Planet Georezo » Planet OSGeo

Un Planet est un site Web dynamique qui agrège le plus souvent sur une seule page, le contenu de notes, d'articles ou de billets publiés sur des blogs ou sites Web afin d'accentuer leur visibilité et de faire ressortir des contenus pertinents aux multiples formats (texte, audio, vidéo, Podcast). C'est un agrégateur de flux RSS. Il s'apparente à un portail web.
Vous pouvez lire le billet sur le blog La Minute pour plus d'informations sur les RSS !

Feeds

50584 items (0 unread) in 88 feeds

Dans la presse

Du côté des éditeurs

Toile géomatique francophone

Géomatique anglophone

Blogs GeoRezo.net

Autres planets

Planet OSGeo

Abonnez vous à cette page (RSS) !

Planet OSGeo

Skip to page: 1 2 3 ... 39

25 mai 2012
16:17
Margherita Di Leo: Corsi di formazione a Potenza
sur Planet OSGeo

L'Organismo di Ricerca EXO, in collaborazione con il Dottorato di Ricerca Internazionale in "Bio-EcoSistemi e BioTecnologie" dell'Università degli Studi della Basilicata, organizza i seguenti Corsi:

- Software liberi per l'analisi di dati ambientali (18-22 giugno)
- Metodologia statistica per la ricerca scientifica (25-29 giugno)

Il Corso di "Software liberi per l'analisi di dati ambientali", nella introduzione delle nozioni di base affronterà le eventuali problematiche legate all’installazione dei software sui diversi pc e sui diversi sistemi operativi.
I corsisti verranno guidati e stimolati all’interazione con i differenti tools (GRASS, Qgis e R) presentati in maniera da acquisire familiarità con gli stessi e riuscire a reperire tutte le informazioni necessarie ad eseguire la tipologia di analisi desiderata.
Particolare enfasi sarà posta sull’analisi di dati spaziali in applicazioni di modellazione ambientale, di classificazione di immagini satellitari, nella realizzazione di statistiche esplorative e nell’applicazione di algoritmi di interpolazione dei dati.

Il Corso di "Statistica" rappresenta un corso di base che introduce alla trattazione di dati sperimentali. Il Corso ha l’ambizione di porre le basi scientifiche per un corretto approccio alla pianificazione di esperimenti, presentazione ed elaborazione di dati.
Il Corso, svolto in un laboratorio dedicato, si prefigge anche di fornire alcune abilità informatiche attraverso l’avvio all’utilizzo del software R che consente di affrontare con esempi gli argomenti trattati. Gli Studenti, inoltre, seguendo le procedure indicate, potranno svolgere autonomamente elaborazioni statistiche.

Ulteriori info.
15:20
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): Open Source Geonews: HSLayers, Proxy4OWS, the Worst of OpenStreetMap, AP moving to TileMill + Leaftlet, and more
sur Planet OSGeo
Still in my geonews catching up process, here's the open source-related geonews not shared yet.
- Via LinkedIn I learned about HSLayers and Proxy4OWS,
  - For HSLayers: "HSLayers is yet another JavaScript Mapping framework. You can use it for building rich mapping portals, as well as use it’s parts for improving your simple OpenLayers-based map."
  - For Proxy4OWS: "It is transforming OGC WMS request types from the client, into WCS or WFS requests, so that the target server can accept them."
- For OpenStreetMap, I liked the 'Worst of OSM' page showing failed imports, I guess we wouldn't see this from proprietary providers (via)
- For those unable to move to 2.0, PostGIS 1.5.4 was released
- If you want to learn about GeoExt 2 development
- GeoNode 1.1.1 was released
- And so was MapProxy 1.4.0
- As an indirect user of GEOS, I'm happy that GEOS graduated OSGeo incubation
- The OSGeo also informed us of the First Open Source Geospatial Laboratory in South America and First African Open Source Geospatial Laboratory
- You might have an interest in the Comprehensive preview of MapGuide Open Source 2.4 series
- libais 0.7 was released: "C++ decoder for Automatic Identification System for tracking ships and decoding maritime information"
- APB informs us that the famous AP, Associated Press, is moving to TileMill and Leaflet for their interactive maps
Google Plus One
6:41
OSGeo News: First Open Source Geospatial Laboratory in South America
sur Planet OSGeo

OSGeo News: First Open Source Geospatial Laboratory in South America
24 mai 2012
17:26
Arnulf Christl: Non-News
sur Planet OSGeo

Thanks to all for all the positive feedback over the past days. Just to make sure that there are no misconceptions: I am not stepping down as director, not stepping down as president, not dropping the ball but will continue to bug OSGeo as best I can. My term as director is simply coming to a natural end and after re-running for three consecutive terms I prefer to not stand for nomination again.

Instead, I will explore the do-ocratic potential of OSGeo in a self experiment by becoming - or rather - by staying a regular member no 'more' no 'less'. If it turns out that OSGeo goes astray we can still devise plan B. No need for lamentations and no more farewells, please. I have no intentions of going away.

Have Fun,
Arnulf

Making sense with your spatial data
http://www.metaspatial.net
23 mai 2012
21:12
Gavin Fleming: Setting up PostGIS 2.0 in PostgreSQL 9.1 on Ubuntu 12.04
sur Planet OSGeo
I’ve been itching to try raster, topology and the rest of the new features in PostGIS 2.0. I suppose it was too much to hope for it to be packaged in Ubuntu 12.04 or UbuntuGIS so soon, so I fetched the source tarball from [postgis.refractions.net] and started following build instructions.

First attempts at compiling hit a few obstacles:

1. You need the latest GDAL, PROJ4 and GEOS. I already met GDAL and PROJ4 minimum requirements. So I fetched the GEOS 3.3.3 source tarball and built and installed that.

2. For raster in PostGIS 2, one of its dependencies is for ODBC support in GDAL. I have a custom GDAL setup since I had to manually configure GDAL for MrSID (that’s another story, but recently there have been conflicts among tiff and geotiff libs and other issues that result in the packaged MrSID configuration failing with UbuntuGIS GDAL). I hadn’t configured GDAL with ODBC support so had to rectify that:
```
./configure --with-threads --with-geotiff=internal --with-mrsid=/usr/local/Geo_DSDK-7.0.0.2167 --with-python --with-odbc
```
3. My last gotcha was having PostgreSQL 8.4 AND 9.1 installed. Not a problem (they run on ports 5432 and 5433 respectively), but to ensure the PostGIS 2.0 compiles against PostgreSQL 9 instead of 8.4 I had to remove 8.4 headers and install 9.1 headers:
```
sudo apt-get install postgresql-server-dev-9.1
```
Then PostGIS 2.0 built and installed successfully with this config:
```
./configure --with-gui --with-geosconfig=/usr/local/bin/geos-config --with-gdalconfig=/usr/bin/local/gdal-config
```
If you have PostgresSQL >= 9.1 you can install PostGIS as a newfangled PostgreSQL ‘extension’. First there is a small compile step in the PostGIS source ‘extensions’ folder. In the root of your source tree:
```
cd extensions; make; sudo make install
```
Then installing PostGIS 2 into any PostgreSQL database (>=9.1) is as easy as connecting to your database and running these SQL commands:
```
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology;
```
You can still install it the ‘old’ way too.

If you do this in a template database, then all subsequent databases you create from this template will include the PostGIS extensions.

So far so good. With the new loader and dumper I got some weird errors but since an update and reboot they’ve disappeared.

Happy PostGISing!

Setting up PostGIS 2.0 in PostgreSQL 9.1 on Ubuntu 12.04 is a post from: AfriSpatial
20:43
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): Glob3 Mobile: Open Source Multi-Platform Virtual Globe Engine
sur Planet OSGeo

At last week's 3D GeoInfo conference, I learned about the open source Glob3 3D GIS and Glob3 Mobile 3D virtual globe.

There isn't much on the sourceforge website: "glob3 is an open source 3D GIS multiplatform framework written in java with a very non restrictive license and advanced features."

But you'll get more on this page for Glob3 Mobile: "Glob3 Mobile is an open source 3D multiplattform virtual globe engine, running in mobile devices (Android and Apple) and in HTML5 web browsers. In this first version, it allows to connect to any OGC WMS public layer, and show it on the globe. Glob3 Mobile is also a framework for virtual globe development. It allows to write plugins directly in Javascript, and these plugins can run in the three plattforms (Android / Apple / web browsers). The project is currently in development, but first plugin examples can be tested in this site."

The apps for iOS and Android are free.
Google Plus One
19:36
Tim Sutton: Interview – Anna Mason from MapAction
sur Planet OSGeo

Enclosure: [download]

Today I had a chance to do a quick interview with Anna Mason from MapAction. The interview is an mp3 audio file recorded on my phone. My apologies if the sound quality isn’t the best. Click on the link below to download the mp3 file. Anna Mason MapAction Interview 23 May 2012 ... Read more »
15:14
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): DB4GeO: Open Source Geospatial Database for 3D Data
sur Planet OSGeo

I was at the 3D GeoInfo 2012 conference last week and I learned about the DB4GeO / DB3D open source geospatial database, which is a Java object-oriented database focusing on 3D data. It supports CityGML, has a RESTful API and has its own WebGL visualization tool.

Since I failed to find much about it on the web other than the GitHub page (it seems the code wasn't synchronized for a while), let me serve you the abstract [pdf] of last week's presentation: "The analysis of complex 3D data is a central task for many problems in the geo- and engineering sciences. Examples are the analysis of natural events such as mass movements and volcano eruptions as well as 3D city planning and the computation of 3D models from point cloud data generated by terrestrial laser scanning for 3D data analysis in various domains. The volume of these data is growing from year to year. However, there is no geo-database management system on the market yet that efficiently supports complex 3D mass data, although prototypical 3D geo-database management systems are ready to support such challenging 3D applications. In this contribution we describe how we reply to these requirements advancing DB4GeO, our 3D/4D geo-database architecture. The system architecture and support for geometric, topological and temporal data are presented in detail. Besides the new spatio-temporal object model, we introduce new ideas and implementations of DB4GeO such as the support of GML data and the new WebGL 3D interface. The latter enables the direct visualization of 3D database query results by a standard web browser without installing additional software. Examples for 3D database queries and their visualizations with the new WebGL interface are demonstrated. Finally, we give an outlook on our future work. Further extensions of DB4GeO and the support for the data management for collaborative subway track planning are discussed."

I'd like to see the differences between PostGIS vs DB4GeO features in regards to 3D geodata. Is DB4GeO more and a playground for researchers?
Google Plus One
14:06
gvSIG Team: About 1st gvSIG Russian meeting
sur Planet OSGeo

Hi! this is a translation from the Russian blog.
Bye,
Viqui-.

The 1st Russian gvSIG Meeting started its work in the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University, Russia, on Monday 14th May. The first activity of the Meeting was the gvSIG workshop which was attended by 14 specialists from six cities of the Russian Federation. Participants represented 10 different organizations, including a number of universities from Lipetsk, Smolensk, Orel, Moscow, Institute of Geography, Department of the Administration of the Lipetsk region, as well as business enterprises from the Lipetsk and Tambov regions.

The venue of the workshop was given by the Center for Free Software of the LSPU (the Head – Vladimir Kalitvin, Ph.D., Associate Professor). The workshop was opened by Lyubov Belyaeva, the Head of the Department of Geography. A brief story about the gvSIG project was made by the coordinator of the Russian gvSIG Community Serguei Mikhailov.

The workshop was led by the lecturer and coordinator of the Russian gvSIG Community Alexander Karandeev from the Department of Geography of the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University.

Workshop participants received a set of teaching materials, including textbook, “Geographic Information Systems. Basic Course. Workshop “, prepared by Alexander Karandeev and Serguei Mikhailov. The exercises were focused on gvSIG Desktop 1.11 and other open source software products.

The workshop organizers are grateful to the Organizing Committee of the International Conference “Fifth Semenov’s Reading: Legacy of the P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and modern science” dedicated to 185th anniversary of P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, also to the Center for Free Software of the LSPU, Alkis LLC [1] and of NPO “GISIT” [2] for their help in organizing and conducting the gvSIG workshop.

[1] [www.maplip.ru]
[2] [npogisit.ru]

The reports of participants of the Fifth Semenov’s Readings and the 1st Russian gvSIG Meeting were presented on the 15th May. The plenary session was opened by the President of the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University Pavel Bugakov.

After greetings from the representatives of the Public Administration of the Lipetsk Region and the territorial authority of the Federal State Statistics Service of the Lipetsk Region, the conference continued with a report on the role of P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky in the reform of 1861 that was made by the chairman of the “Semenov’s Charity Society (the society of descendants of P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, Saint-Petersburg)” Alexander Semenov-Tyan-Shansky.

As part of the 1st gvSIG Users Meeting in Russia, there was the report about The gvSIG Project (Authors: V. Agazzi, G. Carrion, M. Madrid from the gvSIG Association) at the plenary session. On behalf of the authors the presentation was performed by the coordinator of the Russian gvSIG Community Serguei Mikhailov.

In the afternoon there were session meetings, being one of them the session devoted to the 1st Russian gvSIG Meeting. One report about Cartographic Information ALKIS web-service based on the OpenSource products was made by Vladimir Egorov, General Director of Alkis LLC, Lipetsk.
Another report was based on the usage of gvSIG for the protection of cultural heritage of the Lipetsk Region told by Serguei Mikhailov (NPO “GISIT”, Lipetsk).

Polemical, but funny, was the report by Maxim Dubinin (@gislab), General Director of NextGIS LLC, Moscow. His presentation can be found at [1]. The final slide of the presentation was accompanied by the applause of the audience.
The day ended with an evening stroll along the Lipetsk streets and discussing the various issues of development and use of GIS open source software.

The final day of the Fifth Semenov’s Readings was on May 16th, where participants visited the family estate of Semenov-Tyan-Shansky in the village Ryazanka, Chaplyginsky district of the Lipetsk Region. Participants also visited the Museum of Local History of Chaplygin Town.

