates users to help improving OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Game-like elements are used like credit points and badges in a mission to resolve missing spatial data. Kort combines the concept of gamification with volunteered geographic information and is targeted to non-specialists. Within three weeks more than 1,000 users registered and it has been translated into 11 languages!

After having signed in with OSM or Google account, credit points (so called 'Koins') are collected by the players on a mission task. Examples are POIs without a name, where users have to enter the missing label. All proposals for solutions are then validated by other players. If a proposal has passed validations (around 3 depending on error type), it is considered complete.

Data errors are downloaded every night from a project called KeepRight. The data covers many parts of the world except for parts of North America and others. The final task of integrating the passed proposals into OpenStreetMap has not been realized yet. It can be done manually, though. This an other enhancements like moderating campaigns are planned in the near future.

The project has been implemented by two computer science students during their bachelor thesis at the Geometa Lab of the University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil (Switzerland). It's based on HTML5, free (open source) and it runs on iPhone and Android, and in Chrome.

For more information visit http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KortGame

I am glad to announce that Slashgeo.org is a proud media partner of FOSS4G 2013, to be held in Nottingham, UK, on September 17-21, one of the dominant geospatial conferences.

Here's what it is: "FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, organized by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). In 2013, FOSS4G will be held in in the United Kingdom for the first time, at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (AGI) annual GeoCommunity Event at the same venue, and delegates will have an opportunity to attend both events for a full week of Geo-Goodness!

Expect a vibrant mix of workshops, papers, seminars, birds-of-a-feather meetings, and great social events, in a fantastic location. Key dates and travel information will be published shortly, from early September 2012, so check back for updates, follow us on twitter, or sign up to our mailing list for more information."

We'll try to have one or two Slashgeo Editors on the site at FOSS4G 2013. Slashgeo had the chance to be active and cover 4 recent OSGeo FOSS4G events.

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 8.6 for download from source forge:

• geotools-8.6-bin.zip
• geotools-8.6-doc.zip
• geotools-8.6-userguide.zip
• geotools-8.6-project.zip

This release is also deployed to the OSGeo Maven Repository. For more information on setting up your project with Maven consult the Quickstart.

About GeoTools 8.6
This is a bug fix release containing fixes and improvements, including:

• Several fixes in the WFS client, making it work against TinyOWS and ArcGIS WFS server
• Improvements in usage of filter fuctions from SLD (some functions did not properly convert their arguments from string to numeric)
• Removed tiling artifacts when rendering oversampled grid coverages
• Sped up the usage of FIDFilter objects in map rendering

Full details are available in Jira's release notes.

Upgrading from GeoTools 2.7

For those migrating from GeoTools 2.7, upgrade instructions are available. No additional GeoTools 2.7 released are scheduled. Thanks for using GeoTools, and Enjoy!
The GeoTools Community
http://geotools.org

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.2.4, now available for download.

This is the latest release of the stable 2.2 series. The changes that might interest the most users are:

• the monitoring extension module just got promoted to official extension [GEOS-5538]
• the status page does not throw errors after catalog reloads anymore [GEOS-5371]
• one critical fix in the REST configuration of freemarker templates [GEOS-5533]

The changelog also contains the following minor bug fixes

• [GEOS-5338] – Filter function IEEERemainder mishbehaves in SLD
• [GEOS-5537] – Tiling artifacts with RasterSymbolizer using bilinear interpolation (when oversampling raster)
• [GEOS-5551] – WFS 1.0 capabilities will NPE with misconfigured OGR and XSLT output formats
• [GEOS-5565] – workspace admin unable to create sql view
• [GEOS-5570] – QueryProcess fails if called with an OGC filter (either 1.0 or 1.1)
• [GEOS-5197] – Use the layer abstract as the GeoRSS channel description
• [GEOS-5561] – Missing i18n support for ReprojectPage
• [GEOS-5562] – Missing i18n support for WorkspaceEditPage
• [GEOS-5563] – slight mixed up order of Y-parameters in AffineTransformPanel

Also, looking at the corresponding GeoTools release changelog we have the following extra goodies in:

• improvements in the WFS cascading, we can now better interact with remote WFS servers running on TinyOWS and ArcGIS
• imageio-ext was upgraded to version 1.1.6, which means from now on GeoServer uses GDAL 1.9 to extends the range of raster formats it supports

Download GeoServer 2.2.4, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!