Le portail francophone de la géomatique

Because of the design changes in the new Google Maps, v4 of the Maps API must be in the pipeline. I expect however that the release is some way off.

Inspired by the new index card effect in Google Maps I decided to have a little Sunday hack to see if I could create something similar. Here's the result, Not the New Google Maps.

First off to add the new look map base layer it is a simple process to add

google.maps.visualRefresh

to the javascript for the map.

Initially I decided to replace information windows with a slide-down index card. It was simple enough to create a div element for the index card and use jQuery to create a slide-down and slide-up effect for the card. Then it was just a matter of using

document.getElementById('divName').innerHTML

and a call to open the card index, inside the marker's event listener.

After achieving that however I decided to remove the example marker from the finished map.

One of the really impressive new features in the new Google Maps is the reverse geo-coding that happens when you click on the map. When the user clicks on a location on the map a card opens showing the location's address and a small thumbnail of the Street View available.

So I decided to use my index card design to achieve something similar. When you click on the map I geo-code the location and add a little static Street View to the slide-down index card. If I get the time it should be a simple enough process to add a function so that when the user clicks on the static Street View the map is replaced with the full interactive Street View.

Last I posted on vector online GIS, and that appears to be gaining traction. Mapbox offers through TileMill and OpenStreetMaps editing. These are new an emerging technologies that are exciting, and it contrasts with Esri who offers a slew of tools on the desktop and in arcgis.com. WMS is for example still immature on giscloud.com (though it is OGC compliant now), as are the symbology and labels. They do not offer model builder like Esri or Qgis (thru Sextante). But they do offer a service to process GIS functions online and allow to load data direct from web source, avoiding costly down- & up-loads. Here I compare how I used a 180K vector dataset from NOAA NGDC described previously.

  



This is very much a work in progress, stay tuned for Arcgis Online for example. Also Google Fusion Tables I used elsewhere are not appropriate in this context. And of course there are many many more platforms bird-dogged for example by the blog roll below to the right. Here is, however, what GSHHG maps looks like in giscloud.com and ArcGIS for Home Use that offer modest barriers to entry:

1. giscloud.com online
2. screenshot in ArcGIS desktop
3. rendered as WMS in arcgis.com

click image to go to arcgis.com

View Larger Map

On May 9, 2013, President Barack Obama sign an executive order making the default for government data "open and machine readable". The executive order was accompanied by the White House's Open Data Policy.

The post Open and Machine Readable Now the Default for Government Data appeared first on GIS Lounge.

The folks at Watershed Sciences have created an outstanding white paper entitled, "LiDAR Pulse Densities Comparison". Continue reading →



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The Saturday Night Live folks tested Google Glass. Here is there review. Continue reading →



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What with Google I/O and the launch of the new look Google Maps, it has been a reasonably quiet week for reviews of new Google Maps apps. At Google Maps Mania our attention has been drawn away by the live streams from I/O and playing with the new look Google Maps.

However, some great maps did get featured this week.


One map that grabbed my attention this week was from Rough Guide. One feature of the Rough Guide site that I really like is how you can drill down from general reviews of countries, to reviews of individual towns and cities and then search for great individual locations to visit within those towns and cities.

As you navigate the Rough Guide website look out for the 'view map' option that allows you to view Rough Guide recommended locations on a map. The drop-down menu above the map allows you to select individual countries and cities.

If you select a country or city from the menu then a general introduction to your chosen destination is given beneath the map and all the Rough Guide recommended places to visit are displayed on the map.


Another interesting map that came to our attention this week was España en llamas (Spain in Flames), a Google Map displaying ten years of data about the location of forest fires in Spain. The map includes data on 1,508 fires, 699,560 hectares burned, 24 deaths and 191 injuries.

If you click on the 'Explora los incendios' link above the map you can filter the data displayed on the map. The filter controls allow the user to filter the results displayed on the map by cause of fire, fires that caused deaths, by location and by the size of the fire.

A time-line tool beneath the map also allows the user to explore each of the filtered results by year. One neat feature of this map is the use of relatively sized map markers to show the size of each individual fire.

Just a little thought piece on some environmental news happening here in the Bay Area. So on the Nerd for Nature group that I am a part of, someone posted this article with the subject “wtf” [www.californiaprogressreport.com] Besides that title being so incredibly alarmist, it is articles like this that give environmentalists a bad name. […]

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the World War II Dambuster raids. On 16–17 May 1943 an attack on German dams, carried out by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, subsequently known as the "Dambusters", used a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis.

The BBC has put together an interactive map that retraces the mission. The interactive uses a hand-drawn map from the official June 1943 British Air Ministry report on the Dambusters raid. The map shows the routes taken by the planes, the location of the planes that crashed and the location of the German dams.


The MapBox Blog has this week been showing off the power of their MapBox Streets with vector tiles.

Using vector tiles ensures the speed and scalability of MapBox maps. It also allows for some amazing styling of the map tiles. Using MapBox anyone can make "a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device."

The blog post includes a number of beautiful examples of styled maps. I think my favourite is the hand-drawn map style (shown in the screenshot above).

FlyfotoArkivet LW1944 is a Google Map of Denmark overlaid with historical aerial imagery of the country taken by the Luftwaffe, under occupation, in 1944.

Just over 75% of the country is covered by this collection of historical aerial photographs; including Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense.

Other Historical Aerial Photo Maps

The New Jersey State Atlas - aerial photography of the entire state taken in the 1930's
Neighborhood Change in Connecticut - aerial photos from 1934
Catbus - 1947 aerial imagery of Montreal
Old Maps of Moscow - a  large collection of historical maps & aerial imagery from the 1940's

Other Collections of Aerial Imagery

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland has one of the world's largest collections of historical aerial photographs.

The WWII Aerial Photos and Maps website has a large collection of Aerial photos taken during the Second World War.

To help address these challenges, DARPA has issued a Request for Information (RFI) about technologies that can help lead to digitization of dismounted squads. Continue reading →



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I gave a talk last night at the San Francisco Bay Area GeoMeetup.  This one was timed to coincide with Google I/O.



The talks were the 5 minute Ignite format and, just to be different, I went deep technical.  I pulled a couple algorithms out of WhirlyGlobe-Maply and explained them.  I like how it turned out.







The video has audio and, hey, it's short.



The slides, sans video, can be found here.

Test

You probably know in MapGuide that there is a whole different bunch of type of resources available at your disposal, when authoring up your data, maps and applications.



You probably also know that if you move, rename or delete a resource you may be affecting and/or breaking other resources that depend on it.



How about the big picture? Well here's one I've prepared earlier.



As you can see, with the exception of the Load Procedure, Application Definition and Web Layout, every other resource type has a dependency on another resource type.



Consider what you may be potentially breaking when you move, rename or delete a given resource.

A while ago I proposed etymologic cartography as a field of study. Somewhat related, I found this map that doesn’t show the etymology of placenames but literal translations of country names into English from Chinese:

Note: I have no way of checking the correctness of the place names in this map (and some do sound a bit ungrammatical), so take them with a pinch of salt.

Source: mapsontheweb.tumblr.com

Ubilabs have been testing out the new look base map layer that is now available in the Google Maps API.

They have created a simple demo that allows you to compare the new look that is available if you add

google.maps.visualRefresh

to your code. If you mouse-over the demo map you can switch between the old and new designs. So far Ubilabs have confirmed the following design changes in the new base map and map controls:

No shadows for markers
Markers are slightly bigger
Simplified InfoWindow
Smaller MapType toggle
Smaller Google logo (bottom left)
Smaller TOS bar (bottom right)
Tweaked zoom slider
Saturated map color
State borders show up in higher zoom level
Buildings show up in higher zoom level
Icons for all POI places in a small circle
Major streets in cities are desaturated
New font (Roboto) used in InfoWindow
New colors for directions (route & markers)
Some area labels are light grey

Mapperz has also been playing with the new design. He created this JSFiddle page so you can play around with the code yourself and check out how things look with the new Google Maps design.

Have you ever wondered what the 19th century version of Street View would like?

No. Well I've found out anyway. Today I was rummaging around in the back of the internet's attic and came across this early prototype of Street View from 1876.


Vintage Street View is an album of some of the oldest ever Street Views. You can view the album in any browser you like but you won't get the full sepia effect unless you view the album in Chrome.


If that inspires you to take an even deeper look into the past then why not have a peak at There and Then as well. There and Then is a collection of historic vintage movies superimposed on top of the same view as seen now in Google Maps Street View.

So this morning I've received another notice from Esri about another Windows update that can screw up Arc. Didn't we just have something like this about a month ago? And this on the heels of news on the break between ArcGIS Online and Bing. Coincidence or slap fight?



P.S. Bing coming to AutoCAD 2014.

During and after the Spanish Civil War General Franco created 541 forced labour battalions. Frankismoan Preso Batailoiei is a Google Map showing where Franco's forced labour battalions were put to work in the Basque region of Spain.

The map shows the locations where prisoners were used as slave labour to build roads, work in factories and /or on other construction projects. If you click on a map marker the information window provides details on the type of work the prisoners were forced to undertake, the number of prison staff and the dates of each forced labour project.

The map is in the Basque language. 

Taxonomy upgrade extras: OSGeoogc

This page aims to collate community concerns related to the adoption of the "Geoservices REST API" document as a standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The page has been collaboratively edited, and delivered by the board of the OSGeo Foundation (OSGeo) to the OGC and OGC voting members on Friday 17 May 2013.

The original document can be found here: [wiki.osgeo.org]

Cover Letter from the OSGeo Board

The board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is presenting this letter to the OGC. The letter highlights concerns about the "GeoServices REST API" from many people within the OSGeo community. As always, if there is anything the OSGeo board can do to help, then please let us know.

Signed: Jeff McKenna (OSGeo president), Peter Batty, Jáchym Cepický, Michael Gerlek, Anne Ghisla, Mark Lucas, Daniel Morissette, Cameron Shorter, Frank Warmerdam

Open Letter to OGC and voting members

May 2013

We, the undersigned, have concerns that approving the "Geoservices REST API" as an OGC standard, will have detrimental impacts on interoperability within the spatial industry.

We strongly urge that the proposed "Geoservices REST API", as it stands in May 2013, be rejected as an OGC standard.

People have listed different reasons for concern. These concerns are described below.