Once the conference passed, we would like to thank everyone who was involved in its organization and support, especially the staff of the Department of Geography of the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University under the direction of the Head of Department Lyubov Belyaeva.

[1] [gis-lab.info]

Filed under: opinion
22 mai 2012
17:32
GeoServer Team: GeoServer 2.2-beta2 Released
sur Planet OSGeo
The GeoServer team is happy to announce the second beta release of GeoServer 2.2, now available for download.

The 2.2-beta2 release includes a number of great improvements and bug fixes. Some of the highlights include:
- Support for 8-bit PNG output with transparency resulting in a nice tradeoff of performance and appealing visualization. Special thanks to Andrea for this new feature.
- Continued work for supporting high accuracy datum transformations that now allows for user defined transformations supplied via WKT. Thanks to the Catalan Cartographic Institute for funding the work and to Oscar Fonts and Andrea for doing the development.
- A new lenient capabilities mode that allows the GeoServer capabilities documents to remain functioning despite the presence of misconfigured layers. Thanks to David Winslow for this work.
And much more. See the complete changelog of this release for the entire list.

Download and try out 2.2-beta2 today. You can help us get closer to the official 2.2 release by reporting issues in the bug tracker and on the mailing list.

Thanks for supporting GeoServer!
16:40
OpenGeo Blog: GeoExt 2 Code Sprint
sur Planet OSGeo

Back in January we discussed how eager we were to sponsor the GeoExt 2 code sprint and hoped that others would join the cause. Thanks to the generous support of Camptocamp, Mapgears, Terrestris and OpenGeo, we had a productive week at Terrestris’ office in Bonn, Germany. Twelve developers from the sponsoring organizations were joined locally by developers from OccamLabs and remotely by representatives from m-click.

Together they tackled a well-known problem: GeoExt 1.1 is based on Ext JS 3 and thus not compatible with Ext JS 4. The aim was to port as much functionality from GeoExt 1 to GeoExt 2 and make it compatible with Ext JS 4. The result? GeoExt 2 code that’s ready for an alpha release.

OpenGeo is proud to have contributed to GeoExt 2 and encourage you to try it out. As the sprinters work to tie up loose ends and create the official alpha release, we need help testing and reporting bugs. Code contributions and bug fix pull requests on github are always welcome.

For more details on the GeoExt 2 sprint check out the GeoExt blog. Thanks again to all the sponsors of the code sprint!
0:12
Matt Sheehan: Building Mobile Location & Mobile GIS Apps using Titanium
sur Planet OSGeo

We build custom cross platform mobile GIS and location based applications. There is our one sentence elevator sales pitch. But what is this cross platform business? Put simply write one code base and run it across multiple platforms. So take your beautiful mobile web application written in HTML5/Javascript convert it to an installed [read full article]
21 mai 2012
16:57
Simone Giannecchini: Saving the world one application at a time: FAO Aquatic Species Viewer
sur Planet OSGeo
At GeoSolutions we believe that success stories about important organizations and Open Source Software should be openly shared and they can be used as a measure of OSS success in the formal enterprise environment (but you should alreay know this ;)). In this blog post we are going to quickly introduce some work we have done for the Fishery and Aqualture Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN).

The FAO Fishery and Aqualture Department, specifically the FIGIS group; is involved in many efforts geared towards the conservation of the marine ecosystem and GeoSolutions is honored to work with them on some of the mapping applications they need in order to create effective querying and visualizations of the data they manage.

This blog post covers some work we have done to support information dissemination about Aquatic Species Distribution.
If you browse to this page, you'll be able to find the entry point for the Species Knowledge System, from where you can search for species information like distribution, attitude and the like.

If you click on the Fact Sheets link in the right menu you'll be brought to the page where you can search for specific species.

Let's now search for swordfish, and then clicking on his name, let's open its Fact Sheet. You'll be presented with a lot of information, if you scroll down, you'll see also the geographical distribution.

The Fact Sheets are built using a knowledge system developed inside the FIGIS group, working with them we integrated a JavaScript API that integrates with their templating system giving it the possibility to create on the fly maps (using OpenLayers) that would show species distribution data served from GeoServer, as shown above.
Using GeoServer and OpenLayers we also built a specific Aquatic Species Viewer that allow users to visualize different species distribution areas (up to 10) inside a single map, with support for embedding and different projections.

Let's take a deeper look at the implementation.
Interacting with GeoServer's WMS module we dynamically build the map with the species distributions (as they are served internally via Oracle tables where update are done in real time as needed). The API supports 3 different projections: WGS84 (EPSG:4326), Google Mercator (EPSG:900913) and Polar Stereographic (EPSG:3031).

We also support the possibility to generate an embed code as shown below, this is used by the Fishery department web designers to replace what previously were static images representing the resources distribution and limits. It could also be used by an external website to embed these maps into their site.

More could be said about this project regarding its infrastructure, let's summarise a few interesting points:
- background maps are served with GeoWebCache
- most of the data is stored inside the corporate instance of Oracle Spatial, demonstrating perfect integration of Open Source with COTS
Last but not least, we believe it is worth to mention that this work was performed via our GeoSolutions Enterprise Service. Therefore, if you'd like to know more about what we could achieve together, do not hesitate and get in touch with us!
The GeoSolutions team,
10:56
Gavin Fleming: Bashing Shape Files into PostgreSQL
sur Planet OSGeo
During the past few weeks I have been merrily hacking away. The task has been automating the submission feed process as described vaguely in “Starting at AfriSpatial – Automating the Tracks 4 Africa submission feed process”.

This is a little bash script I wrote to load zipped shape files into a PostgreSQL database (this was my first bash script). It is executed by a remote crontab, poling the specific directory into which the submissions were copied for changes. Any submission found is then unzipped and restored into a vault table. It also contains a neat error handling rollback.
```
#!/bin/bash
#executed every minute by a crontab
 dir_shp=/tmp/breadcrumbs
dbname=alias
table=vault
dir_error=/tmp/error
if [ -d "$dir_shp" ]
then
  cd $dir_shp
  for targz in $(find . -name "*.tar.gz")
    do
    shp_name=$(basename $targz)
    shp_name=${shp_name%%.*}
    tar -xf $targz
    shp2pgsql -s 4326 -a -D -S $shp_name $table | psql -d $dbname
    ret=$?
    if [ "$ret" -eq 0 ]
    then
      rm $shp_name.*
    else
      mkdir $dir_error 2> /dev/null
      mv $shp_name.* $dir_error
    fi
  done
fi
exit  
   
```
Bashing Shape Files into PostgreSQL is a post from: AfriSpatial
10:32
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): OGRS2012 :: CFP reminder and keynote synopsis
sur Planet OSGeo

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
OGRS2012 :: CALL FOR PAPERS REMINDER (closing at May 28th)
Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium

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

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

(our apologies for cross-postings)
Dear colleagues,
the program committee would like to remind you that the deadline of OGRS2012 call for papers is soon closing (at May 28th). All information to submit a presentation, a workshop, a poster or discussion group subject is available on the symposium website : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.

Moreover, the organizing committee is pleased to announce that four prominent scholars will present keynote addresses. The synopsis of these talks are now published on the symposium website :

- The open source GIS, an ideal framework for the development of and integrated modelling platform devoted to sustainable urban planning: first steps with OrbisGIS and CartoPolis (Gérard HEGRON Ifsttar/IRSTV);

- Building open source geospatial education at research universities: where we are and what is holding us back (Helena Mitasova, Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University);

- Open source spatial analysis: lessons for research and education from PySAL (Sergio Rey, GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, Arizona State University);

- How open source can help achieving sustainability of e-learning content: The GITTA experience (Robert Weibel, Department of Geography, University of Zurich and GITTA Association).

Please consider these last weeks to submit a contribution. We look forward to read your contribution proposal and to see you in Yverdon-les-Bains.

We would appreciate if you could kindly distribute this call to other interested parties of your acquaintance.

Best regards,
OGRS2012 program committee
Google Plus One [http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ogrs2012.org%0A%09Contact%3A+cfp%40ogrs2012.org%0A%09-----------------------------------------------------------------------------%0A%09%28our+apologies+for+cross-postings%29%0A%09Dear+colleagues%2C%0A%09the+program+committee+would+like+to+remind+you+that+the+deadline+of+OGRS2012+call+for+papers+is+soon+closing+%28at+May+28th%29.+All+information+to+submit+a+presentation%2C+a+workshop%2C+a+poster+or+discussion+group+subject+is+available+on+the+symposium+website+%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fcfp.ogrs2012.org.%0A%09Moreover%2C+the+organizing+committee+is+pleased+to+announce+that+four+prominent+scholars+will+present+keynote+addresses.+The+synopsis+of+these+talks+are+now+published+on+the+symposium+website+%3A%0A%09-+The+open+source+GIS%2C+an+ideal+framework+for+the+development+of+and+integrated+modelling+platform+devoted+to+sustainable+urban+planning%3A+first+steps+with+OrbisGIS+and+CartoPolis+%28G%26eacute%3Brard+HEGRON+Ifsttar%2FIRSTV%29%3B%0A%09-+Building+open+source+geospatial+education+at+research+universities%3A+where+we+are+and+what+is+holding+us+back+%28Helena+Mitasova%2C+Department+of+Marine%2C+Earth+and+Atmospheric+Sciences%2C+North+Carolina+State+University%29%3B%0A%09-+Open+source+spatial+analysis%3A+lessons+for+research+and+education+from+PySAL+%28Sergio+Rey%2C+GeoDa+Center+for+Geospatial+Analysis+and+Computation%2C+Arizona+State+University%29%3B%0A%09-+How+open+source+can+help+achieving+sustainability+of+e-learning+content%3A+The+GITTA+experience+%28Robert+Weibel%2C+Department+of+Geography%2C+University+of+Zurich+and+GITTA+Association%29.%0A%09Please+consider+these+last+weeks+to+submit+a+contribution.+We+look+forward+to+read+your+contribution+proposal+and+to+see+you+in+Yverdon-les-Bains.%0A%09We+would+appreciate+if+you+could+kindly+distribute+this+call+to+other+interested+parties+of+your+acquaintance.%0A%09Best+regards%2C%0A%09OGRS2012+program+committee%0A&source=Slashgeo.org"] title="Publish this post to LinkedIn">
6:08
GIS-Lab: Открытые ГИС в Казани, 31 мая
sur Planet OSGeo

31 мая в Казани с 9 до 14:30 пройдет ряд докладов, мастер-классов и дискуссия на тему «Открытые ГИС: инструменты и данные». Хотим уместить в это время много всего.

Встреча пройдет в рамках ГИС-Форума (место проведения, программа). Вход на нашу секцию свободный, регистрация не нужна. Приходите.

План (по мелочи может измениться):

Общие слова
9:30-9:45 Максим Дубинин, GIS-Lab — «Открытые ГИС: состояние дел»
9:45-10:00 Илья Зверев, Российский Совет OpenStreetMap — «OpenStreetMap неизбежен»

Компоненты и возможности открытого ПО ГИС
10:00-10:15 Дмитрий Барышников, NextGIS -»GDAL — базовая программная библиотека ГИС»
10:15-10:30 Дмитрий Колесов, КНИТУ-КАИ - «Обзор возможностей GRASS GIS»

Дискуссия
10:30 — 11:25 Будущее открытых ГИС в РФ
Цель дискуссии:
Обсудить состояние дел с открытыми ГИС: программное обеспечение и данные в РФ, их готовность для серьезных проектов.
Вопросы для дискуссии:
1. Как будут развиваться инициативы открытых ГИС в ближайшем будущем, не закроют ли OpenStreetMap?
2. Возможно ли достигнуть функционального паритета между открытыми ГИС и проприетарными аналогами?
3. Что мешает развитию открытых ГИС в РФ?
4. Плюсы и недостатки открытых систем.

Мастер-классы
11:30-12:25 Александр Дежин, GIS-Lab/OSM — «Основы веб-картографии с использованием открытого инструментария»
12:30-13:25 Евгения Селезнева, NextGIS — «Введение в Quantum GIS»
13:30-14:30 Александр Карандеев, ЛПГУ — «Введение в gvSIG»
20 mai 2012
19:46
Spatialytics.COM: Viamap
sur Planet OSGeo

Reseller (R) / System Integrator (SI) Partner of Spatialytics: Viamap Aktiebolag Viamap Aktiebolag Viamap is a Swedish company providing applications and services to coordinate information from multiple business systems using spatial technology at its core. Viamap offers Weave to its clients as a sustainable, easy to use and easy to customize platform to streamline their information flows, reduce costs and increase productivity. Viamap Aktiebolag Villavägen 1A 137 38 Västerhaninge Sweden Phone: +46 70-856 88 56 Email: sales@viamap.se Web site: [viamap.se]
19:38
Spatialytics.COM: GEOMAP GIS America
sur Planet OSGeo

Reseller (R) / System Integrator (SI) Partner of Spatialytics: GEOMAP GIS America GEOMAP GIS America GEOMAP GIS America specialises in solutions and services integrating the innovative concepts of Geomatics and BIM (Building Information Modelling) for the Municipal, Facilities Management (FM), Transportation and Utilities Networks industries since 2000. These solutions implemented in public and private organizations, large accounts and international projects allow spatial manipulation of an organization’s assets information and representation on maps, reports, dashboards and in databases. This data can be processed and queried to obtain results in the form of drawings, thematic maps, reports and graphics. GEOMAP is a certified developer and authorized Autodesk reseller. GEOMAP is also involved in the geospatial open source community and is a Microsoft, Oracle and Business Objects partner. GEOMAP GIS America 1440, rue Hocquart, Bureau 220 Saint-Bruno (Québec) Canada, J3V 6E1 Phone: (450) 461-1158 Fax: (450) 461-1159 Email : geomap@geomapgis.ca
19 mai 2012
20:54
Gavin Fleming: Starting at AfriSpatial – Automating the Tracks 4 Africa submission feed process
sur Planet OSGeo

There comes a time in each man’s life when he must leave the comfort of home and go off into the concrete jungle of urban society. So, upon completing matric, I packed my Karrimor back-pack, put on a pair of ‘plakkies’, grabbed my laptop and began hacking at AfriSpatial.

