In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

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 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!

The open source javascript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps named Leaflet is very popular and seriously competing with OpenLayers, and it just got better, Leaflet 0.5 has been released.

From the announcement: "Rejoice, everyone — after 4.5 months of development with 26 contributors involved since the previous major release, I’m happy to announce the release of Leaflet 0.5 stable, hooray!

0.5 highlights include IE10 touch devices and Metro apps support, retina-enabled markers, a much better panning inertia implementation, hand cursors for dragging and a new zoom control design. But the real power of this release comes with about a hundred of subtle improvements and bugfixes, improving usability, performance and overall “feel” of browsing the map even further."

The details of FOSS4G North America 2013 have been announced­. Everything is there, from registration, the call for presentations, the gala and the code sprint.

Amongst the keynotes they propose: "Eric Gundersen, CEO, MapBox.  With big names converting from Google Maps to MapBox (USA Today, Foursquare, etc.), Eric will be discussing the business proposition/value of open source geo.

Erek Dyskant, Sr. Analytics Engineer, Democratic National Committee. Whether you were happy or sad with the outcome of the recent election, they must have done something right!  Erek will talk about how open source solutions were used to empower tacticians with geospatial data, and describe what drove the intentional choice of using open source."

Last year, Slashgeo had the chance to be a media partner of the first FOSS4G-NA 2012.

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.

- MrSID export ability available with Geographic Imager 4.1 -

Toronto, ON, January 7, 2013 - Avenza Systems Inc., producers of MAPublisher® cartographic software for Adobe Illustrator® and PDF Maps for Apple iOS and LizardTech, a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, today announced the integration of LizardTech® GeoExpress® 8.5 and the ability to produce MrSID format files into the latest release of Geographic Imager 4.1 for Adobe Photoshop.

LizardTech, based in Seattle, WA, specializes in developing the MrSID format, which handles high-resolution geospatial data. Previous versions of Geographic Imager have already provided read capability for raster and LiDAR MrSID via the integration of LizardTech MG4 Decode Software Development Kit (DSDK). With the current release, Avenza customers can take advantage of the ability to write to MrSID format directly from Adobe Photoshop provided they have the current version of LizardTech GeoExpress installed. This ability expands the number of supported file formats Geographic Imager can write and increases workflow options when working with high-resolution imagery.

“As the leading GIS vendor to support both viewing and writing of MrSID files in Adobe Photoshop, we're excited at the opportunity to partner with LizardTech to provide our users with access to MrSID technology,” said Ted Florence, President of Avenza. “With this integration, customers on both sides will be able to use MrSID images with the entire Geographic Imager toolset without compromise. The capability of tools in Geographic Imager and Adobe Photoshop with the ability to export to MrSID format is an invaluable workflow and shows how committed we are at bringing formats to the platform that may have never been thought possible.” he added.

Jon Skiffington, director of product management at LizardTech, notes, “We're thrilled at the opportunity to work with Avenza Systems to expand the reach of MrSID technology into viable platforms like Geographic Imager for Adobe Photoshop for the benefit of our mutual users.” Additionally, Jeff Young, business development manager at LizardTech, commented, “Collaboration with Avenza allows for more effective support of the Avenza/LizardTech world-wide user community with smoother workflows and more transparent data exchanges.

More information about MrSID support in Geographic Imager is available at www.avenza.com/geographic-imager/lizardtech-mrsid.

More about Geographic Imager for Adobe Photoshop

Geographic Imager is software for Adobe Photoshop that leverages the superior image editing capabilities of raster-based image editing software and transforms it into a powerful geospatial imagery editing tool. Work with satellite imagery, aerial photography, orthophotos, and DEMs in GeoTIFF and other major GIS image formats using Adobe Photoshop features such as transparencies, filters, and image adjustments while maintaining georeferencing and support for hundreds of coordinate systems and projections.

Geographic Imager 4.1 is immediately available free of charge to all Geographic Imager Maintenance Program members and at prices starting at US$319 for non-maintenance members. Academic and volume license pricing are also available. Geographic Imager 4.1 is available for Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS5.1 and CS6. LizardTech GeoExpress licenses and data cartridges are also available through Avenza Systems.

More about Avenza Systems Inc.

Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools for making better maps and for working with spatial imagery. In addition to software offerings for Mac, Windows and Apple mobile device users, Avenza offers value-added data sets, product training and consulting services. Visit www.avenza.com for more details.

More about LizardTech

Since 1992, LizardTech has delivered state-of-the-art software products for managing and distributing massive, high-resolution geospatial data such as aerial and satellite imagery and LiDAR data. LizardTech pioneered the MrSID technology, a powerful wavelet-based image encoder, viewer, and file format. LizardTech has offices in Seattle, Denver, London, and Tokyo. For more information, visit www.lizardtech.com.

For further information contact:
Avenza Systems: Tel: 416-487-5116 - Email: [email protected] - Web: www.avenza.com
LizardTech: Tel: 206-902-2839 - Email: [email protected] - Web: www.lizardtech.com

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