Signed

1. Cameron Shorter, Geospatial Solutions Director at LISAsoft, core contributor & coordinator of OSGeo-Live, OSGeo Board member
2. Mark Lucas, Founding member and board of directors for OSGeo foundation, Principal Scientist for RadiantBlue Technologies Inc.
3. Stephen Woodbridge, Director of iMaptools.com, Contributor and/or PSC of Mapserver, pgRouting, PAGC, and PostGIS
4. Even Rouault, Geospatial developer, OSGeo Charter Member, core contributor and PSC member of GDAL/OGR, contributor of Mapserver, PROJ.4, libgeotiff, shapelib, libtiff
5. Gerhard Triebnig, Managing Director at EOX IT Services GmbH
6. Brent Wood, Environmental Information Delivery Programme Leader, NIWA, New Zealand. OGC member, Aust/NZ OSGEO chapter member, NZOSS Council member
7. Stephan Meissl, CTO at EOX IT Services GmbH, contributor to Mapserver, PSC chair of EOxServer
8. Jeroen Ticheler, Director of GeoCat, project founder and PSC chair of GeoNetwork opensource
9. Just van den Broecke, Director at Just Objects, contributor to Heron Mapping Client, secretary of OSGeo Dutch Local Chapter, member at OpenGeoGroep
10. Milo van der Linden, member at OpenGeoGroep
11. Landon Blake, GIS Department Manager/Land Surveyor at KSN, OSGeo California Chapter Board Representative.
12. Daniel Morissette, President at Mapgears, OSGeo Board member, core contributor and PSC member of Mapserver and GDAL/OGR. Former OGC TC member and involved in the implementation of several OGC WxS specs in MapServer.
13. Bob Basques, GIS Systems Developer at the City of Saint Paul, MN. Public Works GIS (GISmo), Technical Director at SharedGeo, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo TCMUG local chapter member, Co-founder and PSC member of GeoMoose project.
14. Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses, PM at Omnium Strategic Intelligence, Spain, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Liaison officer.
15. Bevan Rudge, Director Lucion Limited, IT Advisor at Conservation Strategy Fund, Esri client
16. María Arias de Reyna, software engineer at GeoCat, Spain, member of OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter.
17. Anne Ghisla, OSGeo Board Member, Italy, member of OSGeo Italian Local Chapter.
18. Micho Garcia, Freelance and member of geomati.co, Spain, member of Spanish Local Chapter
19. Margherita Di Leo, OSGeo Charter Member, Post-doctoral researcher at the European Commission, JRC, Italy
20. Jorge Sanz, GIS Consultant at Prodevelop, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
21. Pablo Sanxiao, CTO and co-founder at iCarto, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
22. Frank Steggink, GIS software developer at Vicrea, The Netherlands, member of the Dutch Local Chapter
23. Olivier Courtin, Oslandia co-founder, core contributor or/and PSC member of Mapserver and PostGIS. OGC TC member.
24. Wladimir Szczerban, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
25. Anita Graser, GIS specialist with AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, OSGeo Charter member and QGIS team member.
26. Volker Mische, geospatial software engineer, creator of GeoCouch
27. Iván Sánchez, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, head of OpenStreetMap Spain, OpenStreetMap Foundation member, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team member, Spanish SDI working group member
28. Gabriel Carrión, Strategy Manager at gvSIG association
29. Sandro Santilli, OSGeo Charter Member, PostGIS and GEOS PSC member and core hacker.
30. Javier Diaz, member of Geoinquietos Bs As [1], member of the Organizing Committee FOSS4G Bs As 2013 [2]
31. Jo Cook, Consultant at Astun Technology, former Director of OSGeo, Charter Member, founder of UK Local Chapter, Deputy Chair of FOSS4G 2013
32. Francisco José Peñarrubia, CTO and co-founder at SCOLAB. Members of gvSIG Association
33. Shanmugam Ganeshkumar, Director of GeoICON, member OSGeo Malaysia Chapter
34. Barry Rowlingson, Senior Researcher, Lancaster University and Software Sustainability Institute Fellow
35. Stefan Keller, University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil (Switzerland), Member of Swiss OSM (SOSM) and QGIS association and of organizing committees of pgConf.DE and FOSSGIS 2013, and member of eCH (e-government standards of Switzerland)
36. Andrew Bailey, OSGeo member, Astun Technology
37. Suchith Anand, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Education member, FOSS4G 2013 LOC member
38. Carlos Krefft, GIS software developer at CSTARS - University of Miami, OGC and OSGeo Member.
39. Stefano Costa, OSGeo member, GFOSS.it member and former board member, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italy)
40. Peter Baumann, Jacobs University, OGC member, WCS.SWG chair, editor of 10+ specs (disclaimer: this is an expression of my personal opinion and not in any way endorsed by OGC)
41. Peter Batty, CTO of Geospatial Division at Ubisense, OSGeo board member, former CTO of Intergraph and GE Smallworld, Technical Committee member of OGC in its formative years c 1995-97
42. Barend Köbben, OSGEO Chartered Member, OSGeo.nl Dutch chapter treasurer, Senior Lecturer at ITC-University of Twente
43. Paolo Cavallini, Faunalia, OSGeo member, GFOSS.it member and former president, QGIS-PSC
44. FRans Thamura, Indonesia, OSGeo Indonesia, organizer]
45. Sanghee Shin, Founder and CEO of Gaia3D, OSGeo Charter Member, Representative of OSGeo Korean Chapter, Chairman of Open Source GIS Alliance Korea
46. Benni Purwonegoro,Indonesia, IT-Spatial Engineer @ Geospatial Information Agency .
47. Jachym Cepicky, Czech Republic, member of OSGeo Board of Directors
48. Pat Cappelaere, Vightel Corporation
49. Jürgen Fischer, norBIT GmbH, QGIS core developer
50. Maria Antonia Brovelli, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Education member, GIS Professor and Vice Rector for the Como Campus at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
51. Nacho Varela, GIS Consultant, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
52. Vasile Craciunescu, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Romania Local Chapter Leader, Researcher at Romanian National Meteorological Administration, Romania
53. Abbas Abdul Wahab, Asst. Director, Federal Department of Town & Country Planning, Peninsular Malaysia
54. Roy Braam, Software Engineer @ | B3Partners
55. Peteris Bruns, Latvia, GIS Consultant & Software Engineer @ | SunGIS
56. Giovanni Manghi, Portugal, Faunalia, OSGeo member, OSGeo-Portugal
57. Hugo Martins, UK, Lutra Consulting, WebGIS Developer, OSGeo-Portugal Member
58. Saber Razmjooei, UK, Lutra Consulting, Co-Founder
59. Peter Wells, UK, Lutra Consulting, Co-Founder
60. Sidney Gijzen, The Netherlands, Researcher GIS @ Alterra, Wageningen UR
61. Miles Fidelman, US, Principal, Protocol Technologies Group, LLC
62. Puneet Kishor, OSGeo Charter Member; Geology, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Creative Commons
63. António José Silva, Portugal, GIS Consultant, OSGeo-Portugal Member
64. AndreMano, Portugal, Natural History Society - GIS Department, OSGeo-Portugal Member
65. Mauricio Miranda, Argentina, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Board Member
66. Paulo Machado, Portugal, Software Engineer @ PT Inovação
67. Alvaro Anguix, Spain, General Manager at gvSIG Association
68. Santiago Higuera, CEO at Mercatorlab, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Board Member, Spain
69. Alan Boudreault, Developer at Mapgears, contributor to Mapserver and GDAL/OGR.
70. Mike Saunt, UK, Owner at Astun Technology Ltd, OSGeo sponsor
71. Michael Smith, OSGeo Charter Member, Physical Scientist US Army Corps of Engineers Remote Sensing GIS Center
72. Angelos Tzotsos, OSGeo Charter Member, Researcher at National Technical University of Athens
73. Michaël Douchin, France, GIS consultant & software engineer at 3liz
74. Pedro Venâncio, Portugal, GIS Analyst @ Municipality of Pinhel
75. Jorge Gustavo Rocha, Portugal, GIS Professor at Universidade do Minho
76. Daniel Kastl, Japan, Georepublic, Founder
77. John Callahan, US, Research Scientist and GIS/Remote Sensing Specialist, University of Delaware
78. Kalyan Janakiraman, Senior Systems Analyst, Business Development Services, NSW Land and Property Information, Sydney, Australia
79. Phillip Davis, Director, National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence, Texas, USA
80. Simon Pigot, contributor to and PSC member of GeoNetwork opensource (speaking for myself, not an official view of my employer)
81. John Bryant, Consultant, Mammoth Mapping, Dawson City, Canada and GIS/DB Admin, Jupiter Mines, Perth, Australia
82. Christos Iossifides, Remote Sensing Instructor, Laboratory Teaching Staff, Remote Sensing Instructor and Researcher, National Technical University of Athens
83. Tim Bowden, Spatial Consultant, Perth, Australia
84. Luca Delucchi, GIS Technician, Trento, Italy
85. Bart van den Eijnden, GIS software developer, Utrecht, Netherlands
86. Henry Addo, Software Developer at Ushahidi [3], contributor of OSGeo-Live
87. Stefano Iacovella, GIS consultant & software engineer, Rome, Italy
88. Meine Toonen, Software Engineer @ B3Partners, The Netherlands
89. Arne Kepp, Software Engineer, Oslo, Norway
90. Pirmin Kalberer, Managing director Sourcepole, FOSSGIS member, Contributor of GDAL/OGR, QGIS, Mapfish, UbuntuGIS, OSGeo-Live, Switzerland
91. Dr. Horst Düster, Managing director Sourcepole, FOSSGIS member, Treasurer QGIS Project QGIS, Zürich, Switzerland
92. Richard Duivenvoorde, Managing director & software developer Webmapper, QGIS community member
93. Steven Feldman, Principal at KnowWhere Consulting and Chair of the LOC for FOSS4G 2013
94. Edward Mac Gillavry, Managing director & software developer Webmapper
95. Maxim Dubinin, CEO at NextGIS, head of GIS-Lab.info
96. Fran Boon, PMC Chair at Sahana Foundation, CTO of AidIQ
97. Ian Edwards, Chair OSGeo:UK
98. Dmitriy Baryshnikov Developer at NextGIS, GDAL/OGR committer, wxGIS developer, GIS-Lab.info community member
99. Chris van Lith, Director B3Partners, member of OpenGeoGroep
100. Vincent Picavet, co-founder of Oslandia, founding member and treasurer of OSGeo-FR
101. Stefan A. Tzeggai, creator of AtlasStyler SLD editor, founder of empirica systeme gmbh
102. Roald de Wit, Geospatial Software Engineer, Melbourne, Australia
103. Manuel Grizonnet, working at the French Space Agency, ORFEO ToolBox library developer
104. Toru Mori, President & CEO, Orkney, Inc., Yokohama, Japan, Representative of OSGeo Japan Chapter, OSGeo Charter Member
105. Markus Schneider, TMC chair of the deegree project, CEO of Occam Labs
106. Elena Mezzini, Remote Sensing and GIS Technician, GFOSS.it member, Bologna, Italy
107. Alexander Bruy, NextGIS, QGIS core developer
108. Danilo Furtado, Portugal, OSGeo member, OSGeo-Portugal
109. Andreas Schmitz, Germany, deegree core developer and TMC member, CTO of Occam Labs
110. Oliver Tonnhofer, Germany, MapProxy core developer, founder & CTO of Omniscale
111. Thomas Baschetti, Germany, Freelancer, Mapbender PSC Member, FOSSGIS member
112. Ian Mayo, GeoSpatial developer, UK
113. Ivan Mincik, CEO of GISTA s.r.o., Slovakia
114. Edmar Moretti, Software developer, i3GEO core developer, Brazil
115. Diego Moreira, GIS Analyst, Contributor of QGIS, Brazil
116. Luigi Pirelli, Freelance Analyst/Programmer, co-founder of Italian OSGEO Local Chapter GFOSS.it, Italy
117. Kyle Shannon Software Developer, contributor of GDAL/OGR, United States
118. David Mateos, worker member at Terrativa S. Coop. and OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
119. Luis Franco, researcher and GIS analyst at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
120. Gabriel Roldan, Software Developer, Argentina, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member
121. Dimitris Kotzinos, OSGEO Charter Member, OSGEO Greek Chapter founder, Assistant Professor TEI of Serres, Greece
122. Stefan Steiniger, owner of GEO Steiniger Ltda., contributor to OpenJUMP GIS and OpenTripPlanner and author of several FOSS4G overview articles, Canada/Chile
123. Nobusuke Iwasaki, Senior Researcher, National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, Tsukuba, Japan, OSGeo Japan Chapter Board Member
124. Ross Johnson, Land Information Officer, City of Ryde Council and NSW Committee member of Surveying & Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI)
125. Kumaran Narayanaswamy, CEO & Managing Director of kCube Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd India.[4], Member of India OSGeo Chapter.
126. Luis Fernando Bueno, Professor at Federal University of Rondonia, researcher and GIS analyst, Brazil.
127. Bob Bruce, FEC, P.Eng., Geomatics Engineer, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
128. Moritz Lennert, Researcher in geography at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), GRASS-PSC
129. Ian Turton, Software developer and open standards advocate, GeoTools-PSC
130. Gérald Fenoy, OSGeo Charter member, Founder and CEO of GeoLabs SARL, France
131. David Bitner, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo VP for Geodata, OSGeo Twin Cities Chapter, Sahana Software Foundation Board of Directors, MetroGIS Coordinating Committee Chair, ownerdbSpatial
132. Peter Löwe, OSGeo Charter member, Senior Researcher at Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ, General Manager GISIX.com
133. Gavin Fleming, OSGeo Charter member, owner of AfriSpatial.
134. Frank Maes, GeoICT professional, Head Operations at Geosparc, Contributor & community member of Geomajas, OSGeo member

Summary

The OGC candidate standard titled "GeoServices REST API" is currently, in May 2013, being considered to be approved as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard. The vote to accept the document as a standard is unusually contentious. The controversy is the cause of this open letter.

