Le portail francophone de la géomatique

The day of Christmas Eve seems to be a good day to look back on an in many respects enervating year.

With GeoCat we've been working on some great projects that have helped to advance our dreams and have given a lot of satisfaction. I will mention a few here. What is great about these projects is that they have helped us advance the GeoNetwork opensource project significantly. Considering that one of my main reasons to leave the security of a United Nations job for a less secure private company adventure was that it would help GeoNetwork opensource to develop faster, I feel really proud about my team and about the GeoNetwork core developers!

Interesting GeoCat projects

The Dutch National Georegistry (NGR) has been a project we've worked on since GeoCat started back in 2007. The official launch happened during the GSDI conference in Rotterdam in 2009.

This year we've worked on improving it, updating the National Metadata Profile validation and improving INSPIRE related OGC CSW support among others. We've also worked together with Geonovum and the Dutch Kadaster to ensure the NGR can be moved onto the operational infrastructure of the Kadaster. The Kadaster will be responsible for all operational aspects of the central part of the Dutch SDI.

Support to Scandinavian National SDI's

GeoCat worked hard to support Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Scotland with their catalog implementations. These countries have joined their efforts and resources to take GeoNetwork opensource to a level that meets their national and INSPIRE requirements. Much of the custom development of their catalog implementations is done by the countries themselves, while GeoCat has taken up most of the generic requirements and implemented them in GeoNetwork. The three released versions of GeoNetwork v2.6 include a lot of what has been developed in the context of this project. The project will continue in 2011 and the resulting operational catalogues should appear in due course. Looking very much forward to that!

The Dutch Waterboards - Het Waterschapshuis

In collaboration with Nieuwland consulting GeoCat is working for Het Waterschapshuis to develop a central geo infrastructure (Geo-voorziening). Het Waterschapshuis is the executive agency on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for the 26 regional water authorities (Waterschappen) in The Netherlands, a government body comparable with the Provinces. The Geo-voorziening will be operational early 2011 and will provide country covering data layers related to all water management aspects The Netherlands has to deal with. These layers correspond to data required by the INSPIRE directive. The metadata descriptions of these layers will be catalogued in a central repository that will feed its content into the National GeoRegistry (NGR). The individual Waterschappen will be able to upload the data subsets they are responsible for. These subsets will be aggregated into nationwide OGC WMS (INSPIRE View) services. The GeoCat Bridge extension to ArcMap acts as a Bridge between the Waterschappen and the Geo-voorziening to upload and regularly update data and metadata. It will also allow a Waterschap to upload other (locally interesting) data layers to be served on the infrastructure. The data is loaded into PostGIS and served using GeoServer and GeoNetwork opensource.

GeoCat Bridge

At the FOSS4G2010 conference in Barcelona we launched the first version of GeoCat Bridge. Bridge helps GIS professionals to deploy metadata and map services quickly from their ArcMap (ArcView, ArcEditor & ArcInfo) desktop applications.

It converts all symbology to standards OGC SLD symbols and optionally uses GeoServer custom extensions to get an even better rendering of the maps. Metadata can be edited and validated against National metadata profiles. The metadata is kept with the data, using the default ESRI way of managing metadata and is published as clean ISO19139 metadata in a GeoNetwork metadata catalog. Since it supports the INSPIRE required metadata fields, it is extremely well suited to quickly publish INSPIRE complaint metadata and services. It saves ArcMap users lots of double work when publishing data on GeoServer, benefitting of the strong classification and symbology support ArcMap offers to them. Bridge is a product we're extremely proud of at GeoCat and hope it will give you as much excitement as it gives us developing it!

