In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

The relation between geography and geospatial with traveling appears obvious to me. I've been using Wikitravel.org for years (it exits since 2003), and now the Wikimedia Foundation announced a competing wiki to be part of the Wikimedia offers such as the famous Wikipedia, named Wikivoyage.org.

The Slashdot summary: "The Wikimedia Foundation has marked its 12th anniversary by launching a Creative-Commons-licensed travel guide called Wikivoyage. Like other Wikimedia projects, Wikivoyage contains material written collaboratively by volunteers. The site has launched under the aegis of Wikimedia with around 50,000 articles and approximately 200 volunteer editors. Wikivoyage started in 2006 as a travel guide in German and Italian, backed by the German non-profit Wikivoyage Association. The transition to a Wikimedia project was initiated by contributors and the Association, and content is currently offered in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The purpose of the Wikivoyage is to promote education and knowledge of all countries and regions in the world, as well as understanding among nations. There's a huge global demand for travel information, but very few sources are both comprehensive and non-commercial. That's about to change."

For the curious ones, here's the other projects under the WIkimedia Foundation, which includes Wiktionary but also a project that I wasn't aware of before, Wikidata.org, which is still in its infancy but could be eventually leveraged by a part of the geospatial data community?

Via OpenWeatherMap I learned about the OpenMeteoData.org, that has the aim to make meteorological data available for everyone.

From the website: "

What is OpenMeteoData?

• OpenMeteoData is an non-profit organization. We aim to make meteorological data available for everyone. We are now building our own supercomputer to calculate open weather forecasts. We run the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. This is state of the art numerical weather prediction tool, developed by several major universities and US governmental agencies.

Why?

• In most Europeans countries, weather data is not freely available. You have to pay hundreds of thousand euros to get access to raw model outputs.

Who can use the data?

• Everyone. It's free. That's just like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. [...] We plan to release all of the data under Open Database Licence (ODbL). That means the data is free, and it can be used for both personal and commercial projects.

When will it be available?

• If everything goes right, a first preview is expected for March 2013."

This is an abnormally long version of our 'batch geonews' edition, covering the news since the holiday break.

On the open source & open data front:

• This entry discusses the new geocoding client API in GDAL/OGR
• Good news, QGIS gets built-in Oracle support, along with New QGIS PDF and HTML manuals and New QGIS Symbol Packages
• James informs us on the GeoPackage Comment Period is Open, GeoPackage what? Read this previous entry named OGC Draft GeoPackage Specification - Finally the Shapefile Format Replacement?
• James is also enthusiastic about D3.js for its map visualization capabilities
• More in the useful chaining Rendering Transformations in GeoServer
• In case you missed the press releases, GeoTools 8.5 released and GeoServer 2.2.3 released
• Freely available course named Java Open Source GIS Development - From the building block to extending an existing GIS application
• Here's an entry on using PgRouting with Mapserver

On the Esri front:

• The ArcGIS API for JavaScript Version 3.3 Released

In the miscellaneous category:

• It's really the end now, mission accomplished, Landsat 5 will be decommissioned (via VS)
• Follow this link if you have an interest in 30+ years of LAI and FAPAR data for Your research use
• Microsoft shares an entry on Getting started with Bing Maps Windows Store Apps
• Here's an interesting top 10, Top 10 Spatial Law and Policy Stories from 2012
• DM shares an article named Intergraph Retools, Revamps Entire Geospatial Product Suite
• Beidou, aka as Compass, China’s GNSS, is now available for Commercial Use in Asia
• O'Reilly discusses the inevitability of smart dust, where geospatial-aware sensors are to be found everywhere
• Here's geospatial studies of atmospheric lead as a dangerous pollutant
• Here's a funny xkcd cartoon on 'simplifying' map directions

A bunch of minor geo-related stories discussed over Slashdot:

• Nice use of drones: Drone Photos Lead to Indictment For Texas Polluters
• Also on drones: Researchers Seek to Use Drones For Brushfire Forecasting
• A real-time map of those bushfires was up: Australia Is On So Much Fire, You Can See It From Orbit
• Remote sensing satellites in jeopardy thanks to the fiscal cliff: Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy
• Slashdot just discovered OpenFlights, which we mentioned years ago: Visualizing Personal Flight Data With OpenFlights.org
• Benefits and inconveniences of being tracked: Disney Wants To Track You With RFID
• Also on RFID: Texas High School Student Loses Lawsuit Challenging RFID Tracking Requirement and Texas State Rep. Files 2 Bills To Ban RFID In Schools

In the maps category:

• Pretty interesting map, one that more or less works both upside down and... upside up! (screenshot below)

Every frequent Slashgeo reader knows about OpenStreetMap, and now, the project reached another important milestone: 1 million OpenStreetMappers.