The candidate standard was previously released for public comment and can be found on the request for public comment page (though public comment has been closed for now).

The candidate standard attempts to standardize a suite of web services such as a service which provides map images, a service which provides geospatial feature data, and a service which performs geospatial processing. The candidate standard focuses on interactions via a defined hierarchy of URLs and using predominantly a particular set of JSON schemas for the exchange of geospatial data.

Criticism and Response

The criticism of the adoption of this particular document as an OGC Standard includes a wide variety of reasons such as:

• the OGC's process through which the document was developed which is thought to lack sufficient flexibility to respond to input from various stakeholders,
• the focus of the document on 'REST' and 'API' which is seen as not matching the ideas others have for these concepts,
• the names of the standard and of the services which are seen as potentially confusing,
• the functionality of the new services which are considered to duplicate that of existing services already standardized by the OGC such as WMS, WFS, WCS, and WPS,
• the addition of a new set of services based on new URL patterns and new JSON exchange formats which is seen as duplicating the efforts of other working groups bringing similar ideas to the updates of existing OGC services,
• the re-introduction in the new services of previously resolved interoperability issues which is seen as failing to build on the existing knowledge and experience,
• the use of the particular JSON schemas which are seen as having little industry acceptance and are incompatible with other widely used schemas, and
• the lack of implementation diversity which is thought to give the vendor of the one complete implementation an unusual commercial advantage on top of the vendor's already dominant position in the domain.

These issues have potential impacts on the use of 'Open Standards' by governments and companies, on the interoperability of software interacting with standards compliant OGC services, on the costs to developers and users of standards compliant software, on the understanding of 'Open Standards' by the public at large, and, possibly, on the reputation of the OGC as a champion of interoperability.

In particular there are concerns by some that adoption of the standard will likely result in a combination of the following:

1. The cost to application developers, systems integrators, testers and sponsors to support all relevant OGC standards will be substantially increased.
2. Consequently, organisations and/or applications may choose to only support one standard, or only support one standard fully.
3. Sponsors (such as governments) who require compliance with OGC standards will discover that applications don't communicate together, due to applications supporting different OGC standards that essentially do the same thing.
4. This will result in a diminished importance of OGC, as the "OGC standards" stamp of approval will not equate interoperability.
5. After a while, in order to solve interoperability issues, a respected international organisation or program will likely take the initiative to mandate one standard as the preferred standard for all agencies to follow. To date, the OGC has provided this leadership.
6. One standard taking prominence over the other will likely lead to the other being neglected or deprecated, resulting in many OGC compliant systems becoming legacy systems in the process. This should be considered an undesirable outcome for a standards organisation.

In response to these issues, the authors of the Geoservices REST API document have stated that:

• the process of the OGC has been followed completely,
• the specification actually is RESTful and does define an API,
• the name, due to the controversy, is open for modification
• the OGC does not forbid duplication of service functionality, already has duplication between the W*S and the S*S (sensor) family of standards, should not block progress in the name of 'one true way', and harmonization between the services can be considered in the future,
• the JSON format exists and functions, and
• there are alternative implementations for some of these services.

The authors also stress that the existence of a large user base shows the service is useful, and that the standardization of the services at the OGC may encourage new implementations.

The SWG has published two documents in response to various comments.

• File:OGC 12-642 GeoServices REST API - RFC Comments Response.pdf presents the responses from the Standards Working Group to the comments received from the public during the public Request for Comments (RFC).
• File:OGC 13-031r1 GeoServices REST API - Response to no votes r1.pdf presents the responses from the Standards Working Group to the reasons given by the organizations voting _no_ during the adoption vote.

Positions on the vote

The discussion raises a number of issues, many based upon complex technical concepts and implications. This makes it difficult for voting OGC members considering whether to support (or not) the "Geoservices REST API" as a standard. The following provides one analysis of the positions on the vote, aimed to simplify and summarize key points. However, it does not necessarily represent the opinions held by all signatories above.

The pros for accepting the "Geoservices REST API" document as an OGC standard

• The OGC should be in the business of developing good standards, not in choosing which standards should be implemented.
• The proposers of the document want to make a standard and have followed all the rules of the OGC. The work of any such group of members deserves serious, good faith consideration.
• The need for an integrated suite of services using simple data, which is addressed (partially) by the document, is real. The proposed document is pushing the OGC on this issue.
• The proposed document could be useful to a number of people.
• The proposed document is not significantly more broken than the existing standards of the OGC. As one author of standards notes:

"I know how totally impossible it is to write a good standard, so the weaknesses in the existing document seem more acceptable."The cons

• The OGC actually is, whether it should be or not, in the position of recommending interoperable standards for geospatial services. The proposed document is not good enough, has implementations dominated by one vendor's server implementation, and not publicly supported enough, to be considered at the same level as existing standards.
• Adopting a standard implies a desire to maintain the standard, but OGC's desire to support this approach has been questioned by some. In particular, the lack of collaboration and willingness to accept recommendations from the community on this version of the "Geoservices REST API" document bodes ill for the future.
• The overlap in functionality between the proposed services and the existing services, notably with the ongoing work to modularize the existing services, is almost 100 percent. However, compatibility is low.
• There is already a published document: [www.esri.com] so there is no need for the document to be adopted as an OGC Standard merely for interoperability with the ESRI implementation.
• The document, as a new, separate effort, repeats mistakes which were made and since solved by the other services.
• The document focuses on the past (notably with backwards compatibility and use of only GET/POST) not on the future.
• The document needs a comprehensive editorial review and substantial rewriting for clarity.

A conclusion

Both simple answers are bad.

A simple acceptance of the standard would introduce a new set of 'OGC approved' open services. The OGC approval might enable governments to buy a XXXX-new-name-here-XXXX solution instead of a W*S or a S*S solution. The path forwards towards harmonizing the services is unclear. Fixing this document in addition to fixing the W*S services will be a pain.

Simply rejecting the solution would be bad for the OGC. It would place the OGC in the position of picking winners and losers in the standards business. It would mean that the OGC is stuck on the project of fixing the W*S standards to meet some nebulous future functionality without having any path to get there. It would discourage innovation and progress.

Is there any third way?

Well, actually, there is a different way of thinking of the issue. Overall, there appears to be a shared desire for an integrated suite of geospatial services, originally focused on a simple data model, built on the exchange of well defined resources in simple formats including JSON, accessible and usable using the core HTTP verbs, and discoverable through following HTML links and patterns of URL paths. The hope is that such a suite can be designed based on the best expertise of the OGC, can be widely supported by the community, and can be implemented and tested by multiple groups. Neither the proposed document, nor the current services meet this vision. So the work, ultimately, is on improving all the services at the OGC, first to modularize them, then to enable simple implementations, and finally to link those implementations into a functional suite. Since this is the work that is already happening, perhaps the vote is an unfortunate distraction and the productive way forward is merely to redouble the efforts to create the next versions of the standards.

Issues with the document

Beyond the controversy described above, there are issues with the Geoservices REST API document itself. Even if the standard deserves support, these issues could be considered blockers to the adoption of the current, May 2013, document.

The critique is incomplete because it quickly falls into a full editorial review of the text, something which takes a lot of time and effort and is beyond the scope and intent of this Open Letter.

The critique can be found at: [wiki.osgeo.org] .

Note that some of these critiques hold the document to OGC's current, standards writing guidelines. The OGC has been striving to develop better standards so new standards must meet higher requirements than past standards. The lack of clarity in the proposed document is not substantially worse than many published standards but ought to be resolved in new standards.

Further ConcernsTechnical Concerns

• see this discussion for detailed arguments why OGC WCS is superior to the "GeoServices REST API" Part 6. It concludes:

In summary, the ESRI "Geoservice REST API" Imaging part is at a technological level where WCS departed from some 5 years ago.Inconciseness of the specification at large will make it difficult for third parties to come up with interoperable implementations. The components making up the ESRI "Geoservice REST API" provide natural blocks assignable to the matching SWGs. As for Part 6 of the ESRI "Geoservice REST API", if to become a standard it needs to be discussed in the WCS.SWG for harmonization, clarification, and improvement.

Methodological Concerns

• The Geoservices REST API can not be amended (other than editorial changes in the specification document), because of a requirement for backward compatibility with the ESRI implementation. This has limited improvements in this version of the candidate specification.

Further Reading

Please add links to referenced documents, related news stories or blog posts here.

• Call for comments on GeoServices REST API: [www.opengeospatial.org]
• Responses from the Standards Working Group to the comments received from the public during the public Request for Comments (RFC): File:OGC 12-642 GeoServices REST API - RFC Comments Response.pdf
• Responses from the Standards Working Group to the reasons given by the organizations voting _no_ during the adoption vote: File:OGC 13-031r1 GeoServices REST API - Response to no votes r1.pdf

• Email archive of OSGeo discussions about GeoServices REST API: [lists.osgeo.org]
• Adrian Custer's summary of technical issues (and original source of some content in this letter): [lists.osgeo.org]
• "Is OGC Loosing its way?", letter to OGC Voters, from OGC Interoperability Movement Team Leaders, [lists.osgeo.org]

Taxonomy upgrade extras: OSGeoogc

This page aims to collate community concerns related to the adoption of the "Geoservices REST API" document as a standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The page has been collaboratively edited, and delivered by the board of the OSGeo Foundation (OSGeo) to the OGC and OGC voting members on Friday 17 May 2013.

The original document can be found here: [wiki.osgeo.org]

Cover Letter from the OSGeo Board

The board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is presenting this letter to the OGC. The letter highlights concerns about the "GeoServices REST API" from many people within the OSGeo community. As always, if there is anything the OSGeo board can do to help, then please let us know.

