In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

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

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / data front:

• MapBrief claim that the battle for open source in the enterprise in behind us, from the WSJ: "[...] for reasons including ease of innovation and cutting the time to get products to market"
• Interesting, announcing QMap: A simple data collection application using QGIS
• Unless I'm mistaken, we haven't mentioned yet the new 'shp.js' open source javascript Shapefile parser (via GGD)
• In case you missed it in our PR section, there's an Education version of gvSIG
• GeoTools 8.1 has been released, mostly a bug fix release
• Portable GIS version 3 has been released too
• Here's a summary of State of the Map 2012 held in Tokyo
• It's done, OpenStreetMap data license is now ODbL
• And yes, some crazy people try to sell open source geospatial code

From the Esri front:

• Here's What’s New in ArcGIS Online for September 2012

From the Microsoft front:

• New imagery to Bing Maps, a lot of it, Global Ortho & 17 Million SqKm of New Satellite Imagery

From the Google front:

• Plenty of geoblogs mentioned the Atlantic article on the secretive Ground Truth program in an article named How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything
• Google shares a breakout of Google Maps search terms by country for this Summer
• They also have an entry on the need to save the elephants and how to do it the geospatial way
• You can also Explore the Forefront of Japanese Space Science with Google Maps
• Here's the official entry on the latest imagery update in Google Maps and Google Earth, a lot of it
• The GEB shares an entry on Viewing city lights in Google Earth and why not, another entry on Google Earth Fractals

Interesting Directions Mag articles:

• Does Your Local Government Need A Drone?
• New Spatial Information Act for Australia
• Trucking Fleets Leverage Traffic Data to Work Smarter, Cut Costs
• New Resources for GIS Job Seekers

In the miscellaneous category:

• The SPOT 6 satellite is alive and well with its first images, it was successfully launched on September 9 and has a spatial resolution of 1.5m
• LizardTech (MrSID) Releases Express Server 8

In the maps category:

• Via APB, here's a Map the World’s Friendships from Facebook and Stamen
• Here's a gigantic 3D map of the deaths in Grand Canyon
• NASA wants you to help map an asteroid

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source front:

• Thanks to reverse engineering, GDAL/OGR can now use the Shapefile native .sbn spatial index, to understand the context: "The Shapefile format had been documented since 1998, but the documentation was limited to the minimum core, that is to say the .shp file that contains the geometries and the .shx that is an index to the geometries. However the format of the .sbn file, that was known to contain spatial index (aimed at speeding up spatial filters), has never been published."
• Another entry on the visions for OpenLayers 3
• Here's an entry on QGIS Cloud, a hosting service for QGIS Server and still on the QGIS topic, Styling temporal (time) data in QGIS

On the Esri front:

• APB shares their thoughts on Just What is ArcGIS Online for Organizations?: "It’s a cloud hosted platform for a GIS intranet for an organization."

On the web mapping front:

• Microsoft added thousands of international shopping malls to Bing Maps
• Styles Maps in the Google Maps API just got improved

In the miscellaneous category:

• APB shares a interesting new App called Mapfia that "lets users make free "map calls" to see each other's real time location"
• Even geospatial files are prone to virus, AutoCAD Worm Medre.A Stealing Designs, Blueprints
• On a more positive note for Autodesk, James mentions Project Artoo "that allows AutoCAD Map 3D users to perform geometry cleanup operations on geospatial data"
• Also from Slashdot, here's what can happen when you map someone else's data, PadMapper Gets C&D From Craigslist Over Apartment Listing Maps
• Via OGD, with Map Compare, you can now compare side-by-side 35 basemaps from OpenStreetMap versions to Google Maps versions and Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and more

In the maps category:

• That's an interesting and probably sad map in an entry named The Great Indoors, or Childhood's End?, showing how much less we allow our children to go away from the house over the last decades
• The annual map of the Tour de France in Google Earth

• Here's an entry on the On-Going Japan Sea/East Sea Naming Controversy

About time we change our front page poll. The new poll asks you about what 2011 in geospatial will be like.

The results and comments on the poll about the future of the Shapefile format are pretty interesting. Out of 347 answers, 35% believe the shapefile will stay with us forever and 25% believe SpatiaLite will become the choice of many. Otherwise, it's pretty mixed results, 13% admit they don't know, 11% think that web services will eventually replace flat files, 8% think the GML standard will become widely used, the same amount of people believe ESRI's Geodatabase format will eventually replace the shapefile format. Please also take a look at the insightful comments shared by our users for that poll.

Since the Shapefile vs SpatiaLite debate generated some discussion in the geoblogosphere last month, our new poll asks you what do you think the future of the shapefile format is. Related, last month we published an entry name SpatiaLite, the Shapefile of the Future? It's clearly not the first time the future of the shapefile format is discussed, see for example this Spring 2009 entry named The Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto.

Our initial poll asked our users about whether Slashgeo's reprojection (migrating to its new engine) was worth or not. Out of 163 answers, 40% believes that yes, this is an improvement, and another 26% answered "maybe, the future will tell us". Hopefully, only 3 people though all the work we done was wasted time. The rest, 31%, admitted they don't care what the site looks like and its features, just as long as they get their aggregated geonews.

I also removed the Welcome to the new Slashgeo.org! sticky story from the top of our main page. It's been there for over a month and a half, so all our regular readers are certainly aware of the major change by now!

While we discussed SpatiaLite in the past (but the archives haven't been imported to this new site yet), here's the notes I took during Pirmin Kalberer's talk at FOSS4G 2010 named "SpatiaLite, the Shapefile of the Future?". In the notes below, Frank Warmerdam is the main developer of the famous GDAL/OGR library. In the discussion, people wondered about the status of the promised ESRI File GeoDatabase API.

• SpatiaLite doesn't replace PostGIS as a real database
• SpatiaLite is spatial extension to SQLite
• Single file storage
• Spatial data types and functions
• Launched in March 2008
• File based, so no server process
• Well proven and widely used
• Now with SQLite 3.7 reading and writing can proceed concurrently, which was not the case not so long ago - this is not activated by default, for backward compatibility issues
• It supports OGC simple feature types, SQL-SF
• Indexes for spatial data
• Supports networks and routing
• Raster data also supported