As an introductory task, I was assigned the task of automating the submission feed process for the team at Tracks 4 Africa. With limited experience as a Java and SQL programmer, no knowledge of GIS, and solely a Windows background, this was a daunting prospect.

The assignment was to package the yet handled raw data from tracking feeds and then send these manageable lumps as submissions to the team at Tracks 4 Africa so as to be processed as part of their workflow. At the moment much of their time is spent acting as an interface for their clients; customer trips are currently submitted via email. Part of my task, therefore, was to ensure that the automated feeds submission process platform could also be easily extended to automate the email process as well (this would be done via web interface which may become active in the not too distant future). This required some database normalization so as reduce any anomalies and increase processing efficacy.

There are probably infinitely more elegant approaches that could have been adopted in tackling this problem and I apologise for any disgust I may instigate among veteran programmers, but this is was how I attempted the challenge:

The core of my engine is a python driver that is executed monthly using a crontab. The python driver connects to a PostgreSQL database and queries the raw data according to distinct groupings. For this I wrote a custom python class that performs all the miscellaneous plumbing, abstracting it from the program logic. The raw data is then packaged according to the queried combinations as shape files and then zipped, compressing it further. The data is then copied from one server to another remote server. An email alert is then fired off to notify the team of the new data before the data is stamped with that specific submissions ID. If at any stage this process fails, the entire process is rolled back and an email detailing the error is sent to me (this should never happen).

There was, however, also the job of loading the copied zipped shape files into the remote server’s database vault. For this I wrote a simple bash script of which I am rather proud. This can be viewed in an upcoming, more technical blog also by me.

AfriSpatial is definitely one the cutting edge of everything GIS related. The team is young and enthusiastic (I have just matriculated), and I cannot wait for the varsity holiday so I can get stuck in again.

Starting at AfriSpatial – Automating the Tracks 4 Africa submission feed process is a post from: AfriSpatial
3:28
Even Rouault: A new GDAL virtual file system to read streamed data (e.g. for OGR WFS)
sur Planet OSGeo
GDAL/OGR can of course read data from regular file systems, but also from more exotic sources thanks to a "virtual file system" API.

Let's start with the /vsizip/ virtual file system. If you have a ZIP file, myzip.zip, that contains a shapefile myshape.shp (and its associated .shx and .dbf files), you can read with :
ogrinfo -ro /vsizip/myzip.zip/myshape.shp
(or more simply /vsizip/myzip.zip as it is considered as a directory, and a directory is a valid datasource for the Shapefile driver).

If your data is located on a [HTTP] server, you can use the /vsicurl/ virtual file system, like this :
ogrinfo -ro /vsicurl/htttp://example.com/myshape.shp
As a bonus, you can combine both to read inside a remote ZIP file :
ogrinfo -ro /vsizip/vsicurl/htttp://example.com/myzip.zip/myshape.shp
Developers or advanced users can be interested by the /vsimem/, to use a memory buffer as a datasource, or /vsisubfile/ to access a file located instead another one.

/vsicurl/ is convenient to access static files and provides random access to data inside them provided that the web server supports "range downloading", i.e. the capability of returning data in a range of offsets.

Unfortunately, in some circumstances, the file is dynamically generated at the time you request it, so range downloading isn't supported. One such example in the scope of GDAL/OGR is the GML document generated by a WFS GetFeature request. Currently, the OGR WFS driver fetches the document as a whole with the CPLHTTPFetch()">[http_8h.html#aee8368b7821300f4b81ef4da8a9c6a29">CPLHTTPFetch()] API, and passes the buffer to the GML driver (as a /vsimem/ file).

This behaviour has at least 2 drawbacks :
- Even if you need to read one single feature, the driver will fetch the whole WFS GetFeature response, which can be long.
- If the WFS GetFeature response is too long, it might not fit into memory at all.
It was possible to mitigate that by using the paging capability of some WFS servers, that is a non-standardized extension for WFS 1.0 or 1.1 (now normalized in WFS 2.0 spec).

In the GDAL/OGR trunk (2.0dev >= r24460), you can find a /vsicurl_streaming/ virtual file system that can be used to read data from a streaming server. This works efficiently only if the access pattern to the data is linear, and not random access. The OGR GML driver already natively parses data as a stream, so it can work nicely with /vsicurl_streaming/ :
ogrinfo -ro -al "/vsicurl_streaming/http://testing.deegree.org/deegree-wfs/services?SERVICE=WFS&VERSION=1.1.0&REQUEST=GetFeature&TYPENAME=app:Springs"
Or, more simply, since the OGR WFS driver has been retrofitted to use it transparently :
ogrinfo -ro WFS [testing.deegree.org]
app:Springs
18 mai 2012
19:37
Spatialytics.COM: Spatialytics exhibits at Location Intelligence #LI12 and Oracle Spatial User Conference in Washington DC May 22-23!
sur Planet OSGeo

Directions Magazine and Oracle are collaborating to offer consecutive events over two days in Washington, DC. On May 22, Directions Magazine’s Location Intelligence Conference will offer a multi-track program exploring the latest industry trends. On May 23, the Oracle Spatial User Conference will offer a day of technical deep dives and use case sessions around Oracle’s spatial technologies. Spatialytics makes the trip from Quebec City, Canada to exhibit at this important and focussed Industry Event for the Geospatial Industry. Spatialytics is showcasing its : Spatial Data Integration tool Spatialytics ETL: « Generate quality Geospatial Information from multiple data sources to feed your GIS/LI/GeoBI System » (working very well with Oracle Spatial!); Geospatial Business Intelligence software stack Spatialytics SUITE: « Develop robust GeoBI Solutions to maximize your Geospatial and Business Intelligence Infrastructure ». Look for this Booth! Exhibition hours are: Tuesday May 22nd : 7:45 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. Wednesday May 23rd : 7:45 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
12:19
Jo Cook: The Pledge
sur Planet OSGeo

Continuing the subject of the UK Bid for FOSS4G (see previous post); as previously promised, we’ve now got a page on our bid blog where individuals (or should I say heroes?) can pledge to help us with the conference. We’re not looking for your money, just offers of support to help with any part of organising or running the event, should we win it. This could be anything from dressing as Maid Marion to moderating a stream, or just helping to spread the word. If you’re interested, head here, and add your name to the comments! Don’t worry, this is not a contract, and we won’t spam you!
11:27
gvSIG Team: Nuevo soporte adicional de gestión de CRS para gvSIG 2.0
sur Planet OSGeo
En las primeras versiones de gvSIG se desarrolló un soporte de CRS (Sistema de coordenadas de referencia) con una funcionalidad y soporte de definiciones básico. Esta implementación permite al usuario seleccionar el sistema de referencia en base al datum, la proyección y el huso.

Sin embargo tiene algunas limitaciones a la hora de realizar transformaciones, además de no soportar, por ejemplo, los husos del hemisferio sur.

A continuación se desarrolló una nueva versión basada en las librerías geotools y Proj4, con muchas más funcionalidades, definiciones de CRS, incluso con la opción de permitir al usuario a creación de sus propios CRS.

Sin embargo el nuevo soporte presenta dos problemas:
- Mientras que gvSIG está desarrollado en lenguaje java, permitiendo su ejecución en multitud de plataformas, al usar Proj4 que es una librería nativa se ha perdido esa independencia de plataforma. Aunque Proj4 está disponible en múltiples arquitecturas y sistemas operativos, obliga a gvSIG a generar instalables distintos para cada uno de ellos. Todo ello aumenta la complejidad y el mantenimiento de gvSIG.
- El nuevo soporte emplea una base de datos local para la consulta CRS soportados, además de requerir la instalación de la librería Proj4, junto con sus dependencias. Esto implica unas necesidades de recursos (memoria y disco duro) mayores que en el soporte previo.
Recientemente además la Asociación gvSIG ha desarrollado un nuevo proyecto enfocado a entornos educativos: gvSIG Educa. Dentro de dicho proyecto se incluye gvSIG Batoví, que es la distribución que da origen a gvSIG Educa. Esta distribución está impulsada por el Ministerio de Transporte y Obras Públicas (MTOP) de la República Oriental del Uruguay y desarrollada por la Asociación gvSIG y la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de la República (UdelaR), y está enfocada al uso de un Sistema de Información Geográfica en entornos educativos con destino al PlanCeibal (Uruguay)

Se trata de una distribución de gvSIG desktop 2.0 para ser instalada en ordenadores OLPC. Dichos ordenadores tienen unos recursos limitados, por lo que no es viable el uso del soporte de CRS basado en Proj4. Por otro lado el uso del soporte básico no es posible, al carecer de soporte para los husos del hemisferio sur.

Como alternativa se ha desarrollado un nuevo soporte de CRS, empleando para ello la librería Proj4J, que es una implementación parcial de Proj4 en lenguaje Java, por lo que es independiente del sistema en el que se instale gvSIG.

Funcionalmente permite elegir el CRS en base a la autoridad y código, aportando soporte para gran número de definiciones.

Este nuevo soporte se incluirá de base en las distribuciones de gvSIG Batoví, además de estar disponible para ser instalada en gvSIG desktop 2.0 a través del gestor de complementos.

En gvSIG desktop 2.0 estarán disponibles inicialmente las 3 implementaciones de soporte de CRS. La básica va de base con gvSIG, y las otras dos se pueden instalar como complementos. En el caso de instalar las tres, la activa será la basada en Proj4. Sino está instalada ésta, entonces se activará la basada en Proj4J.

Filed under: opinion Tagged: lenguaje java
17 mai 2012
23:58
Martin Davis: A scientific basis for Open Source Software
sur Planet OSGeo

Stefan Steineger of the OpenJUMP project pointed out this great paper in Nature on The case for open compute programs. The paper raises the argument for open source software to a higher plane, that of being a necessary component of scientific proof. It points out that the increasing use of computational science as a basis for scientific discovery implies that open source must become a standard requirement for documentation. Apparently some journals such as Science already require source code to be supplied along with submissions of articles. Amongst other advantages, access to source code is an essential element of peer review.

An interesting example they mention is the infamous HadCRUT and CRUTEM3 meteorological datasets. One of the (few) salient criticisms levelled at this information during Climategate was the inability to reproduce the results by re-running the software. (Mind you, the software was probably a pile of crufty old Fortran programs mashed up by Perl scripts, so maybe it's just as well).

I'm looking forward to seeing JTS get cited in academic papers (actually, it already has been). Maybe I even have a finite Erdos number!

It's maybe too much to ask that mere scientists be coding hipsters, but I noticed that SourceForge is presented as the leading example of collaborative software development. Someone should introduce them to GitHub - which truly walks the talk. Researchers in bioinformatics should be especially appreciative of the sweeping effect of recombinant software development it enables.
22:04
Spatialytics.ORG: @GeoKettle and @GeoMondrian at Location Intelligence #LI12 and Oracle Spatial User Conference, Washington DC May 22-23!
sur Planet OSGeo

Directions Magazine and Oracle are collaborating to offer consecutive events over two days in Washington, DC. First, on May 22, Directions Magazine’s Location Intelligence Conference will offer a multi-track program exploring the latest industry trends. Then, on May 23, the Oracle Spatial User Conference will offer a day of technical deep dives and use case [...]
18:54
Martin Davis: Why we were stronger in the 80's
sur Planet OSGeo

I love this picture. Nowadays this functionality weighs only a few ounces, and we carry it in a pocket.
15:32
Jackie Ng: New mg-desktop binaries: This time with 100% more framework and 100% less coding
sur Planet OSGeo
Does this look familiar to you?

It looks a lot like this doesn't it?

That's because with the latest binary drop of mg-desktop we now have a full-blown framework (hereby known as the AppLayout Engine) which means you do not have to write a single line of code* to have a functional mapping application.

Introducing the AppLayout Engine

The AppLayout Engine was an idea that came about after my last mg-desktop related post.

I had begun experimenting with the componentization of the existing map functionality (Buffer, Measure, etc), such that you could drag and drop these components from the Visual Studio toolbox into your Form Designer and tie them into the (also dragged-and-dropped) map viewer control by only needing to set the appropriate properties in the VS property grid and not having to write a single line of code to do all this. You still needed to write some code to bootstrap the platform and load in the map, but everything else was done design-time in Visual Studio.

This worked so well that I then started doing the same thing for every map related piece of functionality (Zoom, Pan, etc), and through the magic of WinForms Control Extenders, we can tie menu items and toolbar buttons to components and be able to:
- Invoke the associated component when clicked
- Inherit label/tooltip/icons settings from the component
- Automatically enable/disable itself based on certain component conditions (eg. A zoom button disables itself if there is no map loaded)
All this componentization has meant the Visual Studio toolbox for mg-desktop has become quite hefty:

So through this componentization work, it was now possible to assemble a map viewer in a completely declarative fashion by dragging and dropping the components you're interested in and tying them all together by setting the appropriate properties via the Visual Studio property grid. Building an mg-desktop application in this manner is probably a topic for another post.

It was at this point when I noticed that my components were functionally and conceptually similar to what you already know as Commands in the AJAX Viewer and Widgets in Fusion.

Given that the only code we had to write at this point is to initialize the mg-desktop platform and load the main application window, I figured what the hell? Let's go ahead and make this thing 100% declarative without writing a single line of code and thus the AppLayout Engine was born.

The AppLayout Engine consists of a skeleton Shell window (which serves as your application's main window), that you initialize with an AppLayout document.

The AppLayout document

If you understand WebLayout documents for the AJAX viewer or ApplicationDefinition documents for Fusion, then understanding AppLayout documents is very straightforward, because AppLayout documents are structurally and syntactically similar to both.
- You declare a series of Component Definitions (ie. Your commands/widgets)
- You specify the structure of your menus and toolbars and the declared components that they link to
- You specify a Map Definition that is loaded by the viewer.
- Customize various aspects of the viewer user interface.
A Component Definition looks like this in its simplest form:

For Components that expose properties, you can set them as well:

Notice the syntatical similarity to an AJAX Viewer command or Fusion widget. It wasn't intentional, I guess the stars aligned or something because the design naturally converged to something very similar to what we already have with the AJAX Viewer and Fusion.

