In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Yesterday Google announced the new Google Maps, including several significant changes. It's going to be available this summer, and there will finally be an iPad version of the Google Maps app. The Google Geo Dev blog tells you how to use the new look for your maps today via the Maps API. The Google Earth Blog (not from Google) shares an entry on Google Earth integration in Google Maps might mean the demise of the Google Earth Plugin. APB also shares and entry about the Three New Geo APIs for Android: Fuse Location Provider, Geofencing, Active Recognition.

Snippets from the announcement: "

• Every click draws a new map highlighting the things that matter most 
  Like a friend drawing you a map to her favorite restaurant, with only the roads and landmarks you need to get there, the new Google Maps instantly changes to highlight information that matters most.
• Easier to find the best local places
  In addition to a customized map, we’ve also made it easier to uncover the best local gems. Search results are labeled directly on the map with brief place descriptions and icons that highlight business categories and other useful information – like restaurants that are recommended by your Google+ friends.
• Amazing imagery for exploring the world
  Of course, no map would be complete without amazing images for exploring the world. The new carousel gathers all Google Maps imagery in one spot enabling you to fly through cities, walk canyon trails, climb mountains, and even swim the oceans. And on a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, the carousel is also where you'll find the Earth view which directly integrates the beautiful 3D experience from Google Earth into the new maps."

The best way to get an overview of what's new is certainly to watch this 2 minutes video:

InfoQ have published a talk by Gary Gale (@vicchi) called "The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)" giving a half hour potted history of the digital map. Worth a watch (but not as full screen as you'll miss the slides!) as knowing where we came from might help to understand where we are going.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

On the Apple front:

• iOS's Find My Friends Gains Customizable Geofences, letting you know when friends are nearby or warning you when kids arrive at home
• Catching up, Apple Expands 'Maps Ground Truth' Hiring to Rest of the World
• Japan? Apple Releases iOS 6.1.3 With Japanese Maps Enhancements

In the everything else category:

• Another interesting entry from Brian Timoney, Your Online Map Is Missing Half Its Audience: More Revealing Web Analytics From the Field
• An interesting short entry on the future of Esri, LA Times Travel Section Interview with Jack Dangermond
• Some of you will be interested in the Ten Things GIS Users Need to Know about GitHub
• Via OR, that's remote sensing, Millimetre-Accuracy 3D Imaging From 1km Away
• Here's an entry on How NASA uses Google Earth
• A new website, TeachGIS: Resources for and by GIS Instructors
• OpenStreetMap's iD editor gets drag and drop GPX support
• If you do surveying Kurt invites us to look at Trey's TrailScribe
• Interesting, Neighborhoods are Just Predefined Geofences
• To be honest, I did not know who was John Snow, Lessons from the ghost of John Snow: "demonstrating one of the first applications of spatial analysis to detect the cholera outbreak in London in 1854"
• The Economist shares an article on MapBox's web mapping offers
• A Slashdot discussion on How To Stay Ahead of Phone Tracking ?
• Another from the same source, virtual reality? USC Launches 3-D Printed VR Headset Library
• An O'Reilly article on the use of sensors for news reporting
• Stamen teams up with Nokia to show their HERE 3D data
• Bentley is doing well, summary at Bentley 2012 Annual Update
• Wonder about Autodesk? Autodesk Rebrands and Launches InfraWorks for Civil Design
• Forcing geospatial knowledge into workers, U.S. DOT To Require GPS Training for New Commercial Truckers

In the maps category:

• GeoCurrent offers many new informative maps:
  • Maps of Global alcohol consumption
  • Maps of Global Geography of Meat (and Fish) Consumption
  • Maps of cheese production and consumption
  • And why not, the Global Geography of Milk Consumption and Lactose (In)Tolerance
  • On Egypt and the World Diesel Price Map
  • A Map of The Countries That Are Most and Least Welcoming to Foreigners
• Via APB, 28,000 rivers wiped off the map of China
• Here's a funny map of all subways of North America
• As a bonus for reading up to here, you have to see this remote sensing 1-minute video of the Arctic / Beaufort Sea February-March 2013 1000-km ice fracture: "While fracturing events are common, few events sprawl across such a large area or produce cracks as long and wide as those seen here." Look at a map of North Alaska first to understand the scope of this.

After v2.4 last fall, MapGuide Open Source 2.5 has been released. Can anyone share thoughts or links regarding MapGuide's user community? Is it still vibrant as it used to be?

Major new items from the release notes: "

• PDF-based QuickPlot? for Fusion (RFC 124)
• Google Street View widget for Fusion (RFC 125)
• Support for user coordinate system dictionaries (RFC 127)
• Integrated IDE API documentation support for Java/.net (RFC 129)
• New enhanced Java wrapper API (RFC 129)
• Streamed HTTP feature/data/SQL query results (RFC 130)
• Various AJAX Viewer UI and functionality improvements
• Enhanced Redlining widget with expanded data format support  more info
• Fixes and enhancements to assorted Fusion widgets and templates  more info"

Catching up last month's geonews, here's a 5-parts series named Why Map Portals Don’t Work, here's Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.