Other things that make me happy

The list is pretty long! I should start with my real kids here ;)

But when it comes to professional joy, the development of that other baby made me happy:

• GeoNetwork opensource was selected as the platform of choice for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Clearinghouse. (GEO Portal.org)
• The Australian Spatial Data Directory
• Institute of Volcanology and Seismology of FEB RAS, Russia
• Ministerio do Meio Ambiente, Brasil Geo processamento

These are just a few. I can't possibly name all new GeoNetwork based nodes that were created this year. I've seen them in more languages than I could ever have imagined. From Dutch to Finish, from Turkish to Russian and Greek.

What else can I say than a big thank you to all those that have used a tool that was once my baby, but now is a big kid that doesn't need his father that much anymore. I just wish GeoNetwork to grow more and more in the years to come, developed by all those other great people surrounding him. And I will definitely still contribute with whatever I can!

We at GeoCat have another challenging year ahead with exciting new projects, among whom is the Adaption Clearinghouse for Europe (information related to Climate Change Adaptation). I'll try to write more about them during the year :-)

And if you need our support, we're here to help you!

Thank you and a Happy 2011!

Jeroen Ticheler
Founder and chair of the GeoNetwork opensource Project Steering Committee
Owner of GeoCat bv

TRES FORTE PARTICIPATION AU SEMINAIRE REGIONAL ORGANISE PAR IGN France INTERNATIONAL SUR L’APPORT DE L’INFORMATION GEOGRAPHIQUE DANS LES PROJETS AGRICOLES

Merry Christmas Eve to all and welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? It’s not very often that X-mas eve falls on our favorite day, Friday. So, here we are. The stars have lined up and we have an X-mas eve themed FFT post. So, naturally, we cover our favorite holiday topic, Norad Santa, but we also feature video of the “Digital Story of the Nativity.” It’s very very cool. Oh, and just to remind you all that we still have plenty of got geoint? stickers available! Feel free to email info@usgif.org to get more stickers. Merry Christmas Eve to all!

Help Raise Money for GEOINT Education!
Before we dive into the post, we wanted to remind our readers that USGIF has recently become apart of the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area (CFCNCA). As such, USGIF uses money raised to to fund our USGIF Scholarship Program, educational workshops like GEOINT 101, and other academic offerings like providing earth science-related materials to underprivileged schools. The deadline to donate is now January 17, 2011! Click here to donate.

Secret Santa: NORAD Mum on How it Tracks St. Nick
Lots of military secrets are hidden behind the gleaming walls of NORAD’S headquarters building, including this one: Just how do they get Santa’s flight path onto their computer screens every Christmas Eve? Tracking Santa’s travels is a celebrated tradition at the North American Aerospace Command, and it unfolds Friday for the 55th year. NORAD insiders drop hints about how they do it — “ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras,” radar, satellites and Canadian Forces fighter jets. They happily release a flurry of facts: They answered 74,000 phone calls and 3,500 e-mails from around the world last year, all asking for Santa’s location. Read the full AP post story here. By the way, as of 8:30 a.m. EST today, Santa is officially at Lae, Papua New Guinea. Check out more here.

A Social Media Retelling Of The First Christmas
What if Mary and Joseph gave birth to their baby Jesus in the Digital Age? How would they have used the social media tools available to a world where one out of every 13 people have a Facebook account, and one tweet or YouTube video can catch the attention of thousands or millions if it goes viral. The Portuguese digital marketing company, Excentric not only explores that possibility but has produced a video titled, “The Digital Story of the Nativity” to explain to the world how they see that story playing out in the year 2010. Read the full InvestorSport article here and check out the video below.

En los albores de nuestra civilización, los romanos tenían dominado el Mare Nostrum y territorios cercanos bajo el mando, generalmente, del divino emperador de turno. En aquella época, en la que a pesar de existir República y Senado el gobierno era casi dictatorial, aparecieron unos lunáticos que se hacían llamar cristianos y desafiaban la autoridad del emperador, proclamando una autoridad suprema superior a la del emperador, y una igualdad entre personas.

No voy a entrar en valoraciones personales sobre el cristianismo hoy en día por no herir sensibilidades muy respetables, pero la situación me recuerda algo. Al principio fueron ignorados, luego fueron el hazmerreir popular, más tarde fueron combatidos con dureza y al final vencieron.

