Slashgeo.org

Geo-Wiki.org: Validating Global Land Cover with Crowdsourcing

Satri — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:03:00 +0000

The AGISRS list made me aware of Geo-Wiki.org, a crowdsourcing effort aimed at validating global land cover.

From their main page: "The Geo-Wiki Project is a global network of volunteers who wish to help improve the quality of global land cover maps. Since large differences occur between existing global land cover maps, current ecosystem and land-use science lacks crucial accurate data (e.g. to determine the potential of additional agricultural land available to grow crops in Africa). Volunteers are asked to review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect. Their input is recorded in a database, along with uploaded photos, to be used in the future for the creation of a new and improved global land cover map."

TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices

Satri — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:57:39 +0000

We mentioned this type of possibility a few times in the past, and it's getting more and more real ; Slashdot it discussing a story named TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices.

Their summary: "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."

Batch Geonews: 3D OpenLayers, MapQuest APIs for Android and iOS, Pitney Bowes' Geosk, and much more

Satri — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:31:14 +0000

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source and open data front:

BrainOff shares a few examples of capabilities offered only by OpenStreetMap because of its open nature
V1 mentions ReadyMap, using OpenLayers to render 3D models directly in the browser
Here's a way to enhance raster contrast with gdal_lightner, with may makes its way as a QGIS Plugin
Sean made me aware of pygp, a python geoprocessing package
Here's a short but interesting article named The GeoWeb, Citizen Science and Open Data
Harvard's WorldMap reached version 1.0 and they're looking for participants, we mentioned WorldMap in the past

In the everything-else category:

MapQuest Releases Native Mobile Mapping APIs for Android and Apple iOS, and yes, you can use OpenStreetMap data with it
And there's now live traffic cameras in MapQuest too
SS shares a nicely done 2-minutes video of the OGC on the value of geospatial and standards
DM shares more information on Pitney Bowes's Geosk geodata platform, we mentioned Geosk last december. From the article: "Geosk is a platform for finding and using geospatial data. It combines a data as a service (DaaS) offering with a data management product. At its heart, Geosk is a completely scalable data management system that allows our customers to share their data with any user they choose, including their customers. Around this data management system we wrap an e-commerce engine to help our customers buy and sell premium geospatial data."
Slashdot discussed Canada's Massive Public Traffic Surveillance System, which involves license plate reading, a topic covered a few times already
DM offers an article on socio-demographic structures in Germany
SS informs us a 3D model of Bangkok is now publicly available
SS also informs us of Ericsson's Geo Location Messaging API, I wonder how it relates to GeoSMS
In two entries, V1 explore to potential synergies between music interfaces and controllers and geospatial

In the maps category:

O'Reilly shares a map of Mexico's drug war
WunderMap now has historical weather maps for you
Here's a map of the U.S. showing terrain by using only the roads
SS shares an entry named Energy Use Data for all of New York City Released in Map Form

Google Geonews: New Bathymetry and Seafloor in Google Earth, new 45deg imagery, StreetView in Botswana Coming, and more

Satri — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:41:20 +0000

Here's the recent Google-related geonews in batch mode.

From official sources:

Google released a major update to the bathymetry and seafloor display in Google Earth
There's new 45 degrees imagery available for 24 cities:
- "US: Charleston-Folly Beach, SC; Lee’s Summit, KS; Lexington, SC; Magna (Salt Lake City), UT; North Charleston, SC; Pine Island Center, FL; Plymouth, MN; Salinas CA; Santa Rosa, CA; Shawnee, KS; South Hill, WA; Spanish Springs, NV; Killeen, TX; Decatur, AL
- Europe: Torrelavega, Spain; Pamplona, Spain; San Sebastian, Spain; Bailen, Spain; Rolle, Switzerland; Ponferrada, Spain; Wachtberg, Germany; Weinheim, Germany
- South America: Buenos Aires, Argentina"
There's a new biking directions legend in Google Maps
Ed Parsons mentions the coming of Street View in Botswana

From other sources:

The GEB shares a 3D tour of the Costa Concordia recent ship wreck
While there's apparently no new data involved, the GEB shares an entry on the city lights of Earth at night in Google Earth
The GEB also shares an entry on the Monster Milktruck game in Google Earth and an entry on a new book named Google SketchUp for Game Design
To end with a funny note, APB shares a quote regarding the "removal" of Atlantis from the Google Earth seafloor by manually cleaning the data

GeoNode 1.1 Released

Satri — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:24:21 +0000

We first mentioned it two years ago, and now the open source GeoNode 1.1 has been released.

