In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Via email I learned that the open source OSM2NetworkDataset version 1.1 is now available, it readies OpenStreetMap data for ArcGIS's Network Analyst extension.

From the announcement: "Version 1.1 now supports ArcGIS 10.0, as well as ArcGIS 9.3.1. New features include restrictions for tracktype, smoothness, surface, and maxwidth.

The Java application OSM2NetworkDataset converts OpenStreetMap (OSM) data so it can be used for network analyses in the ArcGIS extension Network Analyst. It is designed to generate transportation networks for any mode of transportation and any region. The generated networks are based on OSM attributes, such as restrictions, one-way roads, turn restrictions, point barriers, and maximum speed. The path can be chosen according to the shortest distance or the shortest time with user defined average speed settings."

While we mentioned it once before, it never got its full story, until now.

I haven't found much about it on the popular geoblogs, but I recently learned about the existence of Autodesk's free 123D 3D modeling software. It's at the 'beta 6' stage and available only for Windows. It clearly sounds like Google SketchUp competition from Autodesk. This reminds me of Project Butterfly, which got launched as AutoCAD WS, another free tool from Autodesk.

From the 123D about page: "123D is a free solid modeling software program based on the same Autodesk technology used by millions of designers and engineers worldwide. Not an engineer? No problem, with Autodesk 123D you can design precise and makeable objects using smart tools that let you start with simple shapes and then edit and then tweak them into more complex shapes."

Here's recent geospatial open source software releases. All minor but welcomed updates.

• QGIS 1.7.1 released, to be honest, I only recently started using QGIS for real work, and I've been impressed by the advanced features that worked flawlessly (but I wasn't impressed by the user documentation though) 
• GeoServer 2.1.2 released, mostly a bugfix release, here's previous recent GeoServer news
• GEOS 3.3.1 released, GEOS is the C port of the JTS and incorporated into many other geospatial open source projects, see this previous story
• GeoTools 2.7.3 released, that too, a maintenance release

A year after version 2.10, the popular open source web map frontend OpenLayers 2.11 has been released.

The highlights: "This release is a big one, closing over 380 outstanding tickets and providing significant performance improvements. The biggest win is the mobile support enhancements. OpenLayers now allows features to be dragged and zoomed with touch gestures on mobile devices. Handlers for pinching and zooming have also been added to the library. Other key highlights are the plethora of performance enhancements and the additional support for accessing Bing Maps tiles."

You can learn the details in the 2.11 release notes.

Jumping from version number 0.7.1, Mapnik 2.0 is a major release. While we mentioned Mapnik quite a few times, I don't hear that often about it. That said, many of us experience Mapnik frequently, since Mapnik is used for the rendering of OpenStreetMap's main map. Hey, Mapnik even participated to this year's WMS shootout.

Here's a reminder of what Mapnik is: "Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. It's written in C++ and there are Python bindings to facilitate fast-paced agile development. It can comfortably be used for both desktop and web development, which was something I wanted from the beginning.

Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It uses the AGG library and offers world class anti-aliasing rendering with subpixel accuracy for geographic data. It is written from scratch in modern C++ and doesn't suffer from design decisions made a decade ago. When it comes to handling common software tasks such as memory management, filesystem access, regular expressions, parsing and so on, Mapnik doesn't re-invent the wheel, but utilizes best of breed industry standard libraries from boost.org."

Here's the list of major new features for Mapnik 2.0.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the open source front:

• Wonder where GeoTools is? Here's the Status of GeoTools presentation from FOSS4G 2011
• Here's about Metatools, a metadata management plugin for QGIS, now at version 0.2
• Here's the GeoServer Aggregating DataStore, enabling the republication from several data sources, including remote ones
• The slides and videos of OpenStreetMap's State of the Map 2011 conference are now available
• Sean Gillis' at it again, he started a new project called Fiona, an OGR API which wants to be "a clear alternative to the complex layers and cursors and fussy geometry objects of OGR and ArcPy"
• Ok, not directly geospatial, but Gource is the nicest tool to visualize source code changes I've seen yet (works with Git, SVN and others), and here it is showing the changes in QGIS from version 1.6 to 1.7

On the Esri front:

• ArcGIS Explorer Build 1750 is now available
• Mandown summarizes what’s new on ArcGIS Online for September 2011
• There's also an ArcGIS API for iOS 2.01 update for those developing with iOS 5 and another one for ArcGIS API For JavaScript 2.5
• Here's the Best Practices For Using Custom State Highway Shields In ArcGIS

In the everything-else category:

• Here's another entry on the New KML features in Google Earth 6.1
• Iran is releasing Basir, a Google Earth competitor, to counter Google's cultural aggression 
• Microsoft has an entry on the recent updates to Bing Maps: REST API, AJAX Control v7, and Account Center
• We mentioned a few times vertical datums, via Kurt, now NOAA is releasing VDatum, "designed to vertically transform geospatial data among a variety of tidal, orthometric and ellipsoidal vertical datums"
• That's how far sensors can go, millions of geolocated seismic sensors wirelessly connected for oil and gas exploration by Shell and HP
• V1 mentions a comprehensive guide on 3D spatial relationships
• Here's a Maperitive tutorial for Generating OSM Map For Adobe Illustrator
• In the neverending series of cellphone tracking, Slashdot discusses a story named Surveillance Case May Reveal FBI Cellphone Tracking Techniques
• And regarding car tracking Slashdot offers another story named Canberra Police Want Drones To Track Cars
• In the trivia category, Slashdot discusses a story named Swedish Daycare Tracks Kids With GPS Devices

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly mentions the Global Adaptation Index map, which "rates a given country's vulnerability to environmental shifts precipitated by climate change, its readiness to adapt to such changes, and its ability to utilize investment capital that would address the state of those vulnerabilities"
• V1 shares a map of the gas infrastructures in Europe

Here's the recent open source geospatial news in batch mode, which includes everything about FOSS4G 2011 on the geoblogs that we haven't mentioned yet.