Haciendo analogía, la situación del software libre hoy en día es similar de algún modo a cuando los cristianos eran perseguidos, alegraban la vida de los leones y la de los que disfrutaban de ello.

El tema me ha venido a la cabeza pensando en eventos relacionados con el software libre, y la relación con el software privativo. En mi opinión, el software libre y el privativo deben compartir existencia, al menos mientras existan ambos. De hecho un software absolutamente libre como gvSIG ofrece conexión con sistemas privativos, como Oracle, ArcSDE, ArcIMS, ECWP o formatos cerrados o no estándar como DWG, DGN, SHP (sí, abierto pero no estándar). Sin embargo llama la atención la especial dedicación de recursos que los sistemas privativos hacen por convivir con el software libre.

En el mundo de los eventos de software libre, aparecen participaciones de compañías dedicadas al software privativo de manera creciente. Me llaman la atención los patrocinios. Existe un amplio debate en las comunidades de software libre sobre si se deben aceptar estos patrocinios o no. La opinión más difundida es la de “por qué no, si contribuyen a financiar nuestro evento”. Cada comunidad debe tomar sus propias decisiones. Yo no estoy en contra de una ni de otra opción. Sin embargo me choca. ¿Alguien se imagina 2.000 años atraś, al emperador Malignus o al senador Cerratus financiando una misa cristiana? ¿O al partido republicano financiando las camisetas de los cristianos al salir a los leones?

Repito, no estoy en contra de la financiación de eventos de software libre por parte de compañías privativas, siempre y cuando esta financiación no implique los riesgos que en ocasiones conlleva. Cuando la viabilidad de este tipo de eventos se sustenta en financiación privativa, se “puede” llegar a perder la libertad de decisión. “Si quieres ser libre de verdad, no hagas que tu estómago dependa de ello”.

Más preocupante es la concesión de privilegios a los patrocinadores, cuando los patrocinadores no están vinculados al mundo del software libre. Hace unos meses me invitaron a hablar en el SASIG 2010 (Software Aberto para Sistemas de Informação Geográfica) o Jornadas de SIG Libre de Portugal, organizadas por OSGeo Portugal. No puedo más que hablar bien de la organización, una comunidad activa, con gente muy amable y capaz. En esas jornadas obtenían financiación de compañías locales que trabajan con software libre, y también de patrocinadores de software privativo, como alguno de los nombres que todos conocemos. Hasta aquí ningún problema. Sin embargo, se les concedió protagonismo a los patrocinadores (algo que, a pesar de ser patrocinador habitual de este tipo de eventos, no me gusta, aunque lo entiendo).

Es en este punto donde aparecen las incongruencias de un evento de difusión de software libre, al concederle 30 ó 40 minutos a compañías que nos lanzan sus mensajes desde el mundo privativo, y dejar a otros ponentes de software libre únicamente 5 minutos. Todos recordamos la famosa frase “ArcGIS is open” en el FOSS4G 2010, frase que se transformaba en la presentación calcada en SASIG en “ArcGIS e oberto”. Escuchar burradas por parte de otros, como que Oracle es FOSS4G porque tiene una versión gratuita, o asistir al magnífico sorteo de tres licencias de desarrollo del software X, no contribuyen en absoluto a la misión de este tipo de eventos: “Difundir y promover el uso del software libre”.

Una cosa es que alguna compañía libere algún producto residual en su aportación a su cifra de ingresos, bien por imagen o bien como huida hacia adelante; y otra que eso le otorgue un papel similar al de cualquier proyecto puntero de software libre. Desde aquí animo a los organizadores de eventos a medir las consecuencias de dejar a los romanos paganos brindar en las celebraciones cristianas y contarnos las excelencias de sus dioses. Dejemos que se conviertan poco a poco, o que sus resultados impongan un cambio de CEO, que derive en que, cual Constantino I el Grande, asuma el cristianismo, … quiero decir, el software libre.