Signed: Jeff McKenna (OSGeo president), Peter Batty, Jáchym Cepický, Michael Gerlek, Anne Ghisla, Mark Lucas, Daniel Morissette, Cameron Shorter, Frank Warmerdam

Open Letter to OGC and voting members

May 2013

We, the undersigned, have concerns that approving the "Geoservices REST API" as an OGC standard, will have detrimental impacts on interoperability within the spatial industry.

We strongly urge that the proposed "Geoservices REST API", as it stands in May 2013, be rejected as an OGC standard.

People have listed different reasons for concern. These concerns are described below.

Signed

1. Cameron Shorter, Geospatial Solutions Director at LISAsoft, core contributor & coordinator of OSGeo-Live, OSGeo Board member
2. Mark Lucas, Founding member and board of directors for OSGeo foundation, Principal Scientist for RadiantBlue Technologies Inc.
3. Stephen Woodbridge, Director of iMaptools.com, Contributor and/or PSC of Mapserver, pgRouting, PAGC, and PostGIS
4. Even Rouault, Geospatial developer, OSGeo Charter Member, core contributor and PSC member of GDAL/OGR, contributor of Mapserver, PROJ.4, libgeotiff, shapelib, libtiff
5. Gerhard Triebnig, Managing Director at EOX IT Services GmbH
6. Brent Wood, Environmental Information Delivery Programme Leader, NIWA, New Zealand. OGC member, Aust/NZ OSGEO chapter member, NZOSS Council member
7. Stephan Meissl, CTO at EOX IT Services GmbH, contributor to Mapserver, PSC chair of EOxServer
8. Jeroen Ticheler, Director of GeoCat, project founder and PSC chair of GeoNetwork opensource
9. Just van den Broecke, Director at Just Objects, contributor to Heron Mapping Client, secretary of OSGeo Dutch Local Chapter, member at OpenGeoGroep
10. Milo van der Linden, member at OpenGeoGroep
11. Landon Blake, GIS Department Manager/Land Surveyor at KSN, OSGeo California Chapter Board Representative.
12. Daniel Morissette, President at Mapgears, OSGeo Board member, core contributor and PSC member of Mapserver and GDAL/OGR. Former OGC TC member and involved in the implementation of several OGC WxS specs in MapServer.
13. Bob Basques, GIS Systems Developer at the City of Saint Paul, MN. Public Works GIS (GISmo), Technical Director at SharedGeo, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo TCMUG local chapter member, Co-founder and PSC member of GeoMoose project.
14. Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses, PM at Omnium Strategic Intelligence, Spain, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Liaison officer.
15. Bevan Rudge, Director Lucion Limited, IT Advisor at Conservation Strategy Fund, Esri client
16. María Arias de Reyna, software engineer at GeoCat, Spain, member of OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter.
17. Anne Ghisla, OSGeo Board Member, Italy, member of OSGeo Italian Local Chapter.
18. Micho Garcia, Freelance and member of geomati.co, Spain, member of Spanish Local Chapter
19. Margherita Di Leo, OSGeo Charter Member, Post-doctoral researcher at the European Commission, JRC, Italy
20. Jorge Sanz, GIS Consultant at Prodevelop, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
21. Pablo Sanxiao, CTO and co-founder at iCarto, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
22. Frank Steggink, GIS software developer at Vicrea, The Netherlands, member of the Dutch Local Chapter
23. Olivier Courtin, Oslandia co-founder, core contributor or/and PSC member of Mapserver and PostGIS. OGC TC member.
24. Wladimir Szczerban, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
25. Anita Graser, GIS specialist with AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, OSGeo Charter member and QGIS team member.
26. Volker Mische, geospatial software engineer, creator of GeoCouch
27. Iván Sánchez, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, head of OpenStreetMap Spain, OpenStreetMap Foundation member, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team member, Spanish SDI working group member
28. Gabriel Carrión, Strategy Manager at gvSIG association
29. Sandro Santilli, OSGeo Charter Member, PostGIS and GEOS PSC member and core hacker.
30. Javier Diaz, member of Geoinquietos Bs As [1], member of the Organizing Committee FOSS4G Bs As 2013 [2]
31. Jo Cook, Consultant at Astun Technology, former Director of OSGeo, Charter Member, founder of UK Local Chapter, Deputy Chair of FOSS4G 2013
32. Francisco José Peñarrubia, CTO and co-founder at SCOLAB. Members of gvSIG Association
33. Shanmugam Ganeshkumar, Director of GeoICON, member OSGeo Malaysia Chapter
34. Barry Rowlingson, Senior Researcher, Lancaster University and Software Sustainability Institute Fellow
35. Stefan Keller, University of Applied Sciences, Rapperswil (Switzerland), Member of Swiss OSM (SOSM) and QGIS association and of organizing committees of pgConf.DE and FOSSGIS 2013, and member of eCH (e-government standards of Switzerland)
36. Andrew Bailey, OSGeo member, Astun Technology
37. Suchith Anand, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Education member, FOSS4G 2013 LOC member
38. Carlos Krefft, GIS software developer at CSTARS - University of Miami, OGC and OSGeo Member.
39. Stefano Costa, OSGeo member, GFOSS.it member and former board member, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italy)
40. Peter Baumann, Jacobs University, OGC member, WCS.SWG chair, editor of 10+ specs (disclaimer: this is an expression of my personal opinion and not in any way endorsed by OGC)
41. Peter Batty, CTO of Geospatial Division at Ubisense, OSGeo board member, former CTO of Intergraph and GE Smallworld, Technical Committee member of OGC in its formative years c 1995-97
42. Barend Köbben, OSGEO Chartered Member, OSGeo.nl Dutch chapter treasurer, Senior Lecturer at ITC-University of Twente
43. Paolo Cavallini, Faunalia, OSGeo member, GFOSS.it member and former president, QGIS-PSC
44. FRans Thamura, Indonesia, OSGeo Indonesia, organizer]
45. Sanghee Shin, Founder and CEO of Gaia3D, OSGeo Charter Member, Representative of OSGeo Korean Chapter, Chairman of Open Source GIS Alliance Korea
46. Benni Purwonegoro,Indonesia, IT-Spatial Engineer @ Geospatial Information Agency .
47. Jachym Cepicky, Czech Republic, member of OSGeo Board of Directors
48. Pat Cappelaere, Vightel Corporation
49. Jürgen Fischer, norBIT GmbH, QGIS core developer
50. Maria Antonia Brovelli, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Education member, GIS Professor and Vice Rector for the Como Campus at Politecnico di Milano, Italy
51. Nacho Varela, GIS Consultant, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
52. Vasile Craciunescu, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo Romania Local Chapter Leader, Researcher at Romanian National Meteorological Administration, Romania
53. Abbas Abdul Wahab, Asst. Director, Federal Department of Town & Country Planning, Peninsular Malaysia
54. Roy Braam, Software Engineer @ | B3Partners
55. Peteris Bruns, Latvia, GIS Consultant & Software Engineer @ | SunGIS
56. Giovanni Manghi, Portugal, Faunalia, OSGeo member, OSGeo-Portugal
57. Hugo Martins, UK, Lutra Consulting, WebGIS Developer, OSGeo-Portugal Member
58. Saber Razmjooei, UK, Lutra Consulting, Co-Founder
59. Peter Wells, UK, Lutra Consulting, Co-Founder
60. Sidney Gijzen, The Netherlands, Researcher GIS @ Alterra, Wageningen UR
61. Miles Fidelman, US, Principal, Protocol Technologies Group, LLC
62. Puneet Kishor, OSGeo Charter Member; Geology, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Creative Commons
63. António José Silva, Portugal, GIS Consultant, OSGeo-Portugal Member
64. AndreMano, Portugal, Natural History Society - GIS Department, OSGeo-Portugal Member
65. Mauricio Miranda, Argentina, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Board Member
66. Paulo Machado, Portugal, Software Engineer @ PT Inovação
67. Alvaro Anguix, Spain, General Manager at gvSIG Association
68. Santiago Higuera, CEO at Mercatorlab, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Board Member, Spain
69. Alan Boudreault, Developer at Mapgears, contributor to Mapserver and GDAL/OGR.
70. Mike Saunt, UK, Owner at Astun Technology Ltd, OSGeo sponsor
71. Michael Smith, OSGeo Charter Member, Physical Scientist US Army Corps of Engineers Remote Sensing GIS Center
72. Angelos Tzotsos, OSGeo Charter Member, Researcher at National Technical University of Athens
73. Michaël Douchin, France, GIS consultant & software engineer at 3liz
74. Pedro Venâncio, Portugal, GIS Analyst @ Municipality of Pinhel
75. Jorge Gustavo Rocha, Portugal, GIS Professor at Universidade do Minho
76. Daniel Kastl, Japan, Georepublic, Founder
77. John Callahan, US, Research Scientist and GIS/Remote Sensing Specialist, University of Delaware
78. Kalyan Janakiraman, Senior Systems Analyst, Business Development Services, NSW Land and Property Information, Sydney, Australia
79. Phillip Davis, Director, National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence, Texas, USA
80. Simon Pigot, contributor to and PSC member of GeoNetwork opensource (speaking for myself, not an official view of my employer)
81. John Bryant, Consultant, Mammoth Mapping, Dawson City, Canada and GIS/DB Admin, Jupiter Mines, Perth, Australia
82. Christos Iossifides, Remote Sensing Instructor, Laboratory Teaching Staff, Remote Sensing Instructor and Researcher, National Technical University of Athens
83. Tim Bowden, Spatial Consultant, Perth, Australia
84. Luca Delucchi, GIS Technician, Trento, Italy
85. Bart van den Eijnden, GIS software developer, Utrecht, Netherlands
86. Henry Addo, Software Developer at Ushahidi [3], contributor of OSGeo-Live
87. Stefano Iacovella, GIS consultant & software engineer, Rome, Italy
88. Meine Toonen, Software Engineer @ B3Partners, The Netherlands
89. Arne Kepp, Software Engineer, Oslo, Norway
90. Pirmin Kalberer, Managing director Sourcepole, FOSSGIS member, Contributor of GDAL/OGR, QGIS, Mapfish, UbuntuGIS, OSGeo-Live, Switzerland
91. Dr. Horst Düster, Managing director Sourcepole, FOSSGIS member, Treasurer QGIS Project QGIS, Zürich, Switzerland
92. Richard Duivenvoorde, Managing director & software developer Webmapper, QGIS community member
93. Steven Feldman, Principal at KnowWhere Consulting and Chair of the LOC for FOSS4G 2013
94. Edward Mac Gillavry, Managing director & software developer Webmapper
95. Maxim Dubinin, CEO at NextGIS, head of GIS-Lab.info
96. Fran Boon, PMC Chair at Sahana Foundation, CTO of AidIQ
97. Ian Edwards, Chair OSGeo:UK
98. Dmitriy Baryshnikov Developer at NextGIS, GDAL/OGR committer, wxGIS developer, GIS-Lab.info community member
99. Chris van Lith, Director B3Partners, member of OpenGeoGroep
100. Vincent Picavet, co-founder of Oslandia, founding member and treasurer of OSGeo-FR
101. Stefan A. Tzeggai, creator of AtlasStyler SLD editor, founder of empirica systeme gmbh
102. Roald de Wit, Geospatial Software Engineer, Melbourne, Australia
103. Manuel Grizonnet, working at the French Space Agency, ORFEO ToolBox library developer
104. Toru Mori, President & CEO, Orkney, Inc., Yokohama, Japan, Representative of OSGeo Japan Chapter, OSGeo Charter Member
105. Markus Schneider, TMC chair of the deegree project, CEO of Occam Labs
106. Elena Mezzini, Remote Sensing and GIS Technician, GFOSS.it member, Bologna, Italy
107. Alexander Bruy, NextGIS, QGIS core developer
108. Danilo Furtado, Portugal, OSGeo member, OSGeo-Portugal
109. Andreas Schmitz, Germany, deegree core developer and TMC member, CTO of Occam Labs
110. Oliver Tonnhofer, Germany, MapProxy core developer, founder & CTO of Omniscale
111. Thomas Baschetti, Germany, Freelancer, Mapbender PSC Member, FOSSGIS member
112. Ian Mayo, GeoSpatial developer, UK
113. Ivan Mincik, CEO of GISTA s.r.o., Slovakia
114. Edmar Moretti, Software developer, i3GEO core developer, Brazil
115. Diego Moreira, GIS Analyst, Contributor of QGIS, Brazil
116. Luigi Pirelli, Freelance Analyst/Programmer, co-founder of Italian OSGEO Local Chapter GFOSS.it, Italy
117. Kyle Shannon Software Developer, contributor of GDAL/OGR, United States
118. David Mateos, worker member at Terrativa S. Coop. and OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member, Spain
119. Luis Franco, researcher and GIS analyst at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
120. Gabriel Roldan, Software Developer, Argentina, OSGeo Charter Member, OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter Member
121. Dimitris Kotzinos, OSGEO Charter Member, OSGEO Greek Chapter founder, Assistant Professor TEI of Serres, Greece
122. Stefan Steiniger, owner of GEO Steiniger Ltda., contributor to OpenJUMP GIS and OpenTripPlanner and author of several FOSS4G overview articles, Canada/Chile
123. Nobusuke Iwasaki, Senior Researcher, National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences, Tsukuba, Japan, OSGeo Japan Chapter Board Member
124. Ross Johnson, Land Information Officer, City of Ryde Council and NSW Committee member of Surveying & Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI)
125. Kumaran Narayanaswamy, CEO & Managing Director of kCube Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd India.[4], Member of India OSGeo Chapter.
126. Luis Fernando Bueno, Professor at Federal University of Rondonia, researcher and GIS analyst, Brazil.
127. Bob Bruce, FEC, P.Eng., Geomatics Engineer, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
128. Moritz Lennert, Researcher in geography at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), GRASS-PSC
129. Ian Turton, Software developer and open standards advocate, GeoTools-PSC
130. Gérald Fenoy, OSGeo Charter member, Founder and CEO of GeoLabs SARL, France
131. David Bitner, OSGeo Charter member, OSGeo VP for Geodata, OSGeo Twin Cities Chapter, Sahana Software Foundation Board of Directors, MetroGIS Coordinating Committee Chair, ownerdbSpatial
132. Peter Löwe, OSGeo Charter member, Senior Researcher at Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ, General Manager GISIX.com
133. Gavin Fleming, OSGeo Charter member, owner of AfriSpatial.
134. Frank Maes, GeoICT professional, Head Operations at Geosparc, Contributor & community member of Geomajas, OSGeo member