From the blog entry: "OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That's a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world. At first glance you may think that OpenStreetMap is a map. Those who know more will tell you that it's actually a database; a flexible editable repository of free geospatial data. But above all OpenStreetMap is a community. A massive community in which people like you and me come together collaborate and help build this thing... and now there's a million of us!"

To ease contributions even more, they also introduced the alpha version of the new OpenStreetMap editor, codenamed iD (screenshot below). And for its beauty, see the short animation on OpenStreetMap: A Year of Edits 2012.

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.2.3, now available for download.

This is the latest release of the stable 2.2 series and contains some small new features and interesting fixes:

• [GEOS-3885] – Update Freemarker templates through REST API
• [GEOS-5325] – Add title and abstract to LayerGroupInfo
• [GEOS-5462] – The rendering thread can block forever under request cancellation
• [GEOS-5479] – Error in Documentation: </PropertyName> tag used instead of </Literal>
• [GEOS-5483] – json output in WPS extension does not work due to missing library
• [GEOS-5485] – Border artifacts when reprojecting single banded (scientific) raster data

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

• better support for chaining rendering transformations
• fixes to time/date handling in CQL
• Oracle specific SDO_NN function to find the N nearest objects to a given location

We also welcome our newest committer, Davide Savazzi, and thank him for the work on Freemarker template through the REST API and the title and abstract support in layer groups, as well as the SDO_NN work back in GeoTools.

Download GeoServer 2.2.3, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 8.5 for download from source forge: 

• geotools-8.5-bin.zip
• geotools-8.5-doc.zip
• geotools-8.5-userguide.zip
• geotools-8.5-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 8.5

This is a bug fix release containing a number of fixes and improvements, including:

• several fixes to rendering transformations allowing several transformations to be chained together  in the same rendering request (e.g., interpolate values from discrete points and then also extract isolines from it)
• fixes to date/time handling in CQL
• spotted and fixed a deadlock in the rendering subsystem happening if the renderer gets abruptly stopped while working against a very fast data source (or a very slow Graphics2D implementation)
• a new PullParser class allowing for better streaming parsing of large amounts of XML (e.g., GML, KML)
• better handling of raster "no data" during reprojection, avoiding border artifacts in the results
• a new Oracle specific filter function exposing Oracle spatials's K nearest neighbor search

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

This is our last batch-mode edition of the year - happy holiday break to everyone!

From the open source / data front:

• MapBox share an interesting entry named The Trouble with Geoportals: "Heavy interface-driven sites based on predetermined data acquisition processes are a key part of a local, state, and national spatial and open data infrastructures, but they do not make open data open and accessible to all."
• Here's a nice demo of OpenLayers 3, read the associated discussion
• Here's news of the QGIS Globe and PostGIS 3D with a video demo
• Here's an entry on how the LGPL license of geospatial software is completely destroying iOS adoption of open source geospatial software
• Here's about the version 1.8.0 release of Libspatialindex (which switches from LGPL to MIT) 
• And Jeff McKenna is the new OSGeo president
• Here's an article on Vizzuality, the makers of CartoDB

From the Esri front:

• Here's a summary of Whats New in ArcGIS Online (December 2012): "This is major update, with new capabilities for authoring web maps, publishing hosted services, sharing, and configuring ArcGIS Online organizations."
• DigitalGlobe Imagery for the United States and Western Europe added to the Esri's World Imagery map
• If you're eager to know, here's What’s coming in the next update of the ArcGIS SDK for Android?