What GeoNode is? "GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data. The project aims to surpass existing spatial data infrastructure solutions by integrating robust social and cartographic tools. At its core, the GeoNode has a stack based on GeoServer, Django, and GeoExt that provides a platform for sophisticated web browser spatial visualization and analysis. Atop this stack, the project has built a map composer and viewer, tools for analysis, and reporting tools."

And what version 1.1 has for us: "

Improved documentation
Support for GeoServer 2.1, including:
- GeoWebCache integration
- direct Shapefile-to-PostGIS import from the GeoNode upload form (thanks to Matt Bertrand)
- speed improvements to the way GeoNode manages GeoServer configuration
Support for GeoNetwork 2.6
Various UI improvements, including:
- a new user profile page listing the user’s layers and maps
- a “Get feature info” tool to identify feature attributes when viewing maps
- improved map transitions and performance
Increased coverage in GeoNode’s automated test suite
Better feedback from admin tools (thanks to Ariel Núñez)
Installer for Ubuntu (thanks to Ariel Núñez)
Numerous bug fixes thanks to support from partners at last year’s roadmapping summit
Translations in…"

FOSSGIS Brasil Magazine #4

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:20:53 +0000

We are very proud to announce the release of the 4th edition of FOSSGIS Brasil Magazine.

In this 2012 1st issue, the cover section addresses Medatada theme, which deserves special attention of any professional who works with geospatial data.

This 4th edition of FOSSGIS Brasil was built with the effort of the GIS community, including international contributions. Consering this, be sure to check the interview with Jeroen Ticheler, founder and CEO at Geonetwork project, and also the text written for three of the most important contributors of the gvSIG association, talking about the new development model for the project of the robust gvSIG GIS suite.

This year, greatest desire for us at FOSSGIS Brasil team is to continue doing what we have been doing in 2011: To georreference knownledgment

Link to download: http://bit.ly/zFKS3b

Sincerely,
The FOSSGIS Brasil team
http://www.fossgisbrasil.com.br

SpatiaLite 3.0 Released with Excel Spreadsheets Support

Satri — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:25:43 +0000

I failed to find much information about it, but SpatiaLite, the geospatial version of SQLite, reached version 3.0 about a month ago. Anyone knows where to find release notes? I find also funny that on SpatiaLite homepage, it is clearly stated that spatial is not special! :-) Yes, I'll share a followup to my previous entry on the topic (thanks for your feedback!).

On the SpatiaLite topic, here's a blog entry named Spatialite and Excel on talking terms: "The recent stable version of Spatialite, 3.0, supports linking to and importing Excel spreadsheet tables. Read on to see how it’s done. The developers of spatialite have added a driver for *.xls files (thru the FreeXL library ). You can either link to, or import a single sheet from an Excel file [...]"

French Court Calls Free Google Maps Unfair Competition

Satri — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:29:34 +0000

Slashdot runs a discussion named French Court Calls Free Google Maps Unfair Competition.

Their summary: "A French court has ruled that Google is unfairly subsidizing its free mapping products, making for unfair competition with paid services. This might seem ridiculous, but keep in mind that Google started charging for use of its mapping API once the free version had come to dominate the market."

We of course mentioned last October that Google decided to enforce usage limits for the Google Maps API.

OGRS2012 :: CALL FOR PAPERS - Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:28:33 +0000

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
OGRS2012 :: CALL FOR PAPERS
Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium

October 24 – 26, 2012 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Hosted by School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD)

Website: http://www.ogrs2012.org
Contact: cfp@ogrs2012.org

Notice, PDF version of this call is available here : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(our apologies for cross-postings)
Dear colleagues,

The Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium (OGRS) is a meeting dedicated to exchanging ideas on development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education.

Motivated by the inaugural symposium in Nantes, France, OGRS2012 will be held from October 24 – 26, 2012 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The symposium is hosted and organized by the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), in partnership with EPFL Lausanne, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, which are all academic institutions in Western Switzerland, and the Institute for Research on Urban Sciences and Techniques in France.