Summary

The OGC candidate standard titled "GeoServices REST API" is currently, in May 2013, being considered to be approved as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard. The vote to accept the document as a standard is unusually contentious. The controversy is the cause of this open letter.

The candidate standard was previously released for public comment and can be found on the request for public comment page (though public comment has been closed for now).

The candidate standard attempts to standardize a suite of web services such as a service which provides map images, a service which provides geospatial feature data, and a service which performs geospatial processing. The candidate standard focuses on interactions via a defined hierarchy of URLs and using predominantly a particular set of JSON schemas for the exchange of geospatial data.

Criticism and Response

The criticism of the adoption of this particular document as an OGC Standard includes a wide variety of reasons such as:

• the OGC's process through which the document was developed which is thought to lack sufficient flexibility to respond to input from various stakeholders,
• the focus of the document on 'REST' and 'API' which is seen as not matching the ideas others have for these concepts,
• the names of the standard and of the services which are seen as potentially confusing,
• the functionality of the new services which are considered to duplicate that of existing services already standardized by the OGC such as WMS, WFS, WCS, and WPS,
• the addition of a new set of services based on new URL patterns and new JSON exchange formats which is seen as duplicating the efforts of other working groups bringing similar ideas to the updates of existing OGC services,
• the re-introduction in the new services of previously resolved interoperability issues which is seen as failing to build on the existing knowledge and experience,
• the use of the particular JSON schemas which are seen as having little industry acceptance and are incompatible with other widely used schemas, and
• the lack of implementation diversity which is thought to give the vendor of the one complete implementation an unusual commercial advantage on top of the vendor's already dominant position in the domain.

These issues have potential impacts on the use of 'Open Standards' by governments and companies, on the interoperability of software interacting with standards compliant OGC services, on the costs to developers and users of standards compliant software, on the understanding of 'Open Standards' by the public at large, and, possibly, on the reputation of the OGC as a champion of interoperability.

In particular there are concerns by some that adoption of the standard will likely result in a combination of the following:

1. The cost to application developers, systems integrators, testers and sponsors to support all relevant OGC standards will be substantially increased.
2. Consequently, organisations and/or applications may choose to only support one standard, or only support one standard fully.
3. Sponsors (such as governments) who require compliance with OGC standards will discover that applications don't communicate together, due to applications supporting different OGC standards that essentially do the same thing.
4. This will result in a diminished importance of OGC, as the "OGC standards" stamp of approval will not equate interoperability.
5. After a while, in order to solve interoperability issues, a respected international organisation or program will likely take the initiative to mandate one standard as the preferred standard for all agencies to follow. To date, the OGC has provided this leadership.
6. One standard taking prominence over the other will likely lead to the other being neglected or deprecated, resulting in many OGC compliant systems becoming legacy systems in the process. This should be considered an undesirable outcome for a standards organisation.

In response to these issues, the authors of the Geoservices REST API document have stated that:

• the process of the OGC has been followed completely,
• the specification actually is RESTful and does define an API,
• the name, due to the controversy, is open for modification
• the OGC does not forbid duplication of service functionality, already has duplication between the W*S and the S*S (sensor) family of standards, should not block progress in the name of 'one true way', and harmonization between the services can be considered in the future,
• the JSON format exists and functions, and
• there are alternative implementations for some of these services.

The authors also stress that the existence of a large user base shows the service is useful, and that the standardization of the services at the OGC may encourage new implementations.

The SWG has published two documents in response to various comments.

• File:OGC 12-642 GeoServices REST API - RFC Comments Response.pdf presents the responses from the Standards Working Group to the comments received from the public during the public Request for Comments (RFC).
• File:OGC 13-031r1 GeoServices REST API - Response to no votes r1.pdf presents the responses from the Standards Working Group to the reasons given by the organizations voting _no_ during the adoption vote.

Positions on the vote

The discussion raises a number of issues, many based upon complex technical concepts and implications. This makes it difficult for voting OGC members considering whether to support (or not) the "Geoservices REST API" as a standard. The following provides one analysis of the positions on the vote, aimed to simplify and summarize key points. However, it does not necessarily represent the opinions held by all signatories above.

The pros for accepting the "Geoservices REST API" document as an OGC standard

• The OGC should be in the business of developing good standards, not in choosing which standards should be implemented.
• The proposers of the document want to make a standard and have followed all the rules of the OGC. The work of any such group of members deserves serious, good faith consideration.
• The need for an integrated suite of services using simple data, which is addressed (partially) by the document, is real. The proposed document is pushing the OGC on this issue.
• The proposed document could be useful to a number of people.
• The proposed document is not significantly more broken than the existing standards of the OGC. As one author of standards notes:

"I know how totally impossible it is to write a good standard, so the weaknesses in the existing document seem more acceptable."The cons

• The OGC actually is, whether it should be or not, in the position of recommending interoperable standards for geospatial services. The proposed document is not good enough, has implementations dominated by one vendor's server implementation, and not publicly supported enough, to be considered at the same level as existing standards.
• Adopting a standard implies a desire to maintain the standard, but OGC's desire to support this approach has been questioned by some. In particular, the lack of collaboration and willingness to accept recommendations from the community on this version of the "Geoservices REST API" document bodes ill for the future.
• The overlap in functionality between the proposed services and the existing services, notably with the ongoing work to modularize the existing services, is almost 100 percent. However, compatibility is low.
• There is already a published document: [www.esri.com] so there is no need for the document to be adopted as an OGC Standard merely for interoperability with the ESRI implementation.
• The document, as a new, separate effort, repeats mistakes which were made and since solved by the other services.
• The document focuses on the past (notably with backwards compatibility and use of only GET/POST) not on the future.
• The document needs a comprehensive editorial review and substantial rewriting for clarity.

A conclusion

Both simple answers are bad.

A simple acceptance of the standard would introduce a new set of 'OGC approved' open services. The OGC approval might enable governments to buy a XXXX-new-name-here-XXXX solution instead of a W*S or a S*S solution. The path forwards towards harmonizing the services is unclear. Fixing this document in addition to fixing the W*S services will be a pain.

Simply rejecting the solution would be bad for the OGC. It would place the OGC in the position of picking winners and losers in the standards business. It would mean that the OGC is stuck on the project of fixing the W*S standards to meet some nebulous future functionality without having any path to get there. It would discourage innovation and progress.

Is there any third way?

Well, actually, there is a different way of thinking of the issue. Overall, there appears to be a shared desire for an integrated suite of geospatial services, originally focused on a simple data model, built on the exchange of well defined resources in simple formats including JSON, accessible and usable using the core HTTP verbs, and discoverable through following HTML links and patterns of URL paths. The hope is that such a suite can be designed based on the best expertise of the OGC, can be widely supported by the community, and can be implemented and tested by multiple groups. Neither the proposed document, nor the current services meet this vision. So the work, ultimately, is on improving all the services at the OGC, first to modularize them, then to enable simple implementations, and finally to link those implementations into a functional suite. Since this is the work that is already happening, perhaps the vote is an unfortunate distraction and the productive way forward is merely to redouble the efforts to create the next versions of the standards.

Issues with the document

Beyond the controversy described above, there are issues with the Geoservices REST API document itself. Even if the standard deserves support, these issues could be considered blockers to the adoption of the current, May 2013, document.

The critique is incomplete because it quickly falls into a full editorial review of the text, something which takes a lot of time and effort and is beyond the scope and intent of this Open Letter.

The critique can be found at: [wiki.osgeo.org] .

Note that some of these critiques hold the document to OGC's current, standards writing guidelines. The OGC has been striving to develop better standards so new standards must meet higher requirements than past standards. The lack of clarity in the proposed document is not substantially worse than many published standards but ought to be resolved in new standards.

Further ConcernsTechnical Concerns

• see this discussion for detailed arguments why OGC WCS is superior to the "GeoServices REST API" Part 6. It concludes:

In summary, the ESRI "Geoservice REST API" Imaging part is at a technological level where WCS departed from some 5 years ago.Inconciseness of the specification at large will make it difficult for third parties to come up with interoperable implementations. The components making up the ESRI "Geoservice REST API" provide natural blocks assignable to the matching SWGs. As for Part 6 of the ESRI "Geoservice REST API", if to become a standard it needs to be discussed in the WCS.SWG for harmonization, clarification, and improvement.