So once you have authored up the AppLayout document, you feed the document to MgAppLayout.exe to have your own custom mapping application. You can take a look at the Sheboygan.AppLayout sample document that's included with this release as a comprehensive example of what an AppLayout document should look like.

MgAppLayout.exe

MgAppLayout.exe is the front-end to the AppLayout Engine. It takes your AppLayout document, and does the following:
- Parses and registers all the component definitions defined inside the document (and loads the relevant assemblies if these are external components)
- Constructs the menus and toolbars based on the layouts specified
- Loads the specified Map Definition and optionally invokes a registered component on startup
The MgAppLayout executable, in conjunction with an AppLayout document, gives you the final mapping application, just like your AJAX and Fusion viewer with their respective WebLayout and ApplicationDefinition documents.

Loading your AppLayout is simply a case of calling MgAppLayout.exe with the path to the AppLayout document you want to load. For example:

MgAppLayout.exe Sheboygan.AppLayout
If you do decide to run the sample Sheboygan.AppLayout, you will need to have the Sheboygan sample data set loaded. The sample AppLayout includes a Load Package component available under the File menu for this very purpose.

The default component set

For this release, this is the list of components that are available to you out of the box for assembling your AppLayout:
- Buffer
- Select Radius
- Clear Selection
- Copy Map image to clipboard
- Generic Invoke+
- Initial View
- Load Map
- Load Package
- Measure
- Pan
- Select Polygon
- Print Map
- Generic Query
- Quit
- Refresh Map
- Select
- Theme
- Tooltip Toggle
- Viewer Options
- Zoom In
- Zoom Out
- Zoom to Selection
+ The Generic Invoke component is basically our version of the InvokeURL command/widget and is actually used for the Visual Studio drag-and-drop scenario for a way to have your own custom code get called. It's not really usable within the AppLayout framework, but is listed above for completeness.

*Adding your own functionality

If you require custom functionality, you can create your own subclasses of MgComponent (or MgViewerComponent if you need to display a user interface in the Task Pane). This is once again conceptually similar to creating your own InvokeScript and InvokeURL commands in the AJAX and Fusion viewers.

Adding these components to your AppLayout just requires an extra Assembly element in the Component Definition.

The Assembly element is a relative path (from the path of MgAppLayout.exe) to the assembly containing that particular component implementation. This release contains a SampleExtension.dll which contains some external components (used by the sample Sheboygan.AppLayout). The SampleExtension source can be found here

So there you have it. Web Layouts have arrived for mg-desktop, allowing for desktop mapping applications with minimal to zero code required!

Download mg-desktop
14:07
Equipo GeoTux: Contribuyendo al cliente WPS de QGIS
sur Planet OSGeo
Hace un mes empecé mi semestre de práctica en 52° North y aparte del proyecto principal en el que trabajo, he estado contribuyendo al cliente WPS de QGIS. En este post les comento mejoras recientes a dicho cliente.

For English click here.

Se que esto no es algo que uno quiera mencionar típicamente en un post, pues se trata mayormente de mejorar funcionalidades que en teoría ya están allí. Sin embargo, ya que el cliente WPS (Web Processing Service) de QGIS no tiene aún un sistema de control de versiones público ni una plataforma de registro de incidencias, y ya que no hay anuncios para cada nueva versión, creo que vale la pena informar a los usuarios de cambios recientes.

Estas contribuciones tienen como objetivo hacer al cliente WPS de QGIS más genérico, de tal forma que soporte WPS de diferentes fuentes, ya que parece haber sido creado para procesos de PyWPS. Para temas relacionados con la especificación WPS del OGC, he recibido ayuda de Bastian Shäffer, el líder de la comunidad de Geo-procesamiento de 52° North.

Sin más preámbulos, el siguiente es el listado de mejoras:

ESQUEMAS
- Los esquemas para GML son ahora traídos del servidor, ya no son específicados (quemados) en el código.
- En la petición Execute, el atributo storeExecuteResponse del elemento ResponseDocument fue cambiado de "true" a "false". Esto para asegurar que la respuesta incluya el elemento ProcessOutputs, que de otra forma no ocurre porque la ejecución asíncrona es llamada (ver especificación WPS, tabla 50, nota (a)).
- Si no hay codificación o esquema definidos para los datos, estos parámetros ya no se envían en la petición Execute.
REDIRECCIÓN HTTP
- Algunos servidores proveen resultados en URLs que son redireccionadas a recursos (archivos) reales. La capacidad de manejar dichas redirecciones se agregó al cliente.
VERSIONES DE GML
- El…
Read more...
12:42
OpenGeo Blog: PostGIS Code Sprint Recap
sur Planet OSGeo

The first (annual?) PostGIS Code Sprint in Paris is over, and it was a great event. We had most members of the core development team present, and participants from key PostGIS users (IGN.fr, UK Ordnance Survey) in attendance as well.

We worked in offices donated by QuelleVille, talking about the things we considered worst about PostGIS, and one item topped the list: upgrades. It’s true, upgrades remain difficult, and the path from 1.5 to 2.0 is the trickiest since the 0.x to 1.0 transition many years ago. We expect that the PostgreSQL 9.1+ “extension” system will make upgrades easier for most users in the future, but in the present we need do more testing and documentation of upgrade scenarios.

The other issue of general concern was our Windows support. Windows has been a second class citizen in our development process, because the build process has been tenuous (see the large multi-step build guides in the development wiki) and developers have not been able to make regular windows testing a part of their workflow.

Much of the effort in the code sprint went towards working on the Windows issue. Mateusz Loskot and Mark Cave-Ayland began work on a CMake build system, to allow us to do multi-platform builds including Windows more transparently and reliably. I worked on converting the regression system from a UNIX “bash” script (not available on Windows) to a Perl script (available on Windows) so that the regression tests can be run under Windows too. If we can convert the build chain to CMake and all the script logic to Perl, we should be much closer to providing an easy (easier) Windows build experience.

While we were working on that, Sandro Santilli (who eschews Windows) worked on making long-running algorithms interruptible. That is, when a big process like a huge buffer or spatial join is running, it should be possible to hit ctrl-C and break out of it. Currently, it’s not possible. Because we need to interrupt algorithms that are potentially running outside the database context in GEOS, this is a tricky bit of work, but Sandro made good headway on it.

Working away en francais, Olivier Courtin and Sébastien Loriot (CGAL) discussed how to integrate the CGAL library into PostGIS to support algorithms on the new 3D objects we support such as PolyhedralSurfaces. CGAL already has a considerable number of algorithms for 3D, so leveraging their library could move PostGIS more quickly into the 3D space.

We also had a chance on Tuesday evening to meet local PostGIS power users, at an event at the offices of af83. It was great to hear how widely PostGIS is used in France, from government to business to NGOs. In particular, it was great to hear the general consensus that PostGIS is one of the first options on the table when organizations are thinking about building out spatial systems.

Many thanks to Olivier Courtin of Oslandia for organizing the event and feeding us a delicious breakfast and lunch on Wednesday, I hope to do this again, in France or elsewhere!
12:39
gvSIG Team: 4as Jornadas de Latinoamérica y Caribe de gvSIG: “Creciendo en Comunidad”
sur Planet OSGeo

Del 24 al 28 de septiembre de 2012 se celebrarán las 4as Jornadas de Latinoamérica y Caribe de gvSIG (LAC) [1], en Montevideo (Uruguay), bajo el lema “Creciendo en Comunidad”.

Las Jornadas de Latinoamérica y Caribe de gvSIG tienen como objetivo proporcionar un lugar de encuentro donde los técnicos, investigadores, desarrolladores, expertos, y la comunidad latinoamericana en general, se reunan en un entorno con debates alrededor de la geomática libre y gvSIG.

Estas jornadas serán a su vez las 2as Jornadas Uruguayas de gvSIG, donde se tendrá la oportunidad de volver a convocar a los participantes de las primeras jornadas uruguayas de gvSIG, que tuvieron lugar en Montevideo – Facultad de Arquitectura en el año 2011.

Ya está abierto el periodo para el envío de propuestas para comunicaciones para las Jornadas. Desde hoy pueden enviarse las propuestas de comunicación a la dirección de correo electrónico jornadas.latinoamericanas@gvsig.org, que serán valoradas por el comité científico de cara a su inclusión en el programa de las Jornadas. Existen dos modalidades de comunicación: ponencia y póster. Toda la información sobre las normas para la presentación de comunicaciones puede consultarse en el apartado comunicaciones [2]. El periodo de recepción de resúmenes finalizará el próximo 30 de julio.

[1] [www.gvsig.org]
[2] [www.gvsig.org]

4as Jornadas da América Latina e do Caribe de gvSIG: “Crescendo em comunidade”

No período de 24 a 28 de setembro de 2012 se realizarão as 4as. Jornadas da América Latina e do Caribe de gvSIG (LAC) [1], em Montevidéu – Uruguai, sob o lema “Crescendo em comunidade”.

As Jornadas da América Latina e do Caribe de gvSIG têm como objetivo proporcionar um ponto de encontro onde técnicos, pesquisadores, desenvolvedores, expertos, e a comunidade latinoamericana em geral possam debater e discutir temas relacionados à geomática livre e ao gvSIG.

Estas jornadas serão, por sua vez, as 2as. Jornadas Uruguaias de gvSIG, onde se terá a oportunidade de reunir novamente os participantes das primeiras Jornadas Uruguaias de gvSIG, realizadas em Montevidéu – Faculdade de Arquitetura, em 2011.

Já está aberto o período para envio de propostas para comunicações para as Jornadas. A partir de hoje as comunicações podem ser enviadas ao seguinte endereço eletrônico: jornadas.latinoamericanas@gvsig.org. O comitê científico avaliará sua inclusão no programa das Jornadas. Existem duas modalidades de comunicação: apresentação oral e pôster. Toda as informações sobre as normas para a apresentação de comunicações podem ser consultadas no tópico comunicações [2]. O período de submissão de resumos se encerra no dia 30 de julho.

[1] [www.gvsig.org]
[2] [www.gvsig.org]

Filed under: opinion
11:38
Margherita Di Leo: Nuovi corsi GIS Open Source a Matera
sur Planet OSGeo
Diotima srl in collaborazione con GEOFEMengineering è lieta di annunciare che tra il 4 ed il 12 giugno prossimi si terrà a Matera il corso

STRUMENTI GIS OPEN SOURCE E SOLUZIONI LIBERE PER L’OFFICE E L’INGEGNERIA.

Il corso è rivolto sia al mondo enterprise che a quello accademico ed alle Pubbliche Amministrazioni.
I professionisti, i ricercatori ed i tecnici della Pubblica Amministrazione che, per le proprie attività professionali e di ricerca, necessitano di strumenti software quali Office, Autocad ed Arcgis, potranno beneficiare dall’apprendere l’uso di strumenti free e open source per l’impresa (GNU/Linux Enterprise) e per l’analisi ambientale (strumenti GIS e di analisi statistica e geostatistica) seguendo un percorso formativo mirato al raggiungimento di competenze pratiche immediatamente spendibili in ambiti di produzione.

Il corso sarà organizzato in 4 moduli didattici che potranno essere frequantati singolarmente dai partecipanti:
- Corso GNU/Linux enterprise
- Corso GIS di base
- Corso di QGIS e GRASS GIS
- Corso di applicazioni di statistica/geostatistica in ambiente R
Ogni modulo si svilupperà in 16 ore di attività didattiche diviso in frazioni di 4 ore ciascuno.
Pagina di riferimento.
Scheda corsi.
11:11
Lorenzo Becchi: Configuring Sendmail on ubuntu EC2
sur Planet OSGeo

It took a moment to understand why both command line and php mailing processes were taking ages to accomplish.

checking /var/log/mail.log said:
May 17 08:13:01 ip-10-125-9-183 sm-mta[26006]: My unqualified host name (mydomail) unknown; sleeping for retry

I've been checking that the hostname ("cat /etc/hostname") was the same defined into sendmail and hosts.