The main goals are:
- to build a panel of new scientific research and education practices using and contributing to open source initiatives in the geospatial fields;
- to discuss a framework and highlight a rationale about geospatial open source technology usage in research and education activities;
- to provide an innovation platform to network and develop ideas for future collaborative work between academia – from research to education – and other actors of the field (associations, foundations, local authorities, industry etc.).

For more details, visit the overview page on the website.

Keynote speakers :
- Luc Anselin, Director, Regents' Professor and Walter Isard Chair at School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Director at GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, Arizona State University;
- Gérard Hégron, Scientific Director in charge of sustainable city at IFSTTAR (French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Planning and Networks);
- Helena Mitasova, Associate Professor at Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University;
- Robert Weibel, Professor of Geographical Information Science at Department of Geography, University of Zürich.

Submission :
The symposium will integrate several opportunities for presenting : oral presentations, workshops, posters and discussion groups. To participate in any of these opportunities, authors are invited to submit an extended abstract (1000 to 1500 words, references and keywords excluded) through the conference website. The official language is English.

The international scientific advisory board will review and select abstracts for inclusion in the symposium and publication in the symposium proceedings. A subset of contributions will be invited to submit full papers for possible publication in a special issue of the Journal of Spatial Information Sciences (JOSIS), pending a peer review of full papers.

For more details on how to submit a contribution, please visit the call for papers page on the website : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.

Important dates :
- submission deadline for abstracts is May 28, 2012.
- authors will be notified by June 30, 2012 on program inclusion and selection for JOSIS submission
- deadline to submit full papers is September 30, 2012.

Best regards,
OGRS2012 program committee

Sensor Networks In San Francisco Finds Parking Spots

Satri — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:13:13 +0000

Slashdot discusses a story named Sensor Networks In San Francisco Finds Parking Spots.

Their summary: "You've heard of smart cars, and now, rolling out in San Francisco, is a smart parking system that promises to eliminate the arduous process of finding a parking spot. SFpark is a network of magnetic sensors that have been installed under 8,200 street parking spaces, along with additional information from parking garages and parking meters. These sensors are all linked together in a mesh network, and ultimately link back to a central command center. Drivers can access this parking data via the SFpark website or smartphone app, and see in real-time where parking spaces are available. At any one time, a third of cars on the road in urban areas are looking for parking spots, consuming more fuel, creating more pollution, and causing more accidents. With SFpark, you can see at a glance where there's a parking spot — but in the future, you'll be able to hit a button and have your smartphone direct you to the nearest parking spot."

It's not the first time we discuss location technology to find parking lots.

Batch Geonews: 180,000 Free OrbView-3 Scenes, Car AR Driving, PostGISonline, Bing Maps Updates, Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Alliance, Obesity and Car Travel, and much much more

Satri — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:48:01 +0000

This batch mode edition is unusually long. It covers the past month and a bit more. Yes, that's way too much and I won't try to repeat the experience ;-) Here's what I considered pertinent enough to share with you. Exceptionally, in some cases I haven't gave attribution to the source of the news, thank you for your comprehension.

On the geospatial open source front:

I just recently became aware of PostGISonline, a site for testing and learning spatial SQL
You can now create and manipulate SLD (the OGC Styled Layer Descriptor standard) in Python with python-sld
Via the AGISRS list, I learned about OpenQuake.org, for calculating seismic hazard and risk at any scale, which of course ingest geospatial data and outputs maps
Here's WherePost.ca, which crowdsources the location of mailboxes and post offices for Canada
Here's the Switch2OSM website promoting OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap might go indoor too
Still on the OSM topic, V1 shares an entry on the use of OpenStreetMap data in agriculture
Here's an entry on the future of GeoCouch and CouchDB
GeoServer gets database-level security
There's now a plugin to run Python scripts in QGIS
Here's about improvements to the QGIS rule-based rendering
On a similar topic, here's a guide to beautiful reliefs in QGIS
Did you know you can add Google Maps, OSM, and Bing Maps directly in QGIS? You can via the OpenLayers plugin - hey, there's even a Profile plugin
There's an updated book published by Gary Sherman, now named The Geospatial Desktop , subtitled Open source GIS and mapping
GEOS 3.3.2 has been released

On the Esri front:

Mandown shares how to convert GPX files to Features using ArcGIS 10
From the same source, Learn The Basics Of Working With The ArcGIS Runtime SDK For Android
There were updates to ArcGIS for SharePoint, ArcGIS Mobile and to the ArcGIS API for Windows Phone
James and SS talks about ArcGIS Online as the Esri Content Management System