Y dejemos que los eventos de software libre difundan sólo el software libre, y generalicen la voluntad de utilizar software libre. Ya lo decía Maquiavelo: “resulta tan difícil y peligroso querer hacer libre a un pueblo que quiera vivir siervo como querer hacer siervo a un pueblo que quiera vivir libre”. Así pues, hablemos al pueblo sólo de libertad.

Filed under: community, events, opinion, spanish

La présentation des données tabulaire dans les applications ArcGIS Desktop a été largement améliorée en version 10. Tout d'abord, c'est une fenêtre unique permet désormais d'afficher l'ensemble des tables. A l'aide d'un système d'onglets, l'utilisateur peut activer et afficher une table pour interagir avec elle. Plusieurs tables peuvent être mises cote-à-cote en faisant simplement glisser un

Ce 24 décembre 2010, Michelle Obama n'a pas dérogé à la règle, en aidant... les militaires à localiser les histoires du père Noël, conformément à une tradition qui remonte à 50 ans. Elle était cette année à Hawaï et elle a répondu pendant quarante minutes à des enfants qui appelaient le programme du Commandement de la défense aérospatiale nord-américaine (Norad) qui cherche la trace du père Noël et ses rennes. Le Norad met à la disposition des Américains une ligne téléphonique depuis 1998 et un site internet www.noradsanta.org en sept (...)

By the time you read this, Santa will have already begun his journey around the world, starting around 2:00am EST today. His journey will be tracked using a variety of methods including satellites, radar and fighter jets.

You can view the main Santa tracker here, but read on for other ways to follow his journey throughout the day.

If you missed the chance to watch his journey last year, here is a highlight reel that Google has put together:

There are a lot of great ways to follow him on his journey, thanks to the folks at NORAD and some help from Google:

Watch his progress on Google Maps. Visit noradsanta.org to see a map of his location and his next scheduled stop.

• Watch him fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Visit the "Track in Google Earth" page to watch Santa fly by using the Google Earth Plug-in. Last year, I fired up this page on my netbook, placed it up on the mantle, and we kept a close eye on Santa all day long.

• Follow his progress on your phone. Search for [santa] in Google Maps for Mobile, or visit m.noradsanta.org from your phone to track his progress while you're on the go.

• Follow him on other services, such as his YouTube channel, Twitter account and Facebook Page.

As another fun bonus, Google has just added a Santa hat to "Pegman" (the Street View character) in Google Maps. He doesn't change the functionality of Google Maps at all, but just makes things a bit more festive!

Also, Google has built a variety of custom online holiday cards for you to send to your family and friends. You can see them all at googlemapsholidays.appspot.com. It uses a fun combination of winter images and Google Maps to create a fun card for you to send.

It is Xmas and I just finished to write the manual for the Geopaparazzi 2.0 version.

For those that want to browse a bit the new fucntionalities waiting for the release, here it is.



Well, I am shutting down everything and head to the Xmas Market to warm up my spirit with some mulled wine to properly prepare for the evening.

Happy Xmas to everyone!!

Pegman Decoration

Pegman, the Google Maps Street View character, has gone all festive. For the holidays Pegman has donned his Santa Claus hat.

On which note don't forget to track Santa Claus today with the NORAD Santa Tracker.



The Santa Tracker is now live and shows Santa's current position on a Google Map. This year NORAD have even added a Santa Cam to the map.