From the intro: "[...] we’ll lay out some major drawbacks of standard web portals as well as suggest a few alternatives along the way.  While the baseline scenario I have in mind are public-facing government mapping portals, those rolling corporate intranet solutions would do well to take heed."

Some quotes taken from the entries, but go read the full 5 entries, it's worth:

• No one has widely circulated their own web metrics that shine a more positive light on map portals
• Problem #1: Map Portals Over-Focus on the Map, Under-focus on Text-Based Search and Discovery. Takeaway #1: Users Want and Need a Large, Obvious, Auto-Complete Text Box to Drive Search & Discovery
• Too many choices are psychologically debilitating and make people less happy (cue the TED talk). So yeah, your map portal has too many layers, leaving your users psychologically debilitated and unhappy
• Problem: Multiple map layers make it difficult to elicit a user’s intent and vastly overestimate the public’s interest in figuring out how to manipulate the map display
• Cures for Layerrhea:  a) break out most important layers into single-topic maps; b) provide data downloads for power-users; c) roll your own basemap with supporting, contextual layers baked-in

• Because if you are building any public-facing interface you have exactly four requirements: FAST  •  INTUITIVE  • INFORMATIVE  •  FAST

• The primary use of maps is quick information retrieval, NOT deep interaction with map interfaces
• The greatest recent improvement in map interactivity has been the work Mapbox has done with UTFGrid (interactive demo here) [this is a shame, I admit, that we never mentioned before UTFGrids on Slashgeo]
• Icon-laden toolbars are a desktop thing, not a web thing

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."

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."

The serial winner of the FOSS4G WMS Shootout just got better, MapServer 6.2 has been released. We of course mentioned the open source web mapping server MapServer innumerable times.

The major features of 6.2:

• MapServer 6.2 is INSPIRE View Service compliant, i.e. supports the provision of an INSPIRE View Service compliant WMS Server.
• Mask Layers: Mask layers are used to “mask out” part of a given layer, to only represent data that intersect features from another layer.
• Precise Symbol Placement: Traditionally, MapServer centers a marker symbol on the point it should be rendered to. ANCHORPOINT is a new SYMBOL level keyword that describes where the given symbol should be anchored.
• Complex Multi Label/Symbol Symbology: Some cartographic representations require juxtaposing multiple symbols and/or labels in order to obtain a complex final symbol.
• Vector Fields: MapServer can render vector fields based off data from GDAL supported raster formats containing u and v bands.
• Label Leader Offsetting: For densely labelled maps, MapServer now supports offseting a label with respect to it’s original anchorpoint if the original location resulted in a collision with an already present label. An optional line can also be rendered to link the rendered text to it’s original feature location.
• Multiple Font Support: List a set of true type fonts to search for required characters.
• SVG Symbology: Along with the traditional ELLIPSE, VECTOR, PIXMAP and TRUETYPE symbols, MapServer 6.2 now supports SVG symbols directly.

Here's the latest batch-mode edition of the geonews.

From the open source front:

• InaSAFE 1.0 launched, it's a "free software that produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities", it's also a QGIS plugin

From the Esri front:

• Interested by the SLD standard? Here's about converting an ArcMap project file into an SLD document with ArcMap2SLD (we did mention it in 2010)
• Here's how to add access to various formats to ArcGIS using GDAL/OGR
• Here's How to build an Apple Map app for iOS using the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS

From the Google front:

• Google reminds us to let indoor Google Maps be your guide this holiday shopping season
• There were Big updates to Google Mars
• There's also Google Earth Outreach in Australia and New Zealand now

In the miscellaneous category:

• Bill Gates writes about GIS, GPS and maps, Digital Mapping Technology Helps Polio Vaccinators Zero In
• Here's another must-read entry on the GIS crisis from Brian Timoney, arguing that (Domain Experience + GIS)   >   (GIS + domain experience)
• James tells us about the upcoming JS.geo Geospatial JavaScript conference in Denver January 14-15, 2013, attendance is also only 10$
• Another story on Secret Stingray Warrantless Cellphone Tracking
• GLONASS corruption exposed and 200M$ stolen, GLONASS Satellite System Designer Fired
• An Apple Maps consequence; Scott Forstall Reportedly Forced Out of Apple
• A few news from MapQuest, New MapQuest Gas Prices App and MapQuest for iPhone with Traffic-Influenced Directions, and they also introduced MapQuest Discover, a new MapQuest Local, and more: "a photo-centric social and travel experience centered on places that people may want to explore"
• Geospatial isn't just for driverless cars, Motorcycle App Helps You Ride Faster, Turn Sharper, Brake Harder
• We already know about drones, More Drones Set To Use US Air Space
• An article on Taking the 'Pulse' of Volcanoes Using Satellite Images
• Meet the World's First 3D Printing Photo Booth and on that topic, How to print a 3D Google Earth building using Makerbot
• APB provides Bentley Systems by the Numbers
• Apparently, U.S. Weather Satellites Are Dying
• Here's a different 3D game, where you learn about the effects of the speed of light (via ORR)
• Here's a generic article on how web mapping is helping government improve communications and services

And finally, at the suggestion of a Slashgeo user which made a donation, we added a 'Paypal button' to ease the process of making donation to Slashgeo.