On the Microsoft front:

Microsoft announced a few new Bing Maps features, such as traffic incidents and find near route
They announced the Bing Maps Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Control v1
There's new Bing Maps V7 modules too along with a new routing engine
James Fee shares an interesting entry named Bing Maps gets Nokia Brand and Possibly the Boot

On the remote sensing front:

This is pretty interesting to many: SS shares an entry named USGS Now Offers OrbView-3 High-Resolution Images for Free, 180,000 scenes at 1m spatial resolution available
China launched their first high-resolution remote sensing satellite, Ziyuan I-02C
Slashdot discussed the newly released version of Blue Marble high definition (and beautiful) satellite image of the Earth from the Suomi NPP satellite
Slashdot is running a story named Who's Flying Those Drones? FAA Won't Say and related, O'Reilly mentions OpenPilot, open source UAV with cameras
And another named Launch Your Own Nanosatellite Into Space

On the GNSS / GPS front:

It's coming, car makers are preparing for augmented reality driving
Not exactly GPS but via radio-tagging, see the nice and short video of whale 3D paths in the ocean
Slashdot is also discussing a story named New Mexico Is Stretching, GPS Reveals
MapQuest launched an html5 app-like site for Android and iPhone for using MapQuest

In the miscellaneous category:

The 7 geo predictions for 2012 of Cédric are interesting
Microsoft's Flight Simulator, renamed Flight, will be available for free next Spring, with paid extra content
We never mentioned it before, but now Indiemapper is free, it "helps you make static, thematic maps from geographic data by bringing the best of traditional cartographic design to internet map-making."
SS mentions the new alliance between Autodesk and Pitney Bowes, APB also discuss this new relationship
SS also shares an entry named Safe Software’s Expanded Role as a Conduit Between Sensors and Systems
The U.S. EPA in their Locations Challenge introduced a crowdsourcing project of georeferenced photos of environmental problems
Slashdot ran a discussion on assembling your own 3D printer
The OGC shared a summary of the Eye on Earth Summit held in December
Another OGC entry was named Status of the OGC's Water Resource Activities
DM shares an article named GIS Adoption and Use on College Campuses: An End-of-Year Review and Look Ahead to 2012
The GEB mentions a new 3D San Francisco website
I found interesting the possibility of a .data TLD
A new free iPad app: GeoViewer from LizardTech, supports MrSID format and more
It's been a while since we mentioned them, GISCorps were recently in 7 countries, including Libya

In the maps category:

APB summarizes this: Comparing Maps of Obesity and Car Travel
Here's an entry on cleanly using symbols on maps
Here's U.S. routes as a subway map and the U.S. National Wind Energy Map
Fox News shared a map with missing or wrongly placed countries
TMR shares an obligatory animated map of rising global temperatures since 1880

Is Geospatial Special?

Satri — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:33:24 +0000

I work in a large organization. A colleague challenged me this morning regarding whether geospatial is special or not. Here's part of what I wrote. Your comments are of course welcome! Do you agree? Any other arguments or counter-arguments?

Is Geospatial Special?

Does geospatial deserves special considerations or even a special treatment within an organization?

Geospatial is a set of sciences and technologies that are often applied to specific topics, such as a geographic information system for a municipality, remote sensing for the assessment of the impacts of a flood, location-based services for a smartphone, an interactive web map to plan a trip, a virtual globe to visualize weather events, etc. Other than researchers, nobody does geospatial just for the sake of geospatial, practitioners apply geospatial knowledge and technologies to their own needs and objectives.

I'd argue that geospatial *is* special, and here's why;

Geospatial data, which includes at a minimum a geographic projection and datum, is not processed, analysed and disseminated by the same methods and tools as non-geospatial data
Geospatial data requires software that specifically supports its particularities. Software that not only must support geographic projections and datum to properly store and load the data, but it also provides the methods and algorithms for the processing and analysis of the geospatial data.
Geospatial data processing and analysis differs significantly from non-geospatial data. Only with geospatial data you have to consider snapping, overlapping, proximity, line of sights, position accuracy and precision, reprojections, data types like lines, polygons and voxels, specific file formats like the Shapefile and GeoTIFF, mosaicking, spatial generalization and scale change, spatial indexes in spatial RDBMS, and so on...
Geospatial data dissemination also differs significantly from non-geospatial data. Displaying geospatial data uses techniques specific to cartography, data is generally conveyed via maps and similar means, it requires specific data formats and web services to ensure their spatial component is conveyed along with the data, etc.
Trained geospatial specialists are in much better position to appropriately apply geospatial knowledge, methods and tools to solve complex challenges related to the storing, processing, analysis and dissemination of geospatial data.