I've finally changed /etc/hosts like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost mydomain localhost. mydomail.
note the dots added to the domain name.

once updated sendmail started responding immediately

finally, if you don't want your email to get into spam folders automatically, write this form:
https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/ec2-email-limit-rdns-request
0:04
Prodevelop: Las coordenadas EPSG:4326 en WMS 1.3.0: hay que romper una lanza a favor de la OGC
sur Planet OSGeo
Se comenta mucho el cambio entre las versiones 1.1.1 y 1.3.0 del protocolo WMS de la OGC en lo que se refiere al orden de las coordenadas (longitud y latitud) al usar el sistema de coordenadas EPSG:4326. Creo que la situación puede resumirse más o menos así:
- Tras detallar los parámetros del geoide y esas cosas, EPSG:4326 asocia una semántica para los ejes 2D (un eje corresponde a la latitud y el otro a la longitud) y además establece (aunque quizá de manera no muy explícita) que la primera coordenada debe ser la latitud y la segunda, la longitud. Según los expertos en geodesia, este orden se considera una "buena práctica" por motivos que desconozco (click para agrandar):
- En WMS 1.1.1 se estaba obviando el orden sugerido en el sistema de coordenadas EPSG:4326 y el rectángulo de interés pedido por el cliente era:
  ...BBOX=lon_min,lat_min,lon_max,lat_max...
- La OGC decidió, a partir de la versión 1.3.0 de WMS, acatar el orden establecido o sugerido en la definición de EPSG:4326 y desprenderse del prejuicio según el cual la coordenada asociada a los términos "X", "horizontal", "longitud" debe ir antes que la coordenada asociada a los términos "Y", "vertical", "latitud".
  Así pues, al usar EPSG:4326 en WMS 1.3.0, el área de interés se expresa así:
  
  ...BBOX=lat_min,lon_min,lat_max,lon_max...
- Siendo consciente de que esto puede ser un problema para muchos clientes WMS, la OGC sugiere en cierto modo el uso el código CRS:84, que es lo mismo que EPSG:4326, pero con el orden antiguo (longitud, latitud). Es decir, la OGC sugiere a los administradores de servidores WMS 1.3.0 que ofrezcan el sistema de coordenadas EPSG:4326 para ser usado con el orden riguroso (latitud, longitud) y además ofrezcan el sistema de coordenadas CRS:84, que es exactamente lo mismo, pero usando el orden antiguo (longitud, latitud). De esta manera, si tenemos una aplicación cliente que no contempla el cambio de orden, el usuario final debería elegir CRS:84 en la lista de sistemas de coordenadas disponibles cuando el servidor es WMS 1.3.0 para obtener el mismo comportamiento que obtenía eligiendo EPSG:4326 cuando el servidor era WMS 1.1.1. Lógicamente, esta opción sólo estará disponible si el servidor ofrece el sistema de coordenadas CRS:84.
- Hay que romper una lanza a favor de la OGC porque, a la larga, conviene desprenderse de convenciones injustificadas, elevar la flexibilidad y el nivel de abstracción de los protocolos y evitar la incoherencia de usar un orden de coordenadas distinto al que establece el propio sistema de coordenadas que estamos usando.
16 mai 2012
16:59
GeoServer Team: Happy anniversary, GeoServer-BR!
sur Planet OSGeo

Congratulations to the GeoServer community in Brazil for five years of activity! Since the first training conducted at ENUM III, the Lusophone community has grown to more than 500 mailing list subscribers and 3200 email threads from across several Portuguese-speaking countries. Most notable among their many achievements, however, is the establishment of GeoServer as the official map server of INDE, the Brazilian national spatial data infrastructure (SDI), in 2008 by then-President Lula. Parabéns!
15:09
OpenGeo Blog: OpenGeo’s Hiring: If you’re reading this at work, it may be time to apply yourself
sur Planet OSGeo

OpenGeo is looking for talented people to join our team. We offer interesting technical work, competitive salaries, great benefits, and a fantastic working environment. Most importantly we challenge our employees to build the best open source and interoperable tools for spatial data on the web.

A few of our openings:

UX Developer - Software that’s a joy to use gets more use. This is a critical role that will help the world move past the clunky desktop interfaces of the past. We’re looking for someone who can both design and implement intuitive, responsive interfaces for geospatial applications.

Software Developer - OpenGeo’s solutions and support arm is looking for talented developers to help our clients solve big problems, in fields ranging from disaster risk modeling to demography. You must be curious, communicative, and interested in contributing to our development process.

QA Engineer - Did you ever test how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop? Do you have a secret collection of “QC Passed” stickers? This may be the job for you. With your help, we’ll make sure that every release of the OpenGeo Suite is up to snuff: documented, tested, polished, and ready for action.

Here’s the full list. Please apply and/or spread the word!
14:29
GIS-Lab: 1-я встреча gvSIG
sur Planet OSGeo

Состоялась первая встреча пользователей gvSIG, которая прошла в рамках конференции «Пятые Семёновские чтения: Наследие П.П. Семёнова-Тян-Шанского и современная наука». Событию немного подпортили финансовые кризисы в Испании и Томске.

Я хоть и не пользователь gvSIG — тоже съездил познакомиться, было интересно и гостеприимно. Конечно организаторам есть еще над чем поработать, но самое главное, что такие встречи вообще начинают проходить.

Под катом моя дерзкая презентация и несколько фотографий.

Открытие конференции, Семенов-Тян-Шанский про Семенова-Тян-Шанского

С.А. Михайлов выступает вместо неприехавших испанцев.

Опергруппа сообщества gvSIG и единомышленники: С.А. Михайлов, А.Ю. Карандеев (aka gis), В.А. Калитвин (центр СПО ЛГПУ), Егоров В.В. (АЛКИС)

Инновационный сервис мониторинга общественного транспорта, кажется на базе Яндекс.Карт (кстати лицсоглашение Яндекса разве разрешает создавать на себе такие сервисы?) ...

... все равно не работает.
9:28
Andrea Antonello: Geopaparazzi Web Map Tiles enhancements
sur Planet OSGeo

Well, why should geopaparazzi hang behind uDig? :)

Ok, there are a number of reasons, but in this case, it doesn't have to be like that.

A small piece of history
Some of you might know that I am now part if the Italian TANTO geospatial (and not only) information/education blog.
In April I decided to go and visit the one guy that actually founded that blog in the most distant place in Italy from where I live: Andrea Borruso from Palermo.

We spent a couple of days daydreaming under the heavy effects of muffolette, cassatelle, cannoli and the grand finale of the sfince di San Giuseppe.

The recurring question was: how do we bring a custom raster into geopaparazzi? The potential is there, but we need to be able to load custom map!

Well, at the end we figured that the best thing would be to support local (as well as remote) TMS.
Andrea is black belt of TMS and was able to provide me with some tilesets.

So I started to implement the possibility to load the tiles on the phone and describe them with a small file, so that they would appear as tile sources.

We will throw out this new version as soon as the documentation is ready and some good tutorial on how to quickly handle data and stuff. as usual, if you wanna help, please contact us, we badly need support.

But in the meanwhile I really want to share some examples of the results we were able to achieve.

1) tiles of the ortofoto of sicily, zoomed on Palermo

2) an archeological area airbourne survey, done with drones. Imagery provided by the Consorzio TICONZERO. Interested how they are doing this? Have a look here.

3) technical map, overlayed with the results of a risk analysis (perfect for outdoor geologists and engineers)

Do you remember seeing this image somewhere already? Maybe loaded in uDig? :)

4) Last but not least, a scanned historical map (shiver down my spine)

Ok, need to stop here.
Basically soon it will be possible to load almost any kind of raster map into geopaparazzi, which is an amazing enhancement. Now all that's left, is to wait for the next release :)

This post is born as a parallel post (as in two different ways to tell the same story by the people that lived it) of this post.
15 mai 2012
23:00
MapProxy: New MapProxy 1.4.0 release
sur Planet OSGeo
We are pleased to announce the release of MapProxy 1.4.0. It contains major and minor improvements.

The latest release is available at: [pypi.python.org]

To upgrade within you virtualenv:
```
$ pip install --upgrade --no-deps MapProxy
```
Updated documentation is available at: [mapproxy.org]
New features
Some noteworthy improvements since 1.3.0 are:
Clipping requests to polygons
The security API now supports limiting requests to polygon geometries with the limited_to feature.

See auth API.
Demo service
The demo service now allows you to query WMS layers in all supported SRS. It now also supports WMTS if you have enabled this service.
Other improvements
- WMS 1.3.0 now supports extended layer capabilities for metadata etc.
- You can configure fallbacks for errors in tile sources. MapProxy can create an empty tile if the tile source returns a 404 not found for a tile, for example.
Note: There was a bug in the configuration loader that permitted to have an error in the layers configuration. Please make sure your configuration is valid after upgrading.
Changelog
For a complete list of changes see: [bitbucket.org]
18:58
Sean Gillies: Gearing up for LAWDI
sur Planet OSGeo
I'm beginning to work on my presentation for the upcoming Linked Ancient World Data Institute at ISAW. Here's what I'd like to accomplish in three bullets.
- Engage attendees in thinking outside the database and thinking and talking about the architecture of the web.
- Make a case for using HTTP URIs (aka URLs) whenever possible instead of other identifiers or addresses.
- Talk about using links in data for doing work (using verbs) in contrast to using linked data for reasoning (with nouns).
How to turn expertly curated non-linked data (digital scholarly editions of texts, etc) into RDF is one linked data problem, the one we're most familiar with and most focused on. How to use semantic web architecture and links to initiate and curate "born-linked" data is another interesting and important set of problems – to me, at least, and I hope to be able to make it compelling to everyone else.

Pleiades remains the only classics project in the Linked Open Data cloud today ( [thedatahub.org] ) and I'd also like to talk about how other projects can join it, but time may be too short for this.
18:36
Fernando Quadro: Tradução do GeoServer para o Português Brasileiro
sur Planet OSGeo
Pessoal,

O que acham de termos novamente o GeoServer em português, digo novamente, pois antes da versão 2.x ser lançada, o GeoServer possuia versão na lingua portuguesa. Com as mudanças de versão, foram criados diversos novos arquivos properties e o GeoServer acabou perdendo a sua versão em português.

Porém, existe um projeto para traduzir o GeoServer para diversas linguas, e uma delas é o pt-BR. Então convido a quem tiver interesse se cadastrar no site abaixo e começar a tradução.

http://translate.geoserver.1os.su/project/geoserver/pt-BR

A ferramenta é muito interessante, e se algumas pessoas estiverem dispostas, acredito que o trabalho não fique tão árduo. Eu já me cadastrei e comecei a contribuir. E você?
Posts Relacionados
16:49
OSGeo News: First African Open Source Geospatial Laboratory
sur Planet OSGeo

OSGeo News: First African Open Source Geospatial Laboratory
9:31
OpenGeo Blog: PostGIS Code Sprint à Paris
sur Planet OSGeo

For the next two days in Paris, the PostGIS development team (sans Regina Obe, unfortunately) will be meeting to discuss the 2.1 development cycle, squash a few bugs (and release 2.0.1?), and look at future directions for PostGIS. (Paris? Yes, I said Paris. After jogging a lap around the Champs de Mars and having my croissant for breakfast this morning, I feel that this should be an annual event.)

The sprint wiki page lays out some of the topics on the agenda: routing, parallel processing, 3D, point clouds, performance, and of course the ever-present meta-topic, git. It seems likely that PostGIS will move to git in the near future unless one of the development team is strongly opposed. Being merely ambivalent, I won’t throw myself into the gears of “progress”.

My personal development priorities for 2.1 are performance, performance, performance: I have speed improvements in mind for geometry, geography and raster. The geometry and geography improvements are based on internal indexing, as I described almost three years ago! They were too radical to go into 1.5, which was nearing release at the time, and other things (re-writing the core serialization/parsers/emitters) distracted me during 2.0. So 2.1 is it! And for raster, someone might beat me to it, but the ST_Union(raster) function should be relatively easy to speed up with the same memory management approach that the vector aggregate functions use.

This evening the developers will be meeting with a local group of power users for a discussion about roadmap priorities and where they think our development effort would be best spent. I’m looking forward to hearing some more about how folks are using PostGIS in the wild.

À bientôt!
14 mai 2012
20:43
Micha Silver: Spatialite- Updating one table from another
sur Planet OSGeo

Users of SQL databases often get tripped up when trying to update values in one table from another table. The method involves a subquery in the UPDATE statement to extract the values from the other (source) table. We’ll review how it’s done, both with simple attribute values, and with an update based on a spatial query.

In sqlite3 and spatialite the generic UPDATE statement which extracts values from another table looks like
UPDATE target_table SET target_column=(SELECT source_column FROM source_table WHERE target_table.id=source_table.id );
The tricky bit that sometimes gets people confused is the WHERE clause. In a simple SELECT statement you cannot put a “table.column” into the WHERE clause that doesn’t appear also in the FROM part. So a simple SELECT query would have to read:
SELECT source_column FROM source_table AS s, target_table AS t WHERE s.id=t.id
Both source and target tables must appear in the FROM portion.

Simple UPDATE example
However, when updating the target table with a subquery you must NOT have the target table in the subquery. The WHERE clause in the subquery must refer to the table being updated outside of the subquery. Let’s look at an example. We have a table of store locations, and we receive an excel spreadsheet file with sales data for each store. The excel table has one row for each store with, and a “StoreNum” that matches the StoreID in our stores spatial layer. See the table list in the image below. We want to get the sales values into our spatial layer. We first add a column for the new data:
ALTER TABLE Stores ADD COLUMN Sales double;
Now we can use the support in spatialite for virtual excel sheets, and add the sales data as a virtual table. In Spatialite GUI there’s a VirtualXL button – indicated in green in the image – to add a sheet from an excel file. Once the sales data is available as a virtual table, we want to update the Stores layer with the values from this excel table. So:

Notice – circled in red – that the subquery refers to the Stores table being updated, and this table does not appear in the FROM clause. The FROM clause contains only the sales_summary table, aliased AS s.

UPDATE with Aggregation
On to the next example, we are given an excel spreadsheet with detailed sales data. Rather than a summary for each store, this table contains all the transactions for all the stores. So each store appears many times in the table. We must now aggregate the sales data for each store, and update the sales column in our Stores spatial layer with a sum of sales for each store. This is accomplished easily with the SQL SUM() function. We first use the VirtualXL support to add a virtual table “sales_details”, then:

The UPDATE statement with SUM() to aggregate data for each store

Again, the Stores table, being updated, appears in the WHERE part of the subquery, but not in the FROM clause. The FROM portion has only the sales_details table. And in the SELECT subquery we use SUM(sales) to aggregate sales for each store. Since the WHERE clause matches s.StoreNum to Stores.StoreID, the SUM will be done for each store individually.

UPDATE with a spatial query
For the last example, we do an UPDATE on two spatial tables, using a subquery with a spatial function. Our store locations are spread around many counties (a polygon layer). We need to summarize all sales for each county. But wait a sec, the table being updated is in this case is the Counties, and the source data is from the Stores table. So the Stores table will now drop down to the subquery. We’ll again use the SUM() function, and our WHERE clause utilizes the ST_Within() function to find which stores are inside each county, and total up sales for those stores. In addition we deploy a SpatialIndex on each of the tables to speed up the query. See my previous post for an explanation of using spatial indices. Our spatial query now looks like:

An UPDATE with a spatial query, also using SpatialIndex

The WHERE clause of the spatial query – in green -contains both ST_Within function to find stores in each county, and the search for ROWID in the SpatialIndex limiting the search for stores which fall within each counties bounding box, thus saving lots of time. Again we see that the counties table, being updated, appears in the WHERE clause of the subquery, but not in the FROM part.
16:25
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): Upcoming WhereCamp Berlin 2012
sur Planet OSGeo

Berlin – May 14, 2012

Technology and Geography meet again at WhereCamp Berlin 2012

In an area that merges technology, innovation and creativity, there is a strong community interested in open source, mapping, neogeography, cartography, augmented reality and other geo-related areas. For the second consecutive year, WhereCamp Berlin is bringing together the best and brightest trendsetters, researchers and educators in location and geography.