Methodological Concerns

• The Geoservices REST API can not be amended (other than editorial changes in the specification document), because of a requirement for backward compatibility with the ESRI implementation. This has limited improvements in this version of the candidate specification.

Further Reading

Please add links to referenced documents, related news stories or blog posts here.

• Call for comments on GeoServices REST API: [www.opengeospatial.org]
• Responses from the Standards Working Group to the comments received from the public during the public Request for Comments (RFC): File:OGC 12-642 GeoServices REST API - RFC Comments Response.pdf
• Responses from the Standards Working Group to the reasons given by the organizations voting _no_ during the adoption vote: File:OGC 13-031r1 GeoServices REST API - Response to no votes r1.pdf

• Email archive of OSGeo discussions about GeoServices REST API: [lists.osgeo.org]
• Adrian Custer's summary of technical issues (and original source of some content in this letter): [lists.osgeo.org]
• "Is OGC Loosing its way?", letter to OGC Voters, from OGC Interoperability Movement Team Leaders, [lists.osgeo.org]

Join us at FOSS4G Central and Eastern Europe (FOSS4G-CEE) 2013 from 16th - 20th June, National Library of Romania, Bucharest, Romania.





You will meet well known Keynote Speakers (random order): Jeff McKenna, Paul C. Smits, Jáchym Čepický, Schuyler Erle, Maria Antonia Brovelli, Dirk Frigne, Markus Neteler, Alyssa Wright, and Radu Puchiu.



Check the long list of Practical Workshops and Oral Presentations at: [2013.foss4g-cee.org]

Check out for the additional Code Sprint, the Open GeoData Hackathon, and the Open Data Side Event.



How to arrive? See [2013.foss4g-cee.org]

Hardware compression is considerably faster than software compression, while it also alleviates the processor load. Continue reading →



Click Title to Continue Reading...

To my surprise the new Google maps is available already. Upon receipt of the email providing me with a special link I immediately launched maps from Chrome for a quick, first look. The first thing I noticed was the browser … Continue reading →

I got my invite through today to connect to the new Google Maps. Colour me f**king impressed!


By far and away the stand-out feature in the new Google Maps is the integration with Google Earth  - and Google Maps users no longer need a plug-in to view Google Earth imagery in Google Maps. But so what? - With all due respects to my friends at the Google Earth Blog I've always thought that 3d maps are a bit of a sideshow when it comes to online maps.


But what a sideshow it is! Google Maps now has real-time cloud overlays and, if you zoom out, it also has real-time sun, moon and star imagery! As I almost said before, colour me f**cking amazed.

This imagery is of course stunning and will be important to a significant number of Google Maps users - but for most users it will still remain a sideshow. The majority of Google Maps users, in their day-to-day use of Google Maps, will be far more interested in the basics of finding locations, finding local businesses and getting directions.


Well you know I am biased but there is simply no competition. Google's huge, no really - unbelievably huge - data of local businesses, public transit and nearly everyone's individual search patterns means that no other map provider can come close to offering anything close to the new Google Maps.

Open Street Maps may have far better map data in many parts of the world, Waze may be able to provide far better direction data in many locations, and numerous sites might be able to offer you better local business reviews. However no other online map provider can give you anywhere near the whole package that is the new Google Maps. It simply delivers in nearly every department you want from an online map!

Of course this review is just scratching at the surface. One of the big selling points of the new Google Maps is that every user gets their own map. Google Maps now responds to every user's favourite locations, search patterns and the behaviour of their friends on Google+. I have a feeling that this is going to freak out a few tech-savy users. However most users are simply just not going to notice that their map is tailored to their needs and the technophiles are probably going to love it anyway.

Well I'm biased, I am a technophile, and I do love it!

Googles Maps is preparing to debut its newly revamped Google Maps.  Terming it “smart recommendations” the new functionality of Google Maps is intended to be more interactive and custom tailored to the specific user.  The more you use the map to search for locations, favorite items by starring them, and write location reviews, the more [...]

The post Google Map Redesign appeared first on GIS Lounge.

Reblogged from Robert Reiz:

Unicorn is a very fast app server for Ruby on Rails. You just have to go to the APP_ROOT and type in "unicorn_rails". And your app is running.

The problem with that is, if your server reboots your app is down. And you have to start it again by hand. That is not so cool!

Wouldn't it be cool if you could start your Ruby on Rails like that:

Read more… 213 more words

This article saved my life. Set up Unicorn to start on server reboot.

David Cruickshank from SAP's Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) describes in his blog the architecture of how SAP users can perform geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis using both SAP's HANA in-memory database with a workflow to Esri's ArcGIS. Some of the workflow is explained as... Continue reading

David Cruickshank from SAP's Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) describes in his blog the architecture of how SAP users can perform geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis using both SAP's HANA in-memory database with a workflow to Esri's ArcGIS. Some of the workflow is explained as... Continue reading

The Nature Conservancy's Nature Rocks programme aims to make it easy for families to have fun in nature. To find great natural spaces to visit you can use the Nature Rocks Map.

This Google Map allows users to search for nature locations by location and by type (e.g. hiking, swimming, fishing, parks, camp-grounds, zoos etc).  After you enter a zip-code in the map search bar you can filter the results by distance and by the type of nature space that you are looking for.

Each displayed location contains an address, a website link and a link to the location's Google+ page.

The new OSM editor is a pleasure to use and I've been inspired to fix up my neighborhood a bit. It was cool to see these historic homes (designated Fort Collins landmarks, in fact) pop up in MapBox just minutes after I submitted them.

Google Maps, on the other hand, has no historic homes and a rather outdated and (sadly) never to be realized development proposal in the neighborhood. Fixing Google's map for free is not high on my list of priorities.

Next, I'd like to finally get some Pleiades-related data into the OpenHistoricalMap sandbox.

Another roundup of webinars of interest being delivered to your desktop in the near future… these are an awesome way to test drive a solution, hear directly from industry experts, and experience a little professional development. The following webinars of … Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting, spatially relevant article on regulation and standardization of place names and the disappearing apostrophe in U.S. signage, “Theres a Question Mark Hanging Over the Apostrophes Future: Its Practically Against the Law to Use the Mark in a Places Name; Sorry, Pikes Peak.”    Read the title again to catch the humor that Barry Newman uses to construct a brief history of place signage.

He states that the U.S. is the only country that standardized out apostrophes because they were seen as conveying private ownership of a public place. The USGS Board on Geographic Names set up in 1890 by President Harrison has eradicated around 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps. In contrast, the Apostrophe Protection Society kept the Mid Devon council in England from banning the use of apostrophes in street signs.  According to an in-depth article on the loss of the apostrophe and the history of Fell’s Point or Fells Point, Maryland, “What’s the Point?” from the Underbelly: From the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library, only five natural features have official license to use the possessive apostrophe in 2013.

The quoted arguments for the apostrophe is that it is part of proper English language usage, that it connotes information about the history of a place, and that not using them can cause confusion and miscommunication. What is most interesting about the WSJ article is who isn’t quoted – cartographers. How do cartographers feel about the vanishing apostrophe in place names?

 

 

 

 

 

The Hatnote Wikipedia Recent Changes Map is a real-time map of live edits being made to Wikipedia by unregistered users.

Unregistered users are far more likely to make incorrect, false or spam changes to Wikipedia. Only 15% of the contributions to English Wikipedia are from unregistered users. So the map actually represents only a small portion of the total edit activity on Wikipedia.


The map reminds me of WikipediaVision, a Google Map of real-time map edits to Wikipedia.

The map displays an information window for each edit, with the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if a summary was given), a link to the changes that were made to the article and the time the edit happened.


Mapping Wikipedia is a project from TraceMedia and the Oxford Internet Institute.

Using the Google Maps API Mapping Wikipedia allows you to view the geography of all geotagged Wikipedia articles in a number of different languages. It can also create maps based on the word count of articles, the date created, number of authors, and number of images.

If you are interested about how the map was created TraceMedia has provided an outline of the tools used in building the application. 

On April 12, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) reached its final orbit, 705 kilometers (438 miles) above Earth. One week later, the satellite's natural-color imager scanned a swath of land 185-kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long (120 by 6,000 miles)--an unusual,... Continue reading

On April 12, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) reached its final orbit, 705 kilometers (438 miles) above Earth. One week later, the satellite's natural-color imager scanned a swath of land 185-kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long (120 by 6,000 miles)--an unusual,... Continue reading

Many thanks to the folks that put on GeoNYC Tuesday night. I did a presentation on the balloon mapping projects we have been doing in part to set up Public Labs community here in Philadelphia.

Colorado State University Extension is offering a four day summer camp called GEAR-Tech-21, which will introduce youth to robotics and GPS/GIS technologies. Youth 10 to 14 years of age may attend the day camps at five sites in northeast Colorado: Sterling, Akron, Brush, Holyoke and... Continue reading

Esri and the Directory of Major Malls have partnered to create the DMM Future Retail story map that media can embed or share as part of ongoing retail and local business coverage. Built on exclusive data from the DMM, this map shows 25 lifestyle/specialty and urban mixed-used projects... Continue reading

Colorado State University Extension is offering a four day summer camp called GEAR-Tech-21, which will introduce youth to robotics and GPS/GIS technologies. Youth 10 to 14 years of age may attend the day camps at five sites in northeast Colorado: Sterling, Akron, Brush, Holyoke and... Continue reading

Esri and the Directory of Major Malls have partnered to create the DMM Future Retail story map that media can embed or share as part of ongoing retail and local business coverage. Built on exclusive data from the DMM, this map shows 25 lifestyle/specialty and urban mixed-used projects... Continue reading

UC Berkeley researchers tapped satellite imagery to locate warmer communities. They then used U.S. Census figures to determined who lived in those areas. The conclusion, published this week in the journal, Environmental Health Perspectives: Heat-prone neighborhoods were... Continue reading

UC Berkeley researchers tapped satellite imagery to locate warmer communities. They then used U.S. Census figures to determined who lived in those areas. The conclusion, published this week in the journal, Environmental Health Perspectives: Heat-prone neighborhoods were... Continue reading

España en llamas (Spain in Flames) is a Google Map displaying ten years of data about the location of forest fires in Spain. The map includes data on 1,508 fires, 699,560 hectares burned, 24 deaths and 191 injuries.

If you click on the 'Explora los incendios' link above the map you can view the map filtering tools. These allow the user to filter the results displayed on the map by cause of fire, fires that caused deaths, by location and by the size of the fire.

A time-line tool beneath the map also allows the user to explore each of the filtered results by year.

There's a new beta GIS for Bowling Green Kentucky. It's called GIS Application. What can you do with it? The average person can use this service for many things. It can tell who owns a property, where they can vote, what police or fire district they are in and the acreage of the... Continue reading

There's a new beta GIS for Bowling Green Kentucky. It's called GIS Application. What can you do with it? The average person can use this service for many things. It can tell who owns a property, where they can vote, what police or fire district they are in and the acreage of the... Continue reading

In the city of Wyndham, Australia, rapid population growth, coupled with the diverse business activities of the city, has increased demand for spatial services exponentially. This article discusses how the Spatial Systems Unit at the Wyndham City Council planned to provide an accurate and current enterprise GIS for all staff, empowering them to obtain information seamlessly, while catering to future changes to other corporate systems.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: OSGeoosgeolive

We are starting the build cycle for the 7.0 OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released in September 2013, ready for the global FOSS4G conference in Nottingham, UK. We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to the live DVD, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.