In the past decade, we've seen geospatial going from being the playground of trained experts to being accessible to the general public. The advent of ubiquitous free tools such as web maps (e.g. the Google Maps API) and virtual globes (e.g. Google Earth, which has been downloaded nothing less than over 1 billion times), easy and often free access to satellite imagery, and more recently, smartphones and location-based services, educated and enabled many non-geospatially trained users to acquire and use geospatial data and technologies. This is a Good Thing (tm), but does that mean that geospatial isn't special anymore? No. The reasons for considering geospatial as special stated above are still valid and geospatial is indeed special.

But does the 'geospatial' term have a future as a unifying umbrella, grouping together the domains which deals with geospatial data? Maybe not in the long run. Nowadays, people working in remote sensing, geographic information systems, location-based services and global navigation satellite systems don't necessary overlap that much anymore. Does this mean the term 'geospatial' has become obsolete, diluted into its specific traditional sub-branches? I'd say no. Geospatial is still a term useful as a way to refer to all domains which involve data with spatial references.

Multi-modal maps R us, part II

aizolnai — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:40:23 +0000

Bloggage update: Last week I reported Google Maps' released of multimodal transportation mapping in the greater London UK area. Not to be outdone, Transport for London released a brilliant road congestion mapper under Roads Live Travel News, also based on Google Maps! So again I couldn't resist reporting this somewhat peripheral topic to what I normally cover, but hey, "it's my bloggage and I'll write if I want to" (apologies to Lesley Gore).

Google Earth 6.2 Released: Seamless Globe and Google+ Integration

Satri — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:32:01 +0000

Yesterday, Google released Google Earth 6.2.

From the announcement: "With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+. [...] We’ve also made some updates to the search feature in Google Earth. Aside from streamlining the visual design of the search panel, we’ve enabled the same Autocomplete feature that's available in Google Maps."

On the welcomed seamless globe: "While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data." Sri Lanka, before and after:

A quick reminder, Slashgeo has its Google+ page too (but it's inactive at the moment, that doesn't mean it's not worth adding it to your circles ;-).

Related, the GEB shares an entry named Google Earth 6 now required for Street View.

Google Geonews: Public Alerts in Google Maps Launched, Summaries of 2011, pyKML, World Bank Using Google Map Maker, and much more

Satri — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:44:49 +0000

Here's the recent Google-related geonews, it covers a longer time span than usual.

From official sources:

Here's a summary entry of the major changes and updates to Google Maps and Google Earth in 2011
Google launched today Public Alerts in Google Maps: "If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help?"
The World Bank signed a greement to use Google Map Maker for disaster preparedness, this just makes me wish even more that Google will join and merge GMM with the OpenStreetMap bandwagon
On the dev blog, they introduced pyKML, a Python library for manipulating KML
There's new 45 deg imagery for nothing less than 24 cities:
- US: Boise/Caldwell, ID; Buffalo, NY; Chattanooga, TN; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Greenville, SC; Houston/Pasadena, TX; Kansas City/Gladstone, MS; Knoxville/Louisville, TN; Memphis/Bartlett, TN; Mobile, AL; Nashville, TN; Pensacola, FL; Racine, WI; Santa Monica, CA; Sarasota/Englewood, FL; Stockton, CA
- Europe: Baiona, Spain; Basel, Switzerland; Friedberg, Germany; Mannheim, Germany; Santander, Spain; Ulm, Germany
- South America: Porto Alegre, Brazil
StreetView is now available in South Korea, for the cities of Seoul and Busan and there's new campus tours in Street View too
Google is open sourcing Sky Map and will collaborate with Carnegie Mellon University
On the dev blog, here's about integrating Street View and custom panoramas into your apps
And another entry discusses heatmap.js and its Google Maps API Heatmap Overlay
There's an official Google Maps game coming to Google+ next month
Here's biodiversity tours in Google Earth
There was a major imagery update the first week of January, here's the details

From other sources:

The GEB shares his own recap the year 2011 for Google Earth
Here's an entry on traffic congestion visualization in Google Earth
If you're curious about the Costa Concordia ship wreck, here it is in Google Earth and satellite imagery
Here's an entry on wave mechanics in Google Earth
Here's the North American power plant emissions in Google Earth
Mapperz informs us that Google Maps U.K. now integrates National Rail Info and Ed Parsons offers an entry on multi-modal travel planning in Google Maps
APB reports that Android phones now ranks above iPhone when it comes to GPS navigation

Marble 1.3.0 and "Marble Touch" Released

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:15:43 +0000

Marble 1.3 has been released with lots of new gems: Marble — the virtual globe and world atlas — now integrates with KDE Plasma. By allowing for coordinate and bookmark searches, Marble can be opened directly from the Plasma search bar.

The new Elevation Profile shows the incline of routes, which can be edited interactively.

Stargazers can view and track Earth satellites thanks to Marble participation in the European Space Agency (ESA) Summer of Code in Space.

During Google Summer of Code, Marble gained initial support for display of .osm (OpenStreetMap) files in vector format.

Owners of the Nokia N9/N950 are the first to receive the new mobile application Marble Touch.

Further details can be found in the feature guide.

FME 2012 News and Safe Software Major Donation

Satri — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:39:16 +0000

I am extremely happy to report that Safe Software, the makers of the popular FME spatial ETL tool, have made a big donation to Slashgeo.org - thank you Safe Software! They're taking the sweet spot of being #1 on our top donors list (on the right-hand column).

Here's what might interest you regarding FME 2012:

Contest called "Geography Jones and the Temple of Data", open until Friday which has prizes like an iPad2 and $1500 in travel up for grabs
Webinar that will describe what's new and great in FME 2012, offered three times on January 26
Details on what's new in FME Desktop and FME Server
Blog posts on FME 2012, LiDAR, Google Fusion Tables and more to come later this week

We mentioned FME several times since 2006. In addition to this donation, Safe Software also paid for advertising exclusivity on Slashgeo.org for a few months (the top banner). Slashgeo is managed by a registered non-profit organization. You can learn more about getting exposure on Slashgeo.

Don't worry, we're not filthy rich now ;-) Despite this welcomed donation, our budget is still far in the red because of hosting and maintenance fees accumulated since 2005 (this doesn't count hundreds of hours spent by our team of volunteers). You can peak at our open budget while it's still there. I'll have to remove it in order to respect the Google terms of service (we already got trouble with them in the past).

LightSquared 4G Plans Interfering with GPS Prevented by New U.S. Defense Act?

Satri — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:15:38 +0000

Via @azolnai I learned about the 2012 Defense Authorization act that may prevent LightSquared, or anyone else, to interfere in any way with military GPS. Related, last week, Slashdot discussed a story named LightSquared Says GPS Tests Were Rigged.

From the NewScientist article: "A clause buried deep in the 565 pages of the 2012 Defense Authorization act passed in December bars the Federal Communications Commission from approving systems that interfere in any way with military GPS. The bill also tells the FCC to supply Congress with a final copy of the report from its working group, which late last year issued a preliminary report warning that a system proposed by telecoms firm LightSquared of Reston, Virginia would cause serious interference. [...] The concern was that signals near the 4G transmitters would be so strong that that would drown out the faint satnav signals reaching the ground. A series of subsequent tests backed up those claims."

The Slashdot story summary: "Would-be cellular carrier LightSquared claims that the company's LTE network was set up to fail in GPS interference tests. 'Makers of GPS (Global Positioning System) equipment put old and incomplete GPS receivers in the test so the results would show interference, under the cover of non-disclosure agreements that prevented the public and third parties from analyzing the process,' LightSquared executives said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning."

While we mentioned frequently the LightSquared debacle, those interested in all the details can read All Points Blog's excellent coverage.

MapProxy 1.3.0 Released

Satri — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:54:39 +0000

We mentioned the open source MapProxy a few times since 2010, including the 1.0.0 release about a year ago. Less than two weeks ago, MapProxy 1.3.0 was released. Anyone with an interest in tile caching might be interested in reading this previous story named FOSS4G 2011: What about a Tiling Shootout?