From the Google front:

• Obligatory, Christmas Trees in Google Earth and Street View
• Interesting, Using Google Earth to teach math
• Google shared tips for getting the most from Google Maps on iPhone
• Apparently, the iOS version of the Google Maps app might violate EU privacy laws
• Here's what Google Earth looks like on the Nexus 10
• Here's the Google entry on the Count down to Christmas Eve with Google Santa Tracker
• It's the end of the world right? Predicting volcanic ash with Google Earth
• That's not a reason for not providing New Google Imagery - December 17

In the remote sensing category:

• If you have an iOS device, don't miss ESA's 'Earth from Space: the Living Beauty' free book: "The digital publication has over 100 pages with interactive maps, stunning image galleries and animations that encourage you to discover the various Earth processes. "
• Name change, Copernicus is the new name for European Earth Observation Programme
• Here's a discussion on How to build a microsatellite

In the miscellaneous category:

• Know the WMS standard? Here's a pertinent entry named Don't "upgrade" to WMS 1.3.0 unless you really have to, stick to 1.1.1
• Here's a pertinent entry on GIS user interfaces and how bad they are
• Here's the Directions Mag summary of A Day at Nokia’s U.S. Headquarters
• While they can't do it anymore with a GPS device, the U.S. government can use location data from cell towers in order to track suspects without a warrant

In the maps category:

• Here's an Interactive map of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex

Directions Mag offers an article named Research Explores How to Keep Up With Changing Web Mapping Technology, starting with 'change is inevitable: deal with it'.

From the results: "Despite the fact that the Google Maps API delivered on more of the requirements set out in the Needs Assessment Survey, the team selected Leaflet as the answer to the first question of which technology should be used for teaching. Leaflet was, in fact, second best in supporting the requirements, but the Diary Study suggested students made more progress and felt better working with that set of libraries. The team suggests that might be due to the added transparency and control provided by a fully open source library."

Quite a few interesting news in this batch mode edition.

From the open source front:

• It was the first time I heard about the open source LSI Viewer, an online Shapefile viewer
• There's the new MapProxy 1.5.0 released
• And Portable GIS is now at version 3.1
• It is also the first time we mention GisClient.org, "an open source software written in AJAX, Javascript, PHP/MapScript that offers an innovative way to manage complex GIS projects. The main strength in it is that allows to configure a big range of tools and functionalities easily and quickly."
• If you're working with the U.S. Federal government, take a look at FedGeo Day, to be held in Washington DC on February 28, here's the official website
• Here's the MapBox New Features Roundup
• Regarding QGIS, visualising QGIS data in 3D with Blender and on Sharing QGIS Symbols
• Here's the just released OSGeo 2011 Annual Report
• A bugfix, PostGIS 2.0.2 has been released
• And there's the call for papers and new website for FOSS4G 2013, in the U.K. this year
• The open source ArcGIS for Local Government Apps Available Now on GitHub

From the Google front:

• Google announced two new features for the Google Places API: Place Photos and Radar Search.
• Google wants us to know that they're listening to our Google Maps feedback
• The GEB shares links for The making of the "Powers of Ten", the 1977 video
• The GEB also reports that Botswana not happy with Google Street View, since it "compromise their security"

In the miscellaneous category:

• APB informs us about cloud-offloaded GPS (CO-GPS) to decrease power needed by GPS devices
• DM reports that the National Geologic Map Database Gets a Face Lift
• We now have drones that can infect with software virus other drones
• Here's an OGC summary of Location Business Summit USA 2012
• Augmented reality to the extreme, Belgian Researchers Build LCD Contact Lenses
• Extending their offer, MapBox Teams Up with DigitalGlobe on Satellite Imagery
• Here's the ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map December 2012 updates, and also Esri-related, Esri Updates Terms of Use on (Free) Personal Accounts for ArcGIS Online
• On geospatial jobs, APB shares two interesting entries; NZ Report on Geospatial Skill Shortage and Four of Eight Emerging Careers for 2013 Demand Geospatial Skills

in the maps category:

• Here's an entry named Using Series of Maps to Represent Changes in Time: How Diabetes Swept the U.S.
• VerySpatial links to an entry and map on the geography of US charity
• Let's end this issue with a fake map on procrasti-nation

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."