On the FOSS4G 2011 Conference front:

• Interesting numbers, "By 2011 there are now 19,471 unique subscribers to OSGeo, more than 400 mailing lists, and more than 15 million lines of code, with 740 contributors, and 269 that have contributed for more than 12 months."
• Slashgeo editor Nicolas summarized Brian Timoney's excellent talk at FOSS4G 2011, and if you want to hear it yourself, here is that 14-minutes impassioned talk on the state of the geospatial industry, Brian demonstrate how much better we could do
• Here's the slides of Paul Ramsey's keynote
• Here's Jody Garnett's updated slides on the WPS Shootout
• Here's the entry to read about Open Source and Open Data at the U.K. Ordnance Survey
• If you haven't read too much about it already, here's an entry on the case study of the U.S. FCC National Broadband Map based on open source geospatial software
• Here's the what's coming to PostGIS 2.0 slides [pdf]
• I heard comments that 30-minutes talks at FOSS4G 2011 was too short for the presenters to dive into their subjects, would you agree? If you're interested in what could be improved see this recap of FOSS4G 2011 by OSGeo's president
• Here's Directions Mag complete wrap up of the conference

In other news:

• I was surprised to read that Tyler Mitchell won't be the OSGeo Executive Director anymore
• GWT-OpenLayers version 0.6 has been released, that's the wrapper library for using OpenLayers in Google Web Toolkit applications
• MapFish is now an official OSGeo project
• This entry reminds us of the comprehensive list of web mapping toolkits (there's too much of them!)
• SS mentioned GrassrootsMapping.org, which is a crowdsourcing aerial image project with goals similar to OpenAerialMap.org

You probably know what Git is, the modern distributed revision control system, replacing CVS and Subversion for many projects. Spatially Adjusted made me aware of the GeoGit approach.

Here's what the documentation written a month ago says: "Following on the core Versioning WFS work, in 2011 OpenGeo started experimenting with a new way to handle versioning, drawing on git, a distributed versioning system built for Linux and widely used. There are two different paths taken, both of which warrant further investigation:

• Using git and github directly, storing data as geojson in files
• Drawing inspiration from git core code and adapting the structures to work with geospatial information

[...] 

The code for the core repository can be found at https://github.com/opengeo/GeoGIT . This code backs both a GeoSynchronization Service module (a spec by the OGC to synchronize data) and the versioning constructs of WFS2. The plan is to eventually get both in to the standard distributions of GeoServer.

[...] 

For the geogit implementation we instead code things to be optimized for the fact that a typical geospatial representation doesn't have much nesting - it's just a bunch of features. The index is orthogonal, doesn't need to be part of the tree structure. But the problem we had when we tried to use straight git with lots of leafs is that it wouldn't really work. It doesn't scale to a single directory with millions of files."

We mentioned it over two years ago and now it reaches a major milestone, the open source SOLAP server GeoMondrian 1.0 has been released.

What is GeoMondrian? "GeoMondrian is an open source Spatial OnLine Analytical Processing (Spatial OLAP or SOLAP) server, a spatially-enabled version of Pentaho Analysis Services (aka. Mondrian). As far as we know, it is the first implementation of such a server and it is open source! [...] GeoMondrian provides then a consistent integration of spatial objects into the OLAP data cube structure, instead of fetching them from an external spatial DBMS, web service or a GIS file. To summarize, GeoMondrian brings to the Mondrian OLAP server what PostGIS brings to the PostgreSQL DBMS, i.e. a consistent and powerful storage and querying for geospatial data!"

Via email I learned that a week ago ESA released a new version of their open source SAR toolbox named NEST, now at version 4B-1.0. This is their first major update this year. We mentioned NEST releases since 2008.

Supported product formats include: 

• ENVISAT ASAR, ERS AMI 1 & 2 (CEOS & Envisat format from PGS and VMP), JERS SAR, ALOS PALSAR, TerraSarX, ADARSAT-2, Cosmo-Skymed, BEAM DIMAP, GeoTIFF, HDF, NetCDF, ENVI, PolsarPro, GETASSE30 DEM, ACE DEM, ASTER DEM and SRTM DEM

What's new for version 4B:

• Interferometry
  • Improved interferogram and coherence estimation
  • Topographic phase removal
  • Filtering of spectras in range and azimuth
• Command line interface improvements
• Easier Coregistration from the command line
• Band variables for batch processing of BandMaths
• ReprojectionUI for graph processing
• Automatic fetching of DORIS and PRARE orbit files
• Automatic GETASSE30 download
• New interpolators
• HSV View
• Uses JDK 7
• Bug fixes
• Significant performance improvements