Amongst the new features for the 1.3.0 release: "

RESTful WMTS: The MapProxy WMTS now also supports the RESTful API. This service also supports custom URL templates for your service.
CouchDB cache backend: You can now use a CouchDB as a backend for tile caches. Each cache gets stored into a separate database and you can configure the layout of the URLs of each tile. You can also add additional metadata for each tile."

U.S. Supreme Court Rules Warrants Needed for GPS Monitoring

Satri — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:38:07 +0000

If you're not sick of it already, Slashdot runs another story on GPS monitoring and the law, this time, it's named Supreme Court Rules Warrants Needed for GPS Monitoring.

Their summary: "The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in the case of Washington, D.C. nightclub owner Antoine Jones, saying police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. A federal appeals court in Washington overturned his drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant when they installed a GPS device on his vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month."

First FOSS4G - North America 2012 Conference in Washington DC April 10-12

Satri — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:33:31 +0000

For those who don't read our geospatial press releases feed, you might be interested in learning about the first FOSS4G - North America conference to be held in Washington DC in April 10-12, 2012. We mentioned in 2009 the possibility of a North American-specific FOSS4G conference to be organized by the OSGeo, it now has become reality.

From the press release: "In light of the success of last September’s international FOSS4G conference in Denver, Colorado, the newly-formed North America chapter of OSGeo, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data, seized upon the opportunity to organize a regional follow-up conference focusing on the North American open source geospatial community. “2011’s event showed us that there is great interest in the region to continue the conversation and strengthen the network of individuals and organizations working the open source geospatial field,” said Paul Ramsey, accomplished geospatial software developer and FOSS4G- NA 2012 conference chair."

OpenStreetMap Reports Data Vandalism From Google-Owned IPs

Alex — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:05:54 +0000

Slashdot ran discussion last week named OpenStreetMap Reports Data Vandalism From Google-Owned IPs.

Their summary: "Following reports of misconduct by Google employees in Kenya and India, It has been found that Google IP addresses have been responsible for deliberate vandalism of OpenStreetMap data. While it is unlikely that this was a deliberate or coordinated attack by Google HQ on the competition, multiple such reports does raise the question of whether or not Google has become too big to effectively enforce its 'Don't be evil' philosophy across its massive organization."

While I haven't read as much as I'd like yet about this issue, the following Register article informs us that Google kicked out two contractors that would be to blame.

Slashdot Discussion: Open Source vs Proprietary GIS Solution?

Alex — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:46:07 +0000

Ok, I'm almost back behind the helm and I expect it's going to take me at least a week to catch up the geonews, but you'll get them.

During my absence last week, Slashdot ran a discussion named Ask Slashdot: Open Source vs Proprietary GIS Solution?

Their summary: "As the Project Manager for a non-profit looking to implement a tech project, I am running into a few dilemmas, and as a casual Slashdotter I could really use some help. I'll start with a brief explanation of the project. We research issues in Canadian Immigrants, and found that there was a lack of recent, unaggregated information. As we dug further, we found that some data was available, but there was no central repository. Therefore, we are building a web based service to collect this data, with the intent of having it display in Google Maps and then be downloadable as a CSV file that is readable in GIS software such as ESRI Arcsoft, so that data may be visualized."

Like a lot of Slashdot discussions, the value is in the moderated comments.

Multi-modal maps R us

aizolnai — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:28:02 +0000

Bloggage update: "Google multi-modal maps are so significant to greater London Area commuters that I cannot pass it up. Ed Parsons posted it on his blog and I immediately tried it: it's just the ticket (pun intended) living near Cambridge about an hour north of London and travelling around London only by public transit..."

Resuming Geonews Aggregation in a Week

Alex — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:50:46 +0000

Dear users, a short note to let you know I'll be unavailable (and away from computers!) for the next 10 days. Geonews aggregation will resume on the week of January 23rd. I had the intention of publishing more this week, but good intentions are sometimes not enough. Rest reassured, I will include everything pertinent that I accumulated and which was published during the past weeks. Meanwhile, you can still contribute stories that other editors will handle. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

OpenStreetMap News: Syrian Uprising and OSM+GMM Data, TomTom vs OSM Data, U.S. OSM Terrain Layer, SotM 2012 in Tokyo, and much more

Alex — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:16:59 +0000

Okay, there is much more geonews that were waiting for me than I expected. Please give me some time to catch up everything. Anything worthy, I'll aggregate and share with our users.

There has been several interesting articles and entries posted in the past two weeks about OpenStreetMap. Here they are!

