In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

The pycsw team announces the release of pycsw 1.4.0.

The 1.4.0 release brings numerous features, enhancements and fixes to the codebase, including:

* WSGI server support
* harvesting support for WFS, WCS, WPS, and other CSW endpoints
* support for Open Data Catalog integration
* enhanced support for GeoNode 2.0 (GeoNode development branch)
* support for distutils setup/install, which enables pycsw to be installed as a library
* support for PyPi
* support for displaying counts for GetDomain requests based on queryable properties
* support for requestId request parameter
* fix GetRecords sortby parameter support for HTTP GET
* support for W3C XLink 1.1 migration
* support for Debian and Ubuntu packaging
* support for sorting GetRecords requests by geometry area
* support for PostGIS enabled PostgreSQL

This release also marks our migration to GitHub for source code management, issue tracking and wiki.

The full list of enhancements and bug fixes is available at https://github.com/geopython/pycsw/issues?milestone=2&page=1&state=closed

pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw implements clause 10 (HTTP protocol binding (Catalogue Services for
the Web, CSW)) of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification, version 2.0.2.

pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata. Existing repositories of geospatial metadata can be exposed via OGC:CSW
2.0.2. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

Source and binary downloads:
----------------------------------------

The source code is available at:

http://pycsw.org/download.html

Testers and developers are welcome.

The pycsw developer team.

http://pycsw.org/

This is my tentative to catch up the geonews since my mid-August holidays. Here they are!

On the open source / open data front:

• UDig 1.3.2 has been released with several new features and supports Axios spatial editing tools again
• Since 2008 the USGS provides the Landsat archive, but this entry mentions that a substantial part of the Landsat archive is available on the fast and reliable public Google Earth Engine cloud storage

On the Esri front:

• The free plugin ArcGIS for AutoCAD version 300 is now available
• There's now an ArcGIS Runtime for iOS for ArcGIS.com WebMaps

On the Google front:

• Google made a few Google Maps announcements, including voice guided directions in India, Map Maker in New Zealand and new Street View in 150 university campuses
• In another entry, Google offers a roundup of their August Google Maps related news, most news we already shared with our users
• Nothing surprising, new imagery released on September 1

On the Microsoft front:

• Microsoft shares an entry on overlaying Esri shapefiles in BIng Maps
• Microsoft's Global Ortho Project is complete for the United States, meaning there's high resolution 30cm imagery everywhere in the country
• There's a new Bing Get Me There App for iOS for London, UK
• An entry on Bing Maps V7 AJAX Highlights

In the everything else category:

• James shares a must-read short entry named '80% of Data Is Not Spatial So Stop Claiming It Is', read the comments for insights
• Here's a pertinent entry related to a UN paper, Criticism - Future Trends in Geospatial Information Management: The Five to Ten Year Vision
• Here's an update on the OGC standards and the semantic web (aka Linked Data)
• APB informs us that 22 companies formed the In-Location Alliance to Enhance Indoor Positioning
• O'Reilly links to an article on Yelp Checkins to Measure Geopositioning Accuracy Across Phones
• Slashdot discuss the Location Privacy Act Approved By California Legislature
• Other stories at Slashdot, The Rapid Rise of License Plate Readers and UK License Plate Cameras Have "Gaps In Coverage"
• Big numbers, APB indicates that the GIS market will soon reach between 3.7 - 10.6 Billions, depending on who you ask

In the maps category:

• On APoD, there's a pretty interesting map of hurricane and tropical storms paths (screenshot below)
• An interesting map of the Global Decline in Religiosity
• Some London Olympics 2012 maps: The politics of London 2012 Olympic medal counts

Via the OGD blog I learned about OpenGeoDa, an open source software program that serves as an introduction to spatial data analysis. The initial (closed) version was released in 2003 and they claim about 70,000 users. While we mentioned GeoDa before, it's really the first time we share about its existence with our users.

Here's what it is: "It is designed to implement techniques for exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on lattice data (points and polygons). The free program provides a user friendly and graphical interface to methods of descriptive spatial data analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation statistics, as well as basic spatial regression functionality. The latest version contains several new features such as a cartogram, a refined map movie, parallel coordinate plot, 3D visualization, conditional plots (and maps) and spatial regression."

Still catching up my August holidays, here's the recent geospatial open source and open data geonews.

In general news:

• O'Reilly publishes an article named With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger: "There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t."
• Esri published an update on their relation with open source: "Esri has always hosted open code and samples in a variety of ways, but more can be done. Focus and motivation needs to be improved, and Esri is now making it a priority to improve its open source participation. More of Esri’s code should and will be open sourced in the coming days, weeks, months, and years." They are also on Github now, http://github.com/esri and http://github.com/arcgis
• sxdf
• India launched the beta of their open data portal
• MapQuest have a New Geocoding Service and Updated APIs Based on Open Data
• OpenGeo shares an article named Haitidata.org: using open source geospatial for disaster response planning
• FOSS4G software getting adopted, gvSIG 1.11 now official part of the standard software portfolio in the City of Munich and Luxembourg using open source GIS for cadastre
• DM shares a 2-parts article named Designing an Open Source Geospatial Solution to Manage Airport Noise and Operations
• For the curious ones, here's the new OSGeo Board and Charter members refreshed

In software news:

• The OSGeo-Live 6.0 GIS software collection has been released
• A serious OpenLayers competitor, Leaflet 0.4 has been released, actually, they're at version 0.4.3 now
• Believe it or not, MySQL inches closer to PostGIS with support of true spatial relationship functions
• Here's a short entry on Surface Interpolation in GeoServer and there's a new release, v 1.4.3, of GeoServer-Manager
• Nathan is enthusiastic about Five new awesomely awesome QGIS features, here's more on the Latest Style User Interface Improvements
• There's a new winGRASS 7 with R-integration
• Where's MapGuide Open Source? Here's MapGuide state of the union address (or: Results of the user/developer survey)

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.2-RC3.The release is available for download from:

http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/GeoServer+2.2-RC3

This release comes with assorted bug fixes and small improvements, and aims to be the latest RC before the final release. Notable changes:

• improvements in the security subsystem upgrade from the 2.1.x series
• bug fixes and improvements in the control-flow module (you won’t be wondering anymore if it’s properly installed, or not)
• avoid deadlocks on some WFS transactions

The entire change logfor the 2.2-RC3 release is available in the issue tracker:

http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10311&version=18700

A very special thanks to all those who contributed bug fixes and improvementsto this release.

–The GeoServer Team

I'm back from holidays - thank you for your patience. Expect several days for me to catch up geospatial news and share them with you. You can always submit anything pertinent directly.

Last November we mentioned the major 2.0 release, and now, Mapnik 2.1.0 has been released. Mapnik still is "a free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. Above all Mapnik is about making beautiful maps. It is easily extensible and suitable for both desktop and web development."

Here's the highlights for 2.1.0: "

• A new framework for Style level image manipulation called Image filters.
• A new pipeline for chained coordinate transformations like clipping or smoothing called Vertex Converters
• Compositing modes at Symbolizer and (experimental) Style level. Infinite possibilities from this, see a few examples from AJ.
• Support for Style level opacity
• WKT, WKB, GeoJSON, SVG parsers and generators that can be used outside of rendering
• Data-driven SVG style transforms on svg markers and images thanks to @lightmare
• Data-driven orientationfor Text, heightfor Buildings, and width/heightfor Markers.
• A new CSV input plugin
• A new GeoJSON input plugin
• A new Python input plugin
• Better text labeling through support for placement-type="list". See the docs at the bottom of this page.
• Improved Map loading speeds as well as warnings and errors"

With Slashgeo using Drupal since 2010, I recently found Cartaro, an open source geospatial CMS.

The overview: "Cartaro is the web mapping platform that brings the power of the best open source geospatial components into a content management system. With Cartaro you are able to set-up and run your own geo-enabled and OGC standards-compliant website with not more than a few clicks. The geospatial components used in Cartaro are PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache and OpenLayers. All those are managed from within the powerful CMS Drupal.

Cartaro is for organizations and individuals that need to run a light-weight spatial data infrastructure (SDI) without the need for extensive configurations and much individual programming.

Cartaro is also for all websites that focus on CMS features while also having to handle geospatial data."

If you head to the project's page on Drupal, only a dev version for D7 is currently available, but it looks in very active development. We did mentioned other Drupal geospatial projects in the past, including the CartoDB Drupal module.

The Geotools community is pleased to announce the availability of Geotools 8.0 for download on sourceforge.

• geotools-8.0-bin.zip
• geotools-8.0-doc.zip
• geotools-8.0-userguide.zip
• geotools-8.0-project.zip

If you are using Maven, this release is deployed to our OSGeo Maven Repository:

For more information on setting up your project with Maven, see the Quickstart (included in the user guide documentation pack above).

Geotools 8.0 is a stable release made in conjunction with GeoServer 2.2-RC2 and GeoWebCache 1.3-RC4. Currently there are no additional updates to 2.7.x planned.

Geotools 8.0 comes feature packed compared to its 2.7.x releases. Highlights include:

• Function lookup using qualified Name
• Update to Java 6
• Add support for joins to the WFS protocol
• New ILIKE statement
• Support Multi-Valued Attributes in Filter Comparison Operators
• Temporal Filters
• Allow build with Maven 2 or Maven 3
• Describe Function with FunctionName
• Detailed Argument and Return Info for FunctionName
• Introduction for the use of ResourceId
• Sphinx generated user guide with live codes examples, tutorials and build instructions
• MapContext refactor

More information can be found by checking out the proposals made for this release here.

For those migrating from GeoTools 2.7, additional instructions are available here.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all the developers, users and contributor that have helped to make this release possible.

Enjoy,
The GeoTools Community
http://geotools.org

It's the 2012 Esri International User Conference, expect more Esri news in the coming days, meanwhile, Mandown made me aware of the launch of Esri Maps for Office.

Here's the official list of features, and the summary from the Mandown blog: "With Esri Maps for Office, business professionals can quickly create interactive maps from their data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. These live maps, which can be based on any geographic component, such as customer locations or sales by ZIP Code, can be simply added to Microsoft PowerPoint presentations or shared through Esri’s cloud mapping platform, ArcGIS Online. Maps shared through ArcGIS Online can then be distributed throughout an organization or embedded into mobile or web applications."

Of course this isn't the first solution to build maps directly from MS Excel, but the first deep integration with MS Office from Esri.

We mentioned several times the beautiful maps from Stamen Design, and you can now use them directly in QGIS.

From the entry: "Stamen’s maps are amongst the most creative and beautiful OpenStreetMap visualizations and it would be great to have them as base maps in QGIS. No problem! Nathaniel Kelso has already done all the work for us [...] It adds the possibility to load Stamen’s Watercolor, Toner and Terrain tiles into the QGIS project"