For those passionate about geographical specialties, WhereCamp Berlin is gathering its attendees on the 22nd and 23rd of June. Everyone is free to present and share topics, news and trends. In this highly successful “unconference”, participants drive the content for the day, making this event a truly unique and engaging experience. Meet great people, share ideas, facilitate new relationships and hear different perspectives and get integrated to what’s important to you.

The event is free to attend and participation is strongly encouraged.

For more info or to learn about sponsoring WhereCamp Berlin, visit: wherecamp.de
Google Plus One
14:10
Jackie Ng: SQL Server 2012 FDO support
sur Planet OSGeo

Does the SQL Server FDO provider work with SQL Server 2012?

If you believe these screenshots ...

FDO Toolbox 1.0 (using 3.6 FDO provider)
SQL Server Management Studio 2012 (connected to SQL Server 2012 express)
... then the answer is yes
13:54
Maning Sambale: Alternatives to relief shading
sur Planet OSGeo

Michal M’s latest experiments on automated cartography brought back memories on some experiments I made myself in trying to replicate old map style cartography using modern (free and open-source) GIS packages. The idea is simple, I’m looking for alternative background styling for topographic features (like hills and mountains) that is different from the usual shaded [...]
12:05
Peter Batty: Presentations from GeoAlberta 2012
sur Planet OSGeo

I spent last week up in Calgary for the GeoAlberta conference, which was celebrating its tenth anniversary. It was a good event and I attended a number of good presentations. Dale Lutz of Safe Software gave an interesting review of the history of geospatial data, and my vintage 1990 paper on Exploiting Relational Database Technology in GIS got a mention in the section about moving into databases.
10:31
csgis: FOSS-Academy Sommerschule
sur Planet OSGeo

Erwerben Sie in einer Woche das Grundwissen zum Aufbau von Geodaten-Infrastrukturen mit freier Software in produktiver Atmosphäre!

Wohnen und lernen Sie zusammen mit unseren Trainern im selben Hotel.
Individuelle Zeiteinteilung und der fachliche Austausch außerhalb der Seminare ermöglicht Ihnen einen maximalen Wissenserwerb. Natürlich bleibt auch genügend Zeit für Kreativ-Pausen, Spaziergänge oder einen Ausflug nach Berlin.

Schulungsinhalte:
• jeder Teilnehmer erstellt innerhalb einer Woche eine komplette GDI, auf Wunsch auch in Gruppenarbeit
• zu Beginn der Sommerschule vermitteln wir Ihnen die notwendigen technischen Grundlagen mit verschiedenen Schwerpunkten
• in der zweiten Wochenhälfte arbeiten sie an Ihrer individuellen GDI und werden dabei von unseren erfahrenen Trainern tatkräftig unterstützt
• natürlich haben Sie auch ausreichend Gelegenheit sich mit Ihren Trainern und Teilnehmern über Ideen, Konzepte, Schwierigkeiten und Lösungen auszutauschen
Ort:
Die FOSS-Academy-Sommerschule findet im ruhigen Brandenburg nahe Berlin im Hotel Leegebruch statt (http://www.hotel-leegebruch.de)
Datum:
04.-08. Juni 2012
Kosten:
1.990,00 € netto inkl. Übernachtungen und Verpflegung
Informationen und Anmeldung:
Weitere Informationen zur FOSS Academy Sommerschule finden Sie online unter: www.foss-academy.eu/sommerschule
Anmelden können Sie sich per Email an info@foss-academy.eu oder online auf www.foss-academy.eu
13 mai 2012
20:54
Spatialytics.ORG: Learn more about @GeoKettle and @GeoMondrian at #GSDI13 Quebec City May 14-17!
sur Planet OSGeo

The 13th GSDI World Conference by the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (www.gsdi.org) is held this year in Quebec City, Canada, May 14-17. This year’s theme is « Spatially Enabling Government, Industry and Citizens ». Meet Spatialytics in the exhibition hall and learn more about the Spatial ETL GeoKettle and the SOLAP Server GeoMondrian! Exhibition [...]
18:53
Spatialytics.COM: Spatialytics exhibits at #GSDI13 in home town Quebec City this week
sur Planet OSGeo

The 13th GSDI World Conference organized by the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (www.gsdi.org) is held this year in Quebec City, Canada, May 14-17. The precedent editions were in Singapore in 2010 and Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 2009. This year’s theme is « Spatially Enabling Government, Industry and Citizens ». GSDI 13 in Quebec City is also the occasion for other local geospatial organizations to hold events. This is the case of the Canadian Geomatics Conference 2012, the 14th GEOIDE Annual Scientific Conference and the 7th 3DGeoInfo Conference. Spatialytics, based in Quebec City, takes the occasion to exhibit at this International Event for the Geospatial Industry and showcase its : Spatial Data Integration tool Spatialytics ETL: « Generate quality Geospatial Information from multiple data sources to feed your GIS/LI/GeoBI System »; Geospatial Business Intelligence software stack Spatialytics SUITE: « Develop robust GeoBI Solutions to maximize your Geospatial and Business Intelligence Infrastructure ». Look for this Booth! Exhibition hours
17:09
GIS-Lab: ИПД 2.0, что не так с ИПД в США?
sur Planet OSGeo

Как известно, в РФ работа по созданию Инфраструктуры пространственных данных в основном толкаемая вперед ГИС-Ассоциацией ведется с начала 2000-х. Теперь и на федеральном и на региональном уровне. Во многих случаях процесс создания ИПД превращается в создание ГИС, само по себе это неплохо, хотя и вызывает вопрос зачем это называть ИПД, но плохо, если созданием очередной ГИС все и заканчивается. В связи с этим имеет смысл посмотреть что же происходит с подобными инициативами там, где процесс создания ИПД идет уже давно, наприме в США. Похоже, что на «той стороне», несмотря на то, что ИПД двигается вперед уже 20 лет, и, надо полагать, инвестиции несравненно больше, тоже высказываются опасения в недостаточности всего и призывы о новых инициативах. Это подозрительно, существует ли анализ трудностей, который бы позволил избежать их у нас?

Неделю назад был выпущен отчет Службы исследований Конгресса США: Проблемы и сложности Государственной геопространственной информации (Issues and Challenges for Federal Geospatial Information), автор которого, Питер Фолгер является специалистом в области Энергетической политики и политики в области природных ресурсов .

В разделе Национальная ГИС автор отчета пишет:

Национальная ГИС?

В начале 2009 было озвучено несколько предложений призывающих приложить усилия для создания национальной ГИС (что является нечем большим, чем Национальная Карта — текущей инициативой USGS) или возобновить инвестиции в национальную инфраструктуру пространственных данных или даже создать ИПД 2.0 (см. 1, 2, 3). Предложения были представлены таким образом, чтобы рассмотреть подобные вливания, как часть национальных инвестиций в критическую инфраструктуру, и посредством непосредственного финансирования национальной ГИС и за счет побочных эффектов. Например, одно из предложений указывало, что организации ремонтирующие дороги, мосты и школы нуждаются в обновленной пространственной информации чтобы “восстанавливать с умом, эффективно и с заботой об окружающей среде и устойчивом развитии.” Другое предложение восхваляло национальную ГИС как средство ускорения экономического восстановления, которое может также “»оставить стране общий инструмент, современную геопространственную информационную систему, которая сама может стать основанием для новых поколений индустрии и технологий будущего.”

Призывы начать строить “национальную” ГИС, или новую версию ИПД, или делать инвестиции в национальную инфраструктуру пространственных данных, вызывают вопросы относительно текущих усилий по созданию ИПД. Мероприятия по созданию ИПД начались в 1994 по распоряжению 12906, или даже ранее, в 1990 когда OMB выпустило Circular A-16 создающий FGDC (Федеральная комиссия по географическим данным — Federal Geographic Data Committee). Недавние предложения подразумевают, что процессы, которые начались 20 лет назад и продолжаются сегодня являются недостаточно национальными по охвату, недостаточными по планированию или внедрению несмотря на существование FGDC, NSGIC и других организаций, таких как, например, Коалиция геопространственных организаций (Coalition of Geospatial Organizations) или MAPPS, которые являются форумами для организаций связанными с национальными геопространными вопросами.
11:46
GeoExt Team: GeoExt 2 - more technical details
sur Planet OSGeo
This blog post provides more details on GeoExt 2 and Ext JS 4, focusing on technical aspects

So GeoExt 2 is a port of GeoExt 1 to Ext JS 4. The GeoExt 2 code sprint was really about porting the existing code base to Ext JS 4, redesigning, and rewriting code, only when simple adaptations were not possible.

GeoExt 2 works with Ext JS 4 only. Ext JS 3 and lower aren't supported, and won't be, obviously.

Note also that GeoExt 2 doesn't work with Sencha Touch. Sencha Touch and Ext JS 4 have similarities but their APIs are too different to write code that works with both libs. We actually did attempt to make map panel work with both Ext JS 4 and Sencha Touch, but failed.
The class systemThe class system of Ext JS 4 is quite different from that of Ext JS 3. Ext JS 3 had no specific mechanism for defining classes, and had Ext.extend to define child classes. With Ext JS 4 classes are defined using Ext.define. Defining a parent class is done as follows:
```
Ext.define('P', {
    // prototype object
});
```
Defining a child class is done as follows:
```
Ext.define('C', {
    extend: 'P',
    // prototype object
});
```
In the above examples the P and C constructors are added to the window namespace. To create a class without adding a reference to it in the global namespace Ext.Class can be used. Ext.define actually uses Ext.Class internally, and most of the time you should not need to use Ext.Class.

So porting GeoExt to Ext JS 4 has required using Ext.define for every class definition – the easy part of the porting work really.

Another major change in Ext JS 4 is the way classes should be instantiated. Although using the new keyword still works (thank god!) using Ext.create is recommended. For example:
```
    var c = Ext.create('C');
```
Using Ext.create Ext JS will actually load the script containing the class if the class is not defined yet. This is called "synchronous loading" in the Ext JS 4 jargon, which means "load the class at the time it is actually needed".

The autoloader also supports "asynchronous loading". When relying on asynchronous loading, scripts are loaded earlier, in fact as soon as Ext.require is called or when classes with specific requirements (defined with "requires" in the class) are defined. Synchronous loading works with XHR while asynchronous loading works by dynamically adding script tags to the page. The data components The data types/components in Ext JS 4 work differently from Ext JS 3. Ext JS 4 has introduced the notion of “model”. A model, which is a class, defines a data schema. For example:
```
Ext.define('my.Model', {
    extend: 'Ext.data.Model',
    fields: [{
        name: 'text', type: 'string'
    }, {
        name: 'code', type: 'int'
    }]
});
```
This defines a data model with two fields/columns: "text" and "code". The defined model class can then be used in a store. For example:
```
var store = Ext.create('Ext.data.Store', {
    model: 'my.Model'
});
```
GeoExt 2 defines its own data models. To name a few: LayerModel, WmsCapabilitiesLayerModel, WmsDescribeLayerModel to name a few.

GeoExt 2 also defines preconfigured stores. For example GeoExt 2 includes WmsDescribeLayerStore which is preconfigured with WmsDescribeLayerModel.

As GeoExt 1, the goal of GeoExt 2's data components is to ease working with geo data and metadata in Ext JS applications. But we had to rethink and redesign things in GeoExt 2, to adapt to Ext JS 4's new architecture and concepts.

The tree components (paragraph contributed by Andreas Hocevar) Trees have seen a complete overhaul in Ext JS 4. Instead of loaders, every node in a tree now has a store for its child nodes. While the Ext JS 4 tree is more flexible than the Ext JS 3 one when it comes to columns (the tree is a grid), there are less extension points for customizations on the node level. And GeoExt 1 did a lot of customizations on the node level. But despite these difficulties, we were able to come up with a nice API for configuring trees. Let's have a look at a tree configuration for including a WMS GetLegendGraphic image for each layer in GeoExt 1:
```
// custom layer node UI class
var LayerNodeUI = Ext.extend(
    GeoExt.tree.LayerNodeUI,
    new GeoExt.tree.TreeNodeUIEventMixin()
);
var tree = new Ext.tree.TreePanel({
    // apply the tree node component plugin to layer nodes
    plugins: [{
        ptype: "gx_treenodecomponent"
    }],
    loader: {
        applyLoader: false,
        uiProviders: {
            custom_ui: LayerNodeUI
        }
    },
    root: {
        nodeType: "gx_layercontainer",
        loader: {
            baseAttrs: {
                uiProvider: "custom_ui"
            },
            createNode: function(attr) {
                // add a WMS legend to each node created
                attr.component = {
                    xtype: "gx_wmslegend",
                    layerRecord: mapPanel.layers.getByLayer(attr.layer),
                    showTitle: false,
                    // custom class for css positioning
                    // see tree-legend.html
                    cls: "legend"
                };
                return GeoExt.tree.LayerLoader.prototype.createNode.call
                           (this, attr);
            }
        }
    },
    rootVisible: false,
    lines: false
});
```
Obviously the configuration of a custom TreeNodeUI to get additional events on the tree, which are needed by the gx_treenodecomponent plugin is a bit cumbersome. With GeoExt 2, the same tree can be achieved with a much nicer configuration:
```
var store = Ext.create('Ext.data.TreeStore', {
    model: 'GeoExt.data.LayerTreeModel',
    root: {
        plugins: [{
            ptype: "gx_layercontainer",
            loader: {
                createNode: function(attr) {
                    // add a WMS legend to each node created
                    attr.component = {
                        xtype: "gx_wmslegend",
                        layerRecord: mapPanel.layers.getByLayer(
                                          attr.layer),
                        showTitle: false,
                        // custom class for css positioning
                        // see tree-legend.html
                        cls: "legend"
                    };
                    return GeoExt.tree.LayerLoader.prototype.createNode.call
                              (this, attr);
                }
            }
        }]
    }
});
var tree = new GeoExt.tree.Panel({
    store: store,
    rootVisible: false,
    lines: false
});
```
The node (here: the root node) can be configured with plugins. Note that this is not an Ext JS 4 extension point, but one that we created in GeoExt 2. As long as your tree is a GeoExt.tree.TreePanel instead of an Ext.tree.TreePanel, and its store is configured with a GeoExt.tree.LayerTreeModel instead of the default model, there are no special configuration options needed to make the already built-in component rendering available.