Ogle Earth shares an interesting article on what's happening in Syria with Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap relying on crowdsourcing for their maps, in the context of the 2011-2012 Syrian uprising
Cédric highlights an article on TomTom data vs OpenStreetMap data, specifically for Germany
Cédric also enumerates 13 reasons why OpenStreetMap fails to replace official or proprietary base maps in a sustainable way - this list identify several interesting 'challenges' for OpenStreetMap
Meanwhile, James Fee was one of many that reacted to Wired's article named Open Source Maps Gain Ground as Google Paywall Looms
Related and worth reading, Nestoria explains why it dumped Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap, served by MapQuest
James also linked to an article about OpenStreetMap data and what makes spatial data 'authoritative'
Mapperz mentions the nice OpenStreetMap Terrain layer for the U.S.
The OSM summary links to the video of OpenStreetMap edits for 2011, but don't expect to see details in this video
The State of the Map 2012 conference will take place in Tokyo, September 6-8th
Sadly, I still haven't found an appropriate iOS app to contribute to OpenStreetMap, anyone has?

GDAL/OGR 1.9.0 Released

Alex — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:11:15 +0000

The OSGeo announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. It's hard to ignore GDAL/OGR, which is at the core of many open source and commercial geospatial software. We mention it quite often. Version 1.8.0 was release a year ago. For the curious ones, ESRI's FileGeodatabase format is now officially supported by GDAL/OGR.

The summary of what's new: "This is a major new release including the following major new features:

New GDAL drivers: ACE2, CTG, E00GRID, ECRGTOC, GRASSASCIIGrid, GTA, NGSGEOID, SNODAS, WebP, ZMap
New OGR drivers: ARCGEN, CouchDB, DWG, EDIGEO, ESRI FileGDB, Geomedia, Google Fusion Tables, IDRISI, MDB, SEGUKOOA, SEGY, SVG, XLS
Significantly improved drivers: NetCDF
Encoding support for shapefile/dbf (#882)
RFC 35: Delete, reorder and alter field definitions of OGR layers
RFC 37: Add mechanism to provide user data to CPLErrorHandler (#4295)
gdalsrsinfo: new supported utility to report SRS in various form (supercedes testepsg)"

Microsoft Patents Bad Neighborhood Detection via GPS for Pedestrians

Alex — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:33:59 +0000

Or for geospatial purists, via 'satellite navigation systems' for pedestrian. In any case, Slashdot discusses a story named Microsoft Patents Bad Neighborhood Detection.

Their summary: "With the grant of their US Patent #8090532 Microsoft may be attempting to corner the market on GPS systems for use by pedestrians, or they may have opened a fertile ground for discrimination lawsuits. ... Described as a patent on pedestrian route production, the patent describes a two-way system of building navigation devices targeted at people who are not in vehicles, but still require the use of such a device to most efficiently route to their destination. ... For example, the user inputs their destination and any constraints or requirements they might have, such as a wheelchair accessible route, types of terrain they are willing to cross, the option of public transportation, and a way point such as the nearest Starbucks on the route. Any previously configured preferences are also considered, such as avoiding neighborhoods that exceed a certain threshold of violent crime statistics (hence the description of this as the 'avoid bad neighborhoods' patent), fastest route, most scenic, etc."

2012 Geospatial Conferences World Map

Alex — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Via @Thierry_G I learned about this world map of geospatial conferences to be held in 2012 provided by Quarry One Eleven. You can filter the conferences by month.

I know VerySpatial provide a calendar of geospatial events (compatible with the iCal standard) since 2006.

Anyone's aware of similar global calendars of geospatial events?

Shopping Center Tracking System Condemned by Civil Rights Campaigners

Alex — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:33:17 +0000

Slashdot is discussing a story named Shopping Center Tracking System Condemned by Civil Rights Campaigners.

Their summary: "Civil rights campaigners have spoken out against a technology used by several shopping centers in the UK to track consumers using their mobile signals. The shopping centers claim that the technology helps them provide better services to consumers and retailers without compromising privacy. The system, called the Footpath, allows them to know how people are spending time in a shopping center, which spots they visit the most and even the route they take while walking around. Several consumer and civil rights groups, including Big Brother Watch, say consumers must be given a choice on whether they want their movement tracked or not."

See this story and the related links for numerous previous similar stories.