Also, could all projects please reply to us with which stable version of their software should be included in this release.

Key Milestones17 Jun 2013 All new applications installed, most old applications updated15 Jul 2013 Feature Freeze (all apps updated)05 Aug 2013 User Acceptance Test (all apps installed and working)26 Aug 2013 Final ISO sent to printers

... full schedule

OSGeoLive 7.0-alpha1 released

We have released the first alpha version of OSGeo-Live, which includes an update from Xubuntu 12.04 to 12.04.2 along with updated versions of applications from UbuntuGIS repository. Feel free to start testing your applications in the latest release. Download Alpha 1

About OSGeo-Live

The OSGeo Live demo DVD/VM/USB is an Xubuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use it to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: OSGeoosgeolive

We are starting the build cycle for the 7.0 OSGeo-Live DVD/USB/VM which will be released in September 2013, ready for the global FOSS4G conference in Nottingham, UK. We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to the live DVD, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.

Also, could all projects please reply to us with which stable version of their software should be included in this release.

Key Milestones17 Jun 2013 All new applications installed, most old applications updated15 Jul 2013 Feature Freeze (all apps updated)05 Aug 2013 User Acceptance Test (all apps installed and working)26 Aug 2013 Final ISO sent to printers

... full schedule

OSGeoLive 7.0-alpha1 released

We have released the first alpha version of OSGeo-Live, which includes an update from Xubuntu 12.04 to 12.04.2 along with updated versions of applications from UbuntuGIS repository. Feel free to start testing your applications in the latest release. Download Alpha 1

About OSGeo-Live

The OSGeo Live demo DVD/VM/USB is an Xubuntu based distribution of Geospatial Open Source Software, available via a Live DVD, Virtual Machine and USB. You can use it to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything.

I had a very interesting meeting with the folks at H2H in Troy, New York today. They are definitely pushing the envelope of 3D data innovation. Continue reading →



Click Title to Continue Reading...

With the huge new changes to Google Maps I've been wondering today if the Google Maps team were about to announce v4 of the Google Maps API.

The short answer is 'no'.

But you can get the new base map tiles in your Maps API maps from today. If you add

google.maps.visualRefresh = true;

to your code you will see the new fresher looking map tiles in your own API maps.

As well as the new map tiles you will also get the new default map marker from the new Google Maps and a new information window style (both have no shadows).

You can view the new base maps in a Google Maps API map on More Than A Map.

Google are beginning to push out the new Google Maps. You can request an invitation here. Google will then e-mail you an invite. The invites will start being sent out from tomorrow morning.

One of the stand-out features of the new Google Maps is the integration with Google Earth (without the need for a plug-in). The photo above is an actual view of the new Google Maps (the poor quality is due to it being taken from the presentation on the huge screens at Google I/O).



The whole look of the new Google Maps is designed to provide an individual map for every individual user. For example, places that you visit often will show up on your map. If you regularly visit a particular restaurant then that restaurant will be a place-mark on your map. You might also see similar restaurants on your map and other restaurants that have been recommended by your friends.

The new map also features some amazing transitions from the map into Street View. The photo tour feature also seems to be improved, with amazingly smooth transitions between user photos taken around the same location.

There are also some great improvements to directions in the new Google Maps. I posted about some of them earlier today but one stand-out feature is the ability to view detailed schedules for individual transit stations.

The new Google Maps looks to be such a radical step forward that I wonder if we might hear news of v4 of the Google Maps API later today.

Learn more here

This week OpenGeo took an exciting and important step forward as an organization. We’ve taken on investment and spun out from OpenPlans, our long time parent organization, to establish ourselves as an independent company. Our growth and this successful step out on our own are the result of our amazing team and the success of open source geospatial software that we’ve been working on for over ten years.

Vanedge Capital, a Vancouver-based venture capital firm, led the Series A round of investment that made this possible. We are truly excited to begin a partnership with Vanedge, an innovative fund led by partners who know how to grow and manage software technology companies.

This investment provides the capital we need to meet our objectives and continue to develop innovative technologies. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or have seen us lately at conferences or events, you know about the ambitious projects we’ve been working on: through-the-web-processing, breaking out of the GIS work-flow with Spatial IT, geospatial web-analytics and distributed versioning for geospatial – to name a few. This type of development requires not just the strong technical skills and forward-looking leadership that our team has, but it also requires resources, which Vanedge’s investment provides.

This investment also allows us to achieve our long-planned separation from OpenPlans, which founded and incubated us. We are grateful for the support and vision of OpenPlans over the years. And, since OpenPlans remains an investor in our new company, we’re looking forward to our continued partnership with them.

Our mission remains the same: to build the highest quality software for location and mapping, available to all. This investment gives us a stronger base of resources to support the open source communities we work with. We remain committed to the open source principles of collaboration, transparency, and freedom. We’ll be doing even more to develop the best geospatial tools while supporting the open source communities and our customers alike.

Look for more from us about the future of Spatial IT and how we can help you get there.

Find out more about this important step forward and please contact us if you have any questions.

When we talk to individuals and organizations interested in using OpenTreeMap to map their urban forests through crowd sourcing, we like to say that OpenTreeMap is a hybrid – half tree inventory tool, and half public engagement and outreach platform. But what do either of those parts mean, concretely? What kinds of goals can you accomplish with a tree inventory and public engagement platform? Over the past several months, through conversations on the opentreemap-user Google Group and at the 2012 Partners in Community Forestry conference, I’ve learned about a few particularly exciting projects happening in our community of OpenTreeMap users. I’ve decided with the leaves finally back and spring planting season upon us, it’s high time to highlight and celebrate what some in the OpenTreeMap community are doing and share it with others through some posts on Azavea Atlas. If you’re using an OpenTreeMap site for a cool project, let me know!

Ursinus College student Amos Almy measures the diameter at breast height (DBH) of a tree on Ursinus’ campus in suburban Philadelphia.

In this first post, I’ll dive into a campus tree inventory research project that Amos Almy, a student at Ursinus College here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and his advisor, Professor Patrick Hurley, have started by utilizing PhillyTreeMap.org since the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester.

I met Amos through the opentreemap-user Google Group, when he helped us identify and replicate an issue in PhillyTreeMap where the software wasn’t allowing users to delete their own trees.

I started talking to Amos off-list, and his project is pretty cool. He read an article a while back in The New York Times  about two men mapping all the trees in Central Park, and wanted to do the same thing with all the trees on Ursinus College’s wooded campus. With the support of environmental studies professor Patrick Hurley, Amos turned his idea into an independent research project.

“Our goal was to create a publicly accessible map of the campus’ trees, while also providing a platform for developing a portal to educational information about individual species’ ecological and cultural benefits,” said Amos over email. “I began searching for urban tree maps online…after noticing the ability to export [PhillyTreeMap data] as a Google Earth file, I realized this offered the opportunity to further customize our map and include information on species’ cultural values, forest composition, and tree information. The PhillyTreeMap website also allowed us to use data collected not only in classrooms, but also by students, faculty and the surrounding [Collegeville, PA] community.”

After summer vacation last year, Amos started entering trees into PhillyTreeMap.org, starting with a tree inventory given to him by Ursinus College’s facility services. “I created a system that allowed me to enter trees into the website, then measure those trees with the help of students enrolled in [an environmental studies class],” he said. Over the Fall 2012 semester, Amos and his team added over 1300 trees (!) to PhillyTreeMap.org using the website and PhillyTreeMap iPhone application. By the end of the project, Amos predicts they will have mapped nearly one thousand of the trees on Ursinus’ campus.

Amos’ plans are to take the data he’s collected using PhillyTreeMap, export it to Google Earth-friendly KML format (using OpenTreeMap’s data export functionality), and further annotate a KML-based map of the trees on campus with more extensive icons and information. In particular, Amos and his professor are interested in focusing their KML map on the “cultural values” of tree species: the edible, medicinal, craft-related, or special aesthetic qualities of the types of trees on campus.

“This [annotated KML-based map] will provide a resource for those interested in learning about people’s connections to plants through activities, such as foraging or gathering, and could be used as a learning tool in future classes that are concerned with the interactions between people and forested environments,” explained Amos over email.

But Amos isn’t satisfied with a complete campus tree atlas and useful academic resource. This spring, three of Amos’ fellow students helped map 300 trees in a nearby park  and along streets in the wider Collegeville, PA community. “We hope the borough will advertise this process,” he said, “so that community members might get involved and the borough will have ecosystem service data to consider in future land-use decision-making processes.”

Those interested are welcome to contact Amos Almy at amos.almy@gmail.com, or his advisor Patrick Hurley at phurley@ursinus.edu. If you know of another college or university conducting a tree inventory, let me know in the comments below or email me at athompson@azavea.com. And stay tuned for our next blog post in our series on the OpenTreeMap community!

In the Keynote presentation at Google I/O today Google announced three new location API's for the Google Maps Android API v2.

1. Fused Location Provider

The Fused Location Provider is an improved location detection service for Android. As well as improved location detection the Fused Location Provider is more power efficient and uses less than 1% of the device's battery per hour

2. Geofencing

Geofences allow your apps to detect when users enter or exit defined zones on a map. The Geofencing API will allow up to 100 geofences per app. 

3. Activity Recognition

The Activity Recognition API uses the phone's accelerometer to automatically detect whether users are walking, driving or cycling. I assume developers will use this in activity tracking apps, for example to track bike rides and provide user statistics on average speed, distance travelled etc.

The announcements come from Google I/O, an event in San Francisco this week. The APIs are additions to Google's location services for Android. Fuse Location Provider enhances device location determination. It speeds up the process and makes the location accuracy higher. There's also a... Continue reading

The announcements come from Google I/O, an event in San Francisco this week. The APIs are additions to Google's location services for Android. Fuse Location Provider enhances device location determination. It speeds up the process and makes the location accuracy higher. There's also a... Continue reading

Google Maps: Into the Future - 12.45pm PDT
Ken Hoetmer, Mano Marks

It's been a busy month for MapBox.  Their new OpenStreetMap editor launched, for one thing, and now they've published a pretty little app to show off their satellite data sets.

Actual picture of the earth.  NASA photoshops out the labels.

It's WhirlyGlobe-Maply powering that app and, indeed, the whole thing is open source.



How It Happened

I approached MapBox about doing this one a few weeks ago.  It's basically advertising for me and it was really simple to write.  Take a look at the source code, it's just not that big.



Once I put the first version together, Justin@MapBox cleaned it up and generally made the UI elements work better.  That stuff takes more time than you realize.



Then we shipped it and now you can play with.



Future of MapBox Earth

The app's goals were to show off MapBox's lovely satellite data sets and advertise WhirlyGlobe-Maply.  I'd say we're good on both of those.  What's next depends on what people want to do with it.



Since the app itself is open source and the toolkit is open source... you can do whatever you like (within the constraints of an Apache 2.0 license).  Or you can pay me to do whatever you like, which is kind of how I make my living.



We'll see how that goes.  In the mean time there are other interesting things afoot with MapBox and mousebird consulting.

The Oculus Google Street Viewer is a link that has been sitting in my bookmark folder for a while. While the app looked impressive, and I was sure something clever was probably going on, I had no idea what it was actually for. Little did I know that the clue was in the name and I just needed to Google 'Oculus' - doh!

Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset, designed to give video game players a truly immersive experience. So, if you are one of the few people who actually own your own virtual reality headset, you can now explore Google Maps Street View with the Oculus Google Street Viewer.

The rest of us will just have to squint our eyes and pretend.  

Hat-tip: Google Street View World

What's the MapBox team been up to? Well, yesterday.... Not only did we just launch our new Cloudless Atlas imagery for the entire world (down through zoom level 8), we also launched new aerial imagery for the entire US and EU down to zoom level 19. Everything is traceable in... Continue reading

What's the MapBox team been up to? Well, yesterday.... Not only did we just launch our new Cloudless Atlas imagery for the entire world (down through zoom level 8), we also launched new aerial imagery for the entire US and EU down to zoom level 19. Everything is traceable in... Continue reading

Droid Life has managed to grab a series of screenshots of what looks like a major redesign of Google Maps. Apparently a sign-up page for the new Google Maps briefly went live last night and Droid Life managed to capture a number of images used in the sign-up page that reveal some of the new features coming to Google Maps.

A Smarter Search Box

The sign-up page promises a smarter search box, "One search makes all the information you need available at a glance - read up on your destination, see ratings and reviews, and sometimes even take a peak inside."

As you can see from the screenshot above the new Google Maps seems to fill the whole browser window, with the search box overlaid on the map rather than placed above the map. The results of this search, for 'museums near Paris' also uses what look like genre specific map markers to display the results on the map rather than the iconic large red Google Maps marker.

The search box also gives you the option to view the 'top reviews'  and hints at the almost inevitable tie-in with Google+, giving you the option to view results from 'Your Circles'.

Flight Search and Directions

A screenshot also shows that Flight Search is being added to the directions options. Google's underused separate Flight Search service therefore will now be incorporated into the new Google Maps and will make available one more option for users when looking for directions.

Google Maps users will now be able to ask for driving, transit, flight, walking and biking directions.

Another screenshot in the sign-up page suggests that users will also be able to view a combination of the different directions options on the same map. So, for example, users will be able to view driving and public transit directions for the same route on the same map and will be able to compare the journey times for each mode of transport.

Maps that Get Better

Finally, another image promises that Google Maps will adapt to individual users, "As you search the map, star places you like and leave reviews, the map starts to adapt and can suggest things, like restaurants you might enjoy or the quickest way home. In other words the more you use the new Google Maps, the more helpful it becomes".

An opinion piece by Jerome E. Dobson, Stephanie L. Kozak and Joseph S. Wood appeared in The Trenton News on May 4. It's based in part of the NSF funding survey the American Geographical Society published earlier this year (APB coverage) that suggests American want more, not less... Continue reading

An opinion piece by Jerome E. Dobson, Stephanie L. Kozak and Joseph S. Wood appeared in The Trenton News on May 4. It's based in part of the NSF funding survey the American Geographical Society published earlier this year (APB coverage) that suggests American want more, not less... Continue reading

An opinion piece by Jerome E. Dobson, Stephanie L. Kozak and Joseph S. Wood appeared in The Trenton News on May 4. It's based in part of the NSF funding survey the American Geographical Society published earlier this year (APB coverage) that suggests American want more, not less... Continue reading

The GEOStore project explores new types of geolocated digital content, such as 3D models and augmented reality, and defines new bundling and Web distribution techniques for digital content to facilitate new business models. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which the GEOStore addresses the challenges of interoperability and Web-based distribution of geospatial data content to users in sectors such as education, geomarketing, tourism and urban management.

I am working on a video that was taken of the field operation and I have a meeting scheduled to review the data on Wednesday afternoon. Continue reading →



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To what talks and workshops will you go?

A few days ago, we were sharing our entire list of great 9 keynote speakers. Today, we happily announce the complete draw up of the FOSS4G-CEE 2013 schedule!

We invite you all to take a look! We have prepared 12 workshops that will make your world spin. We have hands-on practical seminars on GRASS, OpenGeo Suite, R, PyWPS, MapServer, PostGIS and much more given by first-class teachers.

The first two days of workshops will converge in 3 keynote speeches, gracefully offered by Jeff McKenna (OSGeo), Maria Antonia Brovelli (Politecnico di Milano) and Markus Neteler (Fondazione Edmund Mach). After a well deserved coffee, you will have 3 intriguing tracks to choose from.

The third day of the conference will start in the Aula, a lovely imposing auditorium, where we will have the pleasure of listening to Paul C. Smits (Joint Research Centre – European Commission), Jáchym Čepický (Help Service – Remote Sensing) and Radu Puchiu (Government of Romania). The rest of the day will be packed with an array of talks on various FOSS4G subjects and coffee breaks. More questions, ideas, greetings and congratulations will fly around starting with 7 p.m. at the social event.

As we have a strong connection with the Open Data movement in Romania, on the third day, we are putting together a side event with a clear focus on Open Data discussions, with participants from both public and private sectors. This is an important stepping stone, coming as a highlight of long standing activities of advocating and promoting. As special guests, we have invited representatives from Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Government Partnership.

The fourth day will have a prompt start at 9 a.m. and after a marathon of 18 talks, we will enjoy the last 3 keynote speeches offered by Dirk Frigne (Geosparc), Alyssa Wright (OpenGeo) and Schuyler Erle (Idibon).

At 3 pm, on Wednesday, June the 19th, our conference will come to an end. But not the fun. After all the talks, networking and ideas springing around, we will kindly invite you to get your hands dirty one more time. Which is the event that will conclude FOSS4G-CEE 2013 for you? Will it be the code sprint or the Open Geodata Hackathon? No matter your choice, for sure it will mold into a great experience.

For the complete detailed schedule of FOSS4G-CEE 2013, please go here.

We take this opportunity to give a warm and big thank you to all our great speakers and workshops’ instructors for their goodwill, their kind thoughts and all of their efforts spent in preparing for this event.

It is only together that we can call ourselves a community.

The Ventus Project at Arizona State University is seeking the public's help to map out the location of all the world's power plants. The project is led by Dr. Kevin Robert Gurney and seeks to measure carbon dioxide output at those power plants.

The post Crowdsource Power Plant Data Project appeared first on GIS Lounge.

Here's what going on next Wednesday at FOSS4GNA in Minneapolis: FOSS4G-NA Student/Mentor Lunch This is a chance for seasoned FOSS4G professionals to get together with a student just starting out in the open source world. The mentor and student will get connected for lunch on... Continue reading

Here's what going on next Wednesday at FOSS4GNA in Minneapolis: FOSS4G-NA Student/Mentor Lunch This is a chance for seasoned FOSS4G professionals to get together with a student just starting out in the open source world. The mentor and student will get connected for lunch on... Continue reading

The cool crew from Seattle-based Socrata are providing government users, opendata enthusiasts, developers, and others with a very cool OpenData resource in the form of a “hackathon in a box” – a toolbox of resources, documents, tools and other handy … Continue reading →

Listed here are shapefile viewers for viewing GIS vector data in shapefile format by using desktop software or an online option.

The post Shapefile Viewers appeared first on GIS Lounge.

ParkMe is a very handy iPhone and desktop application for finding the cheapest and closest parking.

The app uses Google Maps to show nearby parking locations with the prices displayed clearly in the individual map markers. As well as clearly displaying prices the map shows you which parking lots are currently open and which are closed (open lots are displayed in blue, closed lots are grey).

If you select an individual parking lot on the map you can view detailed hourly rates and the hours of operation. 

And no, I am not trying to build a new MapGuide viewer. :)

This new feature just makes such as task dead simple

Every mid-winter, I become impatient with winter’s cold, and dreary grays.   I find myself wondering if the world around me is ever going to be warm, lively, and colorful again.  And every spring, as the days grow longer and warmer, my faith is restored, as I see little signs of life popping out of the leaf litter in my yard and native metro woodlands.  In a matter of weeks, the grays, browns, and faded golds of the winter forest floor transform into a carpet of green, white, gold, blue, and purple.  The spring ephemeral wildflowers arrive, and the forest takes on a moist, rich scent and texture.

Busse Forest Nature Preserve, a National Natural Landmark in Cook County, IL. (NPS.gov)

Growing up with the Cook County, Chicago forest preserves as one of my family’s most significant recreation destinations, I learned in our annual search for Jack-in-the-Pulpits, to appreciate how this time of delightful delicacy and color, is short-lived, as these forest wildflowers take advantage of the sunlight that temporarily reaches the forest floor, during the time between the end of winter, and the leafing out of the shrub and tree layers above them.

 

Jack-in-the-Pulpits (NPS.gov)

These flowers must complete their lifecycles in a matter of weeks, growing, blooming, being pollinated, and setting seed before the dense shade of summer arrives.  It is because their opportunity to thrive is so short, that these plants grow in great numbers, with several adaptations for attracting pollinators: bright colors, enticing scents, and nectar guides on their petals.  Some even have petals which serve as landing platforms for flying insects.

Spring ephemerals are perennials that sprout mostly from underground bulbs and corms, which they have stored with starch during their previous growing season.  They grow close to the ground because there is no competition at this growth level, and this low profile reduces damage from cold winds.  Because the weather in the early spring is still too cold for most flying insects, ants and small ground beetles pollinate most of these plants and disseminate their seeds.

The natural intricacies and beauty of this time in the woods are more than enough to provide a rationale for conservation and restoration, but recent research by the Leopold Center at Iowa State University tells us that these forest floor communities play a big role in water quality as well.  A recent press release from the center tells how certain species of the forest floor are high performers when it comes to capturing and storing nutrients, along with their companion native trees and shrubs.   Together, their root and shoot biomass act as giant natural sponges and filters.   Iowa State has a couple of nice write ups with more information and can be found at:

• [www.leopold.iastate.edu]
• [www.leopold.iastate.edu]

The weather this year has been unusual but normally I’d suggest you look for the earliest spring ephemerals between late March and early April, especially on moist south-facing slopes warmed by the sun, and on moist bottomlands next to streams.  Later in a normal spring, look for new blooms on rich, moist, well-drained east and north-facing slopes.  Some of the most common spring ephemerals you will see in our region are, Spring Beauty, Dog Tooth Violet, Toothwort, Dutchman’s Breeches, Virginia Bluebell, Wild Sweet William, May Apple, Wake Robin, Bellwort, Bloodroot, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Putty Root Orchid, and False Rue Anemone.  They will be interspersed with longer lived spring bloomers, like Wild Ginger, Wild Geranium, Jacob’s Ladder, Virginia Waterleaf, Solomon’s Seal, False Solomon’s Seal, and several ferns.

This spring, wander our metro region’s woodland wildlands with a guidebook and marvel at our ephemeral spring beauty.  You can search for carpets of color in the Fort Leavenworth bottomland forests, Swope Park, Burr Oak Woods Conservation Area,  Isley Park Woods Natural Area, Maple Woods Natural Area, the Blue River bottomlands, and Hidden Valley Natural Area.

Roberta Vogel-Leutung is a city girl with rural Iowa and Kansas roots who grew up on the southwest side of Chicago in a family of 13. There, she frequently took refuge at the top of her family’s three story Weeping Willow Tree, and explored the Cook County Forest Preserves with her family, her Boy Scout brothers, and her St. Albert’s Girl Scout Troop.  She’s a big fan of local nature, and works on Urban Waters partnership projects, and various community engagement and sustainability initiatives, from her seat in ENSV where she has been a contractor or employee since 1988.