Instead of having this built into our default tree view (the one the GeoExt.tree.TreePanel is configured with), we could also move it into a plugin before the final release. This decision depends on how much code the other plugins (like the ActionPlugin and RadioButtonPlugin) require, and our architecture allows us to create an extension point here any time.
9:33
BostonGIS: Update to Install instructions for PostGIS 2.0 more coming
sur Planet OSGeo
We finally got around to updating our Part 1: Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide for PostGIS 2.0. We kept the 1.5 around so is still accessible under Part 1: Getting Started With PostGIS: An almost Idiot's Guide (PostGIS 1.5).

The Part 2: Introduction to Spatial Queries in the series was even more outdated and was using functions removed in 2.0 and long deprecated since around PostGIS 1.3. We've updated this as well, but still cleaning it up a bit and verifying we didn't make any typos in the code.

We hope to augment these tutorials with similar ones for raster and topology. Some of the misconceptions people have about working with raster in PostGIS 2.0 that we've noticed are:
- It is somehow different if you are on windows vs. Unix/Linux. This is not true. In fact the raster2pgsql command-line tool makes the process pretty much the same regardless of what OS you are on.
- People use raster2pgsql to generate an SQL file and then try to load it with pgAdmin and pgAdmin crashes. Sorry folks, pgAdmin is not the right tool for the job, it's not designed for loading up a 1 GB sql file in SQL Query browser and running it. Frankly you don't even need to bother with generating an intermediary SQL file - just pipe straight to psql. Works for all OS including Windows.
- How to display PostGIS raster with external tools. The story there is still in infancy. Yes you can sorta do it with MapServer, QGIS etc, but its kinda slow at the moment. GeoServer might be better using the GeoTools option, but I haven't had the time to play with all the options. Another option I wanted to experiment with is one suggested by a client of ours publishing PostGIS raster as a tile based store similar to what is done with MBTiles. That has some allure since PostGIS raster can be loaded as chunked tiles with the loader to make analysis faster. So although it's really slick for vector/raster analysis there is no reason I see it can't play kinda dumb as well when its convenient and smart again when the need arises simply by using the output PNG/tiff etc functions as wrappers for tile output. Those functions are fairly fast. :).
- Oh yah and it's about analysis not display. I know Paul, but some of us don't live in caves though I admit I do :)
Anyway we'll go thru these lessons in raster tutorials to follow and hopefully I'll have a better story with displaying PostGIS raster with third-party tools after some experimentation and some issues in the PostGIS GDAL driver have been resolved.
New book coming
Yap we just finished the first draft of our new book PostgreSQL: Up and Running and are patiently tweed-ling our thumbs for pre-reviews to come in. It's a short only about 150 pages in length (so far anyway) and we hope to have it on shelves in the next couple of months - both e-book and hard-copy. It will be published by O'Reilly Media and follows their new experimental standard similar in flavor to their HTML 5: Up and Running book.

The difference with this kind of book, is they are generally shorter and more focused because who wants to spend time reading or writing a tome that is almost guaranteed to be out of date by the time it hits the shelf. So the writing cycle is in theory shorter which means less risk for the publisher and the author to write a book that may not have as major of an audience. The other benefit is the e-Book formats of these books can always be kept up to date. So assuming you trust us as authors to continually update the material, if you buy an e-Book version of this title, you'll get any updates we write to it without shelling out extra dough. Of course if you go the standard of buying the hard-copy version you get it only at print cycles and just for that print. It's an interesting business model. We'll see how it goes and if it goes well we'll write other books of a similar flavor.

So Is "PostgreSQL Up and Running" for beginners? Yes and No. Our main audience target are people coming from other relational databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite etc. and why the heck is using PostgreSQL the best decision you ever made :) . It is also for people who have used PostgreSQL but have a hard time keeping up with enhancements in newer versions of PostgreSQL and how to prepare and take advantage of them. The first release will target 9.1 and 9.2 series and if all goes well, we'll keep it up to date with newer versions as they come.
5:38
Fernando Quadro: 5 anos de GeoServer-BR
sur Planet OSGeo
Caros leitores,

É com muita satisfação que escrevo este post em comemoração a mais um aniversário da comunidade GeoServer-BR, pois a 5 anos atrás no primeiro treinamento de GeoServer realizado no Brasil (no III ENUM) iniciava-se esta comunidade. Hoje somos mais de 500 inscritos na lista de discussão do Yahoo não só do Brasil mas de vários países de lingua portuguesa com mais de 3200 emails respondidos.

O fato mais marcante no decorrer desses anos, foi em 2008 quando o então presidente Lula assinou o decreto e o GeoServer foi “nomeado” o servidor de mapas oficial da INDE (Infraestrutura Nacional de Dados Espaciais).

Agradeço a todos que de alguma forma ajudaram a comunidade durante estes anos, e desejo que a comunidade cresça cada vez mais e o GeoServer a cada dia seja mais difundido neste país.
Posts Relacionados
12 mai 2012
22:07
csgis: gvSIG & Sextante Anwendertreffen AGIT 2012
sur Planet OSGeo

Wir möchten Sie herzlich zur AGIT 2012 - Symposium und Fachmesse für Angewandte Geoinformatik - vom 4. bis 6. Juli 2012 nach Salzburg einladen! Die Synergie aus Symposium und praxisnaher Fachausstellung prägt die AGIT seit vielen Jahren. Die Konferenz gilt als Informationsplattform für GIS-Fachexperten aller Anwendungsgebiete der Geoinformatik aus Verwaltung, Wirtschaft und Forschung. Wenn Sie durch das Programm blättern, werden Sie unter anderem das „gvSIG & Sextante Anwendertreffen“ entdecken. Darüber hinaus gibt eine Vielzahl von interessanten Keynotes sowie thematische Workshops zu OpenData Initiativen, Rechtsfragen zu Geodaten und vieles mehr.
Beim gvSIG und Sextante Anwendertreffen im Rahmen der AGIT 2012 präsentieren Produktspezialisten und Anwender am Donnerstag den 5. Juli Trends und Lösungen rund um die Open Source Projekte gvSIG und Sextante. Im Anschluss bietet eine offene Diskussionsrunde Raum für Fragen und Antworten sowie zur Organisation zukünftiger Aktivitäten der Projekte. Des Weiteren können Interessierte auf der AGIT EXPO am Stand von gvSIG in Kontakt mit Open Source Spezialisten treten.
Anmeldungen zum Frühbuchertarif können noch bis zum 21. Mai online durchgeführt werden: www.agit.at/anmeldung.symposium
Das Programm finden Sie unter: > www.agit.at/programm2012> www.agit.at/gvsig
11:13
GIS-Lab: Релиз ILWIS 3.8
sur Planet OSGeo
Ещё тише и незаметнее, чем обычно, обновилась свободная ГИС ILWIS (Integrated Land and Water Information System) до версии 3.8.

ILWIS Open 3.8 объединяет изображения, векторные и тематические данные в один уникальный и мощный настольный пакет. Эта ГИС предоставляет широкий спектр функций, включая импорт / экспорт, оцифровку и редактирование, анализ и отображение данных, а также производство качественных карт.

Значительное обновление графической системы в версии 3.8 привело к появлению новых инструментов для управления визуализацией и настроек для визуального анализа. Инструменты анимации и 3D-визуализации стали удобнее с точки зрения функциональности и простоты использования, и теперь работают аналогично обычной 2D-визуализации.

Другие новшества:
- новое «дерево» слоёв;
- новая командная строка в окне карты;
- новый тип данных — набор карт;
- новый PixelInfo;
- обновлённая система перевода;
- ILWIS в качестве сервера WPS;
- справочная система была перенесена в набор HTML файлов;
- новый процесс печати, старая система макетов удалена;
- расширен список операций; теперь он с поиском и возможностью быстро отфильтровать список ILWIS приложений;
- обновлены SEBS-модули.
Подробнее можно почитать здесь и здесь.

Скачать ILWIS 3.8. можно здесь.
9:21
UDIG Team: uDig web map tiles enhancements
sur Planet OSGeo

What do you really know about Web Map Tiles support in uDig?
Did you know it started as a summer of code project?
Did you know it now also supports TMS?
Did you know it now supports local folders of TMS?

Go to the full post.
0:04
Andrea Antonello: uDig web map tiles enhancements
sur Planet OSGeo

Many of you for sure know that uDig has the ability to show Web Map Tiles.

From the import dialog you select Web Map Tiles:

push the next button and find a long list of available web map tile servers (which we should probably check).

There is also the possibility to select a custom server. This is very handy, but had 2 problems:
- it could not load local folders of files
- it understood only the google tile schema numbering, which means no TMS

Well, this is the first enhancement. Those two problems were solved. Mind that you will have to check the right option:

The second enhancement will make uDig Spatial Toolbox users happy. With the next uDig release we will also release the module that creates TMS folders from a set of layers. I do not want to go into detail shere, but a new module will allow to export a set of styled layers as tiles folder. Those tiles come with the complete description of the zoom levels and so on.

In fact since that file is the only thing needed to load a folder of tiles, it made sense to add a small item to the list, the JGrasstools TMS folder:

And there we have it. Push the button, push, push the button and:

This will be extrememly helpful for those like us that use uDig with BeeGIS field extensions out in the field on netbooks. The base dataset gets extremely lightweight to load and rasters can be prepared to be fast and easy.
11 mai 2012
22:21
GeoExt Team: GeoExt2 Sprint Results
sur Planet OSGeo
Today was the final day of the sprint, and we are proud to announce that GeoExt2 is ready for an early alpha release. Most of the key features that our sponsors were interested in could be ported from GeoExt1. Examples matching previous examples are available for most of the ported components, so it should be easy for application developers to port their applications to Ext4/GeoExt2.

To continue our tradition of giving credit to the developers who put an incredible amount of energy into making GeoExt2 a reality, here is the list of today's achievements:
- Alexandre finished a MVC demo application that shows the power of Ext4 and GeoExt2, and fixed many tests and examples.
- Andreas and Julien were able to finish big portions of the tree functionality, just in time before the end of the sprint, and just before going crazy over the complexity of the internals of Ext4. In addition to the synchronization between map and tree, all the loaders (except for the LayerParamsLoader) and the TreeNodeComponent plugin were implemented. Because the Ext4 architecture of trees is too much different from Ext3, a new (and nicer) API for building tree configurations was introduced.
- Bart and Matt and Frédéric wrapped up their work on data components - even the not so famous ones like the SymbolizerColumn or the GeocoderCombo. A nice improvement, which also received contributions from other sprinters, is the common OwsStore base class for OGC data sources. Bart also brought basic i18n to GeoExt2.
- Christian, Marc and Johannes made all print components work with Ext4. They also made huge improvements to many of the examples.
- Éric gave the new MapPanel a big overhaul, so it is more lightweight and feature complete than the initial port. Together with François, he finished the AttributeReader and all components from the form namespace. They also took care of dependency management and made improvements to the build story.
- Stéphane did a great job reviewing many of the pull requests that had piled up during the week, and helped to keep the pile of open tickets small. He also contributed to the MVC demo application mentioned above.
Next StepsOver the weekend, we will be trying to brush up the API documentation and create an official alpha release. At this point, some components still need unit tests, and there may be some loose ends that are best encountered by using GeoExt2 in real life applications.
This means: we invite everyone to test the upcoming alpha release, or get the latest code from github. Bug reports, and - more than ever - code contributions and bugfix pull requests on github are welcome. Getting out a final 2.0 release soon is a goal that can only be reached with help from the community. For talented developers, a reward for repeated quality code contributions is the nomination for GeoExt2 core committer status.
Thanks again to all our sponsors, and to terrestris for the organization of the sprint and the perfect venue. And of course to all my fellow sprinters for all the good and hard work.
Happy coding, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
14:13
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): Maki: Points of Interest Icon Set for Cartography
sur Planet OSGeo

While I wait until next week to share geonews in batch mode, James made me aware of a great MapBox project: the Maki open source point of interest icon set for cartography.

What it is? "Designed pixel-by-pixel to look great at small sizes but scale up elegantly. We designed Maki specifically for TileMill with the goal of creating an international, comprehensive, and stylistically unified point of interest icon set. Each symbol is drawn three times at different sizes to maximize crispness and readability. Maki symbols are based on international recognized symbols, following precedents set by AIGA and other international symbol systems, but preserving a unique look at feel.

Use Maki for everything from adding context to the base map of your mobile app to highlighting critical data on your disaster map. Just download the icons and start using them with TileMill or put them on your server to integrate with another mapping API."

As pointed out by James, The Noun Project jumped in the Maki train. Looking for previous related entries, I found, those two: Impacts of Symbology Changes for Organizations and Map Symbols and A Summary of Thematic Mapping Techniques.

Google Plus One
11:48
gvSIG Team: IGVSB hacia la independencia tecnológica
sur Planet OSGeo

Durante el mes de abril el IGVSB (Instituto Geográfico Venezolano Simón Bolívar) impulsó unas jornadas de formación en gvSIG. Unas jornadas en las que desde la Asociación gvSIG participamos como formadores y las que me gustaría reseñar por su importancia. Relevancia no por el curso en sí, sino por el planteamiento del IGVSB de cara a transformar la realidad de la geomática tanto en el propio instituto como en Venezuela.

Se plantearon dos bloques de cursos principales.