________________

During the recent QGIS hackfest in Poland, we spent some time discussing the use of GIT and I spent a bit of time to learn the basics of using GIT. One thing about GIT that is different for users like myself coming from an SVN background is the way that creating and applying patches is done. Typically under svn I would do something like this to create a patch:

svn diff > foo.diff

And then to apply that same patch I would do:

patch -p0 < foo.diff

Which is all quite simple. Git’s process is a little different. Here is my workflow for creating a patch:

• Create a branch (GIT seems to encourage you to work in branches and to branch often)
• Checkout your branch
• Work and change things in your branch
• Commit your work to your branch
• Generate a patch as a diff between your branch and master
• Submit your patch
• Apply your patch

So here is a simple session that does the above:

git branch patch-testing
git checkout patch-testing
( do some work in that branch now)
git commit -m "Important changes" -a
git format-patch master

After you are done with that,  Git will have created a nice little diff for you. To apply the patch to another checkout do:

git apply foo.path

Then commit and push your changes to the origin repository.

During the recent QGIS hackfest in Poland, we spent some time discussing the use of GIT and I spent a bit of time to learn the basics of using GIT. One thing about GIT that is different for users like myself coming from an SVN background is the way that creating and applying patches is done. Typically under svn I would do something like this to create a patch:

svn diff > foo.diff

And then to apply that same patch I would do:

patch -p0 < foo.diff

Which is all quite simple. Git’s process is a little different. Here is my workflow for creating a patch:

• Create a branch (GIT seems to encourage you to work in branches and to branch often)
• Checkout your branch
• Work and change things in your branch
• Commit your work to your branch
• Generate a patch as a diff between your branch and master
• Submit your patch
• Apply your patch

So here is a simple session that does the above:

git branch patch-testing
git checkout patch-testing
( do some work in that branch now)
git commit -m "Important changes" -a
git format-patch master

After you are done with that,  Git will have created a nice little diff for you. To apply the patch to another checkout do:

git apply foo.path

Then commit and push your changes to the origin repository.

Pegmans Gets A Hat Pegman gets a Christmas hat for the weekend? [goo.gl] Predictions - 2011 will bring, A new perspective to old fashioned raster maps... with the help of...

Map and GIS News finding blog. With so many Maps and GIS sites online now it is hard to find the good from the not so good. This blog tries to cut the cream and provide you with the newest, fastest, cleanest and most user friendly maps that are available online. News has location and it is mapped.

A quick update on my Google Books experience.

After my initial post of December 9 that outlined my experience adding my book to Google Books, I waited patiently for some action on the ‘processing’ status of my book.  Finally on December 18th, the book moved to a status of ‘Live.’ For those keeping track, this amounted to approximately 13 days in the ‘processing’ stage.  How did I know the book was live?  No, I did not get an email (that would be nice!); the book simply showed up under “Live” in the Google Books Partner Program interface on one of my daily checks.

As soon as I noticed the book was “Live,” I ran to Google Books and searched for “Cyclocross“.  The result?  Not my book :(  I then did an ‘author’ search for my name, and found my book.  I clicked the link, and ‘previewed’ the book.  Looking good!  I then went back and searched for the full book title “Cyclocross for Roadies” and the results came up right away.  I again tried a search for just “Cyclocross” and finally found my book on page five or 6! I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t further up on the rankings for the term “cyclocross,” but figured there wasn’t much more that I could do.  However, when I ran the search a day or so later, I was the second result, after Simon Burney’s book!  Much better!

So…some thoughts?  I had set the ‘preview’ percentage at 20% (the minimum allowable to participate in Google Books).  However, the preview appears to be showing 13 of 42 pages (30.9%), so I am not sure how this is calculated.  Perhaps it is smart enough to not include the cover and table of contents, etc. in the ‘viewable’ limit?  If so, then I would say 9 pages (21.4%)of the preview are actual content.  I would still prefer that this percentage err on the lower rather than higher side, but I guess I will live with it for now.

What else to say?  The reporting tools are still not showing any information, which is a bit annoying; you would hope that once the book is ‘Live’ that results would immediately be available for page views, etc.  Since it appears I will have to wait it out, I will again reserve comment on the reporting tools.

I’ll finish this with a recap of my questions from the first post.  Unfortunately, only one of them was answered…

• How long will the “Processing” step take? – 13 days in my case

…while most of them remain unanswered…

• Once the book is “Live,” how much traffic will I get from it? (views, page reads, etc.)
• How many folks will click through to the “Buy Link”?
• How many of those folks will actually buy a copy of the book?
• If these Google Books traffic numbers are significant, can I (and how?) then add the book to the Google eBook store?  I have read that an “Editions” tab will show up in my Partner Program page, where I can add it to the eBook Store.  I’ll keep you posted on this one!  If I decided to do this, I will likely have to stop selling through RBR.
• How is the ad ‘revenue sharing’ linked to Google AdSense?
• What are the limitations to a non-U.S. Google Books account?

…and of course I now have some new questions…

• how is the ‘viewable’ percentage calculated?
• Now that the book is live, how much time does it take for the Reporting tools to become active and usable?
• Why don’t I have an “Editions” tab to add the book to the Google eBook Program (should I decide to do so)?
  • is this related to the limitations of a non-U.S. Account?

I’ll be sure to keep you updated as things progress, but for now, Happy Holidays!

A quick update on my Google Books experience.

After my initial post of December 9 that outlined my experience adding my book to Google Books, I waited patiently for some action on the ‘processing’ status of my book.  Finally on December 18th, the book moved to a status of ‘Live.’ For those keeping track, this amounted to approximately 13 days in the ‘processing’ stage.  How did I know the book was live?  No, I did not get an email (that would be nice!); the book simply showed up under “Live” in the Google Books Partner Program interface on one of my daily checks.

As soon as I noticed the book was “Live,” I ran to Google Books and searched for “Cyclocross“.  The result?  Not my book :(  I then did an ‘author’ search for my name, and found my book.  I clicked the link, and ‘previewed’ the book.  Looking good!  I then went back and searched for the full book title “Cyclocross for Roadies” and the results came up right away.  I again tried a search for just “Cyclocross” and finally found my book on page five or 6! I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t further up on the rankings for the term “cyclocross,” but figured there wasn’t much more that I could do.  However, when I ran the search a day or so later, I was the second result, after Simon Burney’s book!  Much better!

So…some thoughts?  I had set the ‘preview’ percentage at 20% (the minimum allowable to participate in Google Books).  However, the preview appears to be showing 13 of 42 pages (30.9%), so I am not sure how this is calculated.  Perhaps it is smart enough to not include the cover and table of contents, etc. in the ‘viewable’ limit?  If so, then I would say 9 pages (21.4%)of the preview are actual content.  I would still prefer that this percentage err on the lower rather than higher side, but I guess I will live with it for now.

What else to say?  The reporting tools are still not showing any information, which is a bit annoying; you would hope that once the book is ‘Live’ that results would immediately be available for page views, etc.  Since it appears I will have to wait it out, I will again reserve comment on the reporting tools.

I’ll finish this with a recap of my questions from the first post.  Unfortunately, only one of them was answered…

• How long will the “Processing” step take? – 13 days in my case

…while most of them remain unanswered…

• Once the book is “Live,” how much traffic will I get from it? (views, page reads, etc.)
• How many folks will click through to the “Buy Link”?
• How many of those folks will actually buy a copy of the book?
• If these Google Books traffic numbers are significant, can I (and how?) then add the book to the Google eBook store?  I have read that an “Editions” tab will show up in my Partner Program page, where I can add it to the eBook Store.  I’ll keep you posted on this one!  If I decided to do this, I will likely have to stop selling through RBR.
• How is the ad ‘revenue sharing’ linked to Google AdSense?
• What are the limitations to a non-U.S. Google Books account?

…and of course I now have some new questions…

• how is the ‘viewable’ percentage calculated?
• Now that the book is live, how much time does it take for the Reporting tools to become active and usable?
• Why don’t I have an “Editions” tab to add the book to the Google eBook Program (should I decide to do so)?
  • is this related to the limitations of a non-U.S. Account?

I’ll be sure to keep you updated as things progress, but for now, Happy Holidays!

EDIT (December 28, 2010): The reports are now showing! Read Part III of my experience here.

This video show the install process, the configuration and use of the GeoCat Bridge extension and the resulting metadata and map services configured on GeoServer through the GeoNetwork opensource user interface. (It can also be viewed in HD quality).

Purpose:

• Publish shapefiles, ArcSDE data and gridded data on GeoServer while maintaining the complex symbology created in ESRI® ArcMap (ArcView, ArcEditor or ArcInfo).
• Publish metadata for each data layer in ISO format (a.o. for INSPIRE) on the GeoNetwork opensource catalog to publish as OGC CSW et cetera.

More information at [geocat.net]

We're happy to announce the release of GeoNetwork v2.6.2. This is a minor release that fixes a number of bugs and adds a number of great new improvements listed below.

A security hole was discovered that is fixed in this release. We strongly advise you to upgrade your existing implementations of GeoNetwork to this version!

You can download the release from [geonetwork-opensource.org]

I would like to thank all contributors to make this release possible!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very good 2011!

Kind regards,
Jeroen Ticheler
PSC Chair GeoNetwork opensource

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- Bug fixes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- Be sure id is an integer when creating SQL query. Thanks Pierre Mauduit
- Fix download with special character
- Protect code in getMetadataFromIndex if createDate or changeDate are null (for example, if created/harvested invalid metadata without this fields)
- Removed Download link (doesn't work within release documentation unless generic)
- Use permanent redirect instead of temporal redirect to avoid some issues when running with Apache proxy
- XSL processor configuration
- Fix #387 : GN vulnerable to other application's TransformerFactory
- Fix #397 : Thesaurus name after adding keyword
- Fix #398 : INSPIRE keywords not multilingual
- Fix #399 : Map in editor does not work correctly
- Fix #400 : Security hole in GeoNetwork -- search for owner
- Fix #413 : Fix typo in SQL scripts
- Fix #415 : Simple numeric indexing

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- Changes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 2.6.x documentation updates
- Added documentation for ArcSDE harvester
- ArcSDE harvester documentation update
- GN logo points to [geonetwork-opensource.org]
- Improved documentation
- Improved pdf search print layout
- Removed InterMap log removal
- Small GUI improvements in search form
- Update version number in installer
- Updated Russian language files (thanks Irina Romanova)
- Updated documentation license
- Updated navigation for documentation
- Updated sql files for 2.6.2
- #376 : Configurable stopwords
- #391 Metadata Notifications to Remote Targets
- #407 : Option to discard invalid harvested metadata
- #410 : My Metadata function
- #411 : INSPIRE - support for CSW LANGUAGE parameter
- #412 : Add isPublishedToAll to geonet:info

    This is the time of year when people take a few days off of work for a winter vacation and I thought it would be seasonable to upload a few pertinent data layers to Market. The National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (NOHRSC), part of NOAA and the National Weather Service, has data that is used for their Interactive Snow Information page and I found the skiing locations layer to be ideal for a holiday listing on WeoGeo. The skiing locations data represents 684 areas in the Continental United States that offer recreational skiing facilities. The types of facilities range from Cross-County ski trails, to snowboard parks, to typical ski areas.

    The skiing locations data is displayed over the National Climatic Data Center’s Average Total Snow Fall (Annual) data. This data has been compiled from information gathered over the course of nearly 30 years (1961-1990). It is not surprising to see that many of the ski areas are found in areas that have had high average snow fall (represented by the darker blue). However, one outlier is found in Alabama – the Cloudmont-Mentone Ski Area, which boasts a few small runs. What ever your plans are this holiday season, check out this data to find the nearest winter recreation center near you! Visit the WeoGeo Market to view the ski and snow data today!

Tagged: Data Blog, Free Data, Ski Locations, Snow Data, weogeo library