Por un lado, cursos de usuarios en los que se capacitara a los alumnos en todas las capacidades actuales de la tecnología gvSIG: vectorial, raster, IDE, redes, 3D, geoprocesamiento, LIDAR,… Los alumnos del IGVSB tenían como objetivo aprender para replicar posteriormente esta formación por todo el país, mediante un conjunto de salas que dispondrán de la dupla Canaima+gvSIG. Formar a formadores. Formadores que, según lo previsto, formaran a más de un millar de técnicos en todo el país en 2012, lo que supondrá un impulso más que importante para la Comunidad Venezolana de gvSIG.

Por otro lado, en su clara apuesta por gvSIG, el IGVSB entiende que debe formar a un equipo de desarrollo que en colaboración y coordinación con la Asociación gvSIG vaya mejorando y añadiendo nuevas funcionalidades al software acorde a sus necesidades de producción cartográfica. Por ello se dictó un curso de desarrollo sobre gvSIG 2.0. Huelga decir que este es el momento ideal para formarse en el desarrollo de gvSIG, a las puertas de una versión que facilitará la incorporación de nuevos desarrollos, la compatibilidad entre versiones, y su mantenimiento en el tiempo.

Además de los técnicos del IGVSB participaron alumnos de otras entidades como el Ministerio de Ambiente, PDVSA, FEVP, Hidrofalcón, Ipostel, Fundacomunal, Alcaldía de Caracas o la UBV.

Sin duda, el proceso que ha emprendido el IGVSB es encomiable y un ejemplo a seguir. Independencia y soberanía tecnológica, cambio del gasto en licencias por inversión en conocimiento, y demás motivos propios y conocidos por los que el software libre avanza cada día más en todo el planeta.

Y por legalidad.

Recordemos que en Diciembre del año 2004 El Poder Ejecutivo Nacional aprobó en Gaceta Oficial N. 38095 de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela el Decreto 3.390, mediante el cual se dispone que la Administración Pública Nacional empleará prioritariamente Software Libre desarrollado con Estándares Abiertos, en sus Sistemas, Proyectos y Servicios Informáticos. Los motivos de este Decreto se encuentran en el denominado Paro Petrolero, en el que el uso de tecnologías cerradas tuvo terribles consecuencias durante el sabotaje contra la industria petrolera nacional.

Más allá del Decreto 3.390, aunque menos conocido en el mundo del software libre, encontramos el Decreto Presidencial 6.649 contra el gasto suntuario en la Administración Pública Nacional, con el fin de “optimizar la racionalización del gasto en el sector público”. El artículo 2 indica que los equipos y plataformas tecnológicas sólo podrán ser adquiridos con la autorización del Vicepresidente Ejecutivo y previa exposición de motivos que justifique su aprobación. Es injustificable que un estado que busca reducir sus gastos superfluos e innecesarios, al mismo tiempo gaste bolívares en licencias.

Y por último existe un motivo supranacional. A nadie escapa que Latinoamérica está dando pasos firmes hacia su integración, hacia la colaboración de los países más allá de meros intereses económicos. En el mundo del software no hay mayor apuesta por la integración, la complementariedad y la suma de esfuerzos, que la apuesta por el software libre.

En este sentido, es preciso recordar que gran parte de los países que conforman la América Latina tienen legislaciones que o bien obligan o bien recomiendan la adopción de software libre: Ecuador, Brasil, Paraguay, Bolivia,…

En palabras de Rafael Correa, Presidente de Ecuador: “que todos utilicemos tanto a nivel público como a nivel privado el software libre. De esta manera, garantizaremos la soberanía de nuestros Estados, dependeremos de nuestras propias fuerzas, no de fuerzas externas a nuestra región…” “…es la hora de la integración de América Latina en todos los aspectos, entre ellos, el aspecto tecnológico y el uso de tecnologías informáticas”

Por otro lado, en el argumentario técnico, la soluciones de geomática libre están lo suficientemente contrastadas y extendidas como para igualar y superar a las privativas. Por tanto, los motivos para utilizar software privativo se van terminando.

Quería finalizar este post felicitando públicamente al IGVSB por los pasos que está dando hacia una independencia tecnológica que a buen seguro será un pilar fundamental en la soberanía tecnológica de Venezuela.

Filed under: opinion
0:24
Tim Sutton: Installing PostGIS 2.0 on ubuntu
sur Planet OSGeo

PostGIS 2.0 is out and the awesomness continues! You can install PostGIS 2.0 on Ubuntu using packages which is exactly what I am going to show you here. Read on for details on how to get up and running and do your first simple raster analysis! Note: You should make good backups first! Before we... Read more »
10 mai 2012
22:57
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings: Glowing Hot Maps – QGIS Meets Gimp
sur Planet OSGeo

Waiting time is over, Gimp 2.8 is finally here. That is reason enough to take it for a quick test run!

How about a new look for the QGIS user map?

This “glowing hot” map was made using the Gimp filter of the same name:

For the user point layer, I selected a simple point style with high transparency and separately exported land and user points from print composer.

user points as exported from QGIS

In Gimp, I applied the “glowing hot” filter to the user points and combined the layers. The trick here is to first use “Color to alpha” on the user point layer and turn black to transparent. This way, the “glowing hot” filter will only be applied to the remaining points.

Gimp 2.8 RC1 is close enough to the previous version to get comfortable fast. I like the single-window mode even if it’s hard to tell which part of the GUI has the focus sometimes.

Open source GIS and image editing for a perfect work flow.
19:42
GIS-Lab: Открытые геоданные в Мытищах
sur Planet OSGeo

В отличие от Росреестра, не совсем понятно из каких соображений отгораживающего материалы ПКК от важных видов использования (см. cоглашение об использовании ПКК), администрации г. Мытищи хватает храбрости признать очевидное, адресный план и адресный реестр города не являются объектами авторских прав, а значит могут быть использованы для таких проектов, как OpenStreetMap.

Запрос на выяснение этого момента был отправлен Советом Российского OSM в следующей формулировке:

На официальном сайте органов местного самоуправления городского поселения Мытищи размещены адресные планы и адресные реестры городского поселения Мытищи. Эти адресные планы оформлены в виде приложения к постановлению Совета депутатов. Ряд постановлений, утверждающих адресный план либо изменения к нему, также опубликованы на сайте.(начиная с постановления 3/4 от 29.10.09)

Прошу подтвердить, что эти адресные планы и адресные реестры являются неотъемлемой частью постановлений и попадают соответственно под действие подпункта 1 пункта 6 статьи 1259 Гражданского Кодекса РФ, который выводит официальные документы органов местного самоуправления муниципальных образований и иные материалы административного характера из зоны действия авторского права.

Был получен официальный ответ, гласящий (оригинал письма-ответа):

Согласно ст. 43 Федерального закона от 06.10.2003 N 131-ФЭ (ред. от 06.12.2011. с изм. от 07.12.2011) «Об общих принципах организации местного самоуправления в Российской Федерации» представительный орган муниципального образования (Совет депутатов городского поселения Мытищи Мытищинского муниципального района Московской области) по вопросам, отнесенным к его компетенции федеральными законами, законами субъекта Российской Федерации, уставом муниципального образования, принимает решения, устанавливающие правила, обязательные для исполнения на территории муниципального образования, а также решения по вопросам организации деятельности представительного органа муниципального образования и по иным вопросам, отнесенным к его компетенции федеральными законами, законами субъектов Российской Федерации, уставом муниципального образования.

Адресный план и адресный реестр утвержденные Решением Совета депутатов городского поселения Мытищи от 29.10.2009 № 3/4 «Об утверждении адресного плана и адресного реестра городского поселения Мытищи», являются официальными документами органа местного самоуправления муниципального образования.

Согласно пп.1, п. 6, ст. 1259 ГК РФ не являются объектами авторских прав официальные документы органов местного самоуправления муниципальных образований, в том числе законы, другие нормативные акты, иные материалы законодательного, административного и судебного характера.

Таким образом, адресный план и адресный реестр не являются объектами авторских прав.

Хотелось бы увидеть на основе этих данных и другие коммерческие и гражданские проекты, ведь препятствий к этому никаких нет.
18:01
GeoExt Team: GeoExt2 Code Sprint - Day 4
sur Planet OSGeo

The fourth day of the GeoExt 2 codesprint has been as intensive as the other days, things are really coming together, but tomorrow is gonna be a crucial day. But sometimes we wish Ed Spencer from Sencha would be here to explain a few things to us.

Andreas Hocevar from OpenGeo and Julien Samuel-Lacroix from MapGears kept working on their unicorn, the tree components. They can now turn layers on and off through checkboxes, and are currently figuring out more advanced UIs like radio buttons (which they just did as I am writing this blog post). On the data side, they are digging into implementing the remaining loaders - currently they only have the plain LayerLoader.

Alexandre Dube from MapGears worked on an Ext-oriented application using their MVC architecture. Stéphane Brunner from CampToCamp made a build for it. You can see the current built version using a FeatureStore at: [dev8.mapgears.com]

Stéphane also combined his efforts with Frederic Junod from CampToCamp to finish off the FeatureStore. Frederic also ported the grid.SymbolizerColumn (now in master with test and example) and worked with Alexandre on the app example.

Matt Priour of OpenGeo debugged data model inheritance issues and crafted an OwsStore to act as a base class for all of the OWS data stores.

François van der Biest and Eric Lemoine from CampToCamp completed the work on the Attribute model, reader and store and on the Form.toFilter and Form.recordToField functions. Two pull requests are ready for review. Next step for them is the SearchAction.

Marc Jansen, Christian Mayer and Johannes Weskamm from Terrestris worked very hard on the print components. Marc also did several reviews.

I myself worked on porting more of the data components (WfsCapabilities, WmsDescribeLayer, CswRecords, Wmc and ScaleStore) and started porting the ProtocolProxy but the differences are very big here between Ext 3 and Ext 4, so this needs more work.

Some links to the German music that inspired some of us today (new versus old), and a big thank you again to Terrestris for hosting us in their fantastic office:

[www.universal-music.de]
[www.youtube.com]

Tonight we will have a social activity at KleinsPeterBerg (a restaurant alongside the river Rhine): [www.kleinpetersberg.de]

Bart van den Eijden
18:00
Jo Cook: Back the Bid
sur Planet OSGeo

The UK local chapter of OSGeo are bidding to host FOSS4G in the UK in 2013! For those of you that don’t know, the location of the main FOSS4G “meeting of the tribes” conference moves around from continent to continent each year, and 2013 is Europe’s turn. We want to dove-tail the event with the UK’s main annual geospatial conference, AGI Geocommunity, giving developers a great chance to showcase their work to a new audience, and for UK GI people to see all the fantastic work the open source community has been doing.

Our bid team is massively excited about potentially bringing the conference to the UK! We’re blogging the bid process here and currently asking for letters of support from anyone who likes the idea (no financial commitment involved!), and shortly we’ll have a page on the blog for anyone who wants to sign up to help out. If you’re interested in supporting the event, do get in touch either via the comments below or sign up on the OSGeo UK mailing list.

Nottingham might not initially seem like the most glamourous of venues but the facilities are awesome, there’s plenty of accomodation on site, and we hope to offer people some great chances for informal get-togethers, code-sprints, birds-of-a-feather meetings and so on. Not only will be we offering really great packages for anyone who wants to come to both events, but we’re organising some great workshops on the overlap day, and some joint social events to allow people to really get to meet up. The AGI crowd do know how to throw a good party, so it should be fun…

We won’t know the results of the process for another few months yet, and we’re up against a compelling team from Helsinki- so it could go either way. Whatever happens, we hope to see you in Europe in 2013, and hope even more strongly to see you in Nottingham!
15:27
GIS-Lab: Apps4Russia-2
sur Planet OSGeo
НП “Информационная культура” объявляет о проведении в 2012 году 2-го общероссийского конкурса Apps4Russia.

Цель конкурса — привлечь российских разработчиков мобильных приложений и веб-сайтов по созданию проектов, основанных на использовании открытых государственных данных, для увеличения общественной пользы и большей прозрачности государства.

В 2011 году конкурс Apps4Russia проводился в формате частной инициативы, его выиграла команда NextGIS.

Конкурсные работы 2012 года будут оцениваться жюри в рамках следующих номинаций: — основной конкурс для всех разработчиков. (примеры тем разработок: борьба с коррупцией, понятная статистика, мониторинг экологических объектов, Россия в мире и др.)
- Большой — основной конкурс для всех разработчиков. (примеры тем разработок: борьба с коррупцией, понятная статистика, мониторинг экологических объектов, Россия в мире и др.)
- Junior — конкурс разработок, выполненных школьниками (возможно личное участие или в составе группы)
- Визуализация — инфографика (интерактивная или плакаты) на основе открытых данных
- Города — cреда обитания — приложения и веб-сайты по улучшению жизни в городской среде, поддержке общественных инициатив горожан
Дата начала конкурса – 19 апреля. Приём заявок апрель – сентябрь, подведение итогов конкурса – 12 сентября 2012 года (День программиста).

Подробнее победителей прошлого конкурса можно спросить в форуме и, конечно, есть официальный сайт конкурса.
09 mai 2012
19:58
GeoExt Team: Another big day today at the GeoExt 2 Code Sprint
sur Planet OSGeo

After a three days of around twelve hours of work, things are really coming together. Today started more quiet as people worked in pairs to complete core functionalities. A lot of effort was put to port the main GeoExt features to ExtJS 4. Here are the main aspects of the work our tireless sprinters accomplish today:

* Documentation ( [geoext.github.com] ) was worked on by Andreas Schmitz and Markus Schneider, who joined us today, from Occam Labs. All functions are now automatically generated from the code without error. The new documentation framework (JSDuck) is really easy to use for developers and produce really nice docs à la ExtJS.

* Print forms work started today with efforts from Marc, Christian and Johannes. Not only did the Terristris team provide all the sprinters with good food and a great network connection, they also built essential data components for the printing capabilities of GeoExt.

* Tests ( [geoext.github.com] ) are now nearly completed as they all pass in Chrome and Firefox. Thanks to Alexandre who also worked really hard to make everything work in IE8+. This helped to not only get all functionalities out by the end of the week, but also to have a very robust library.

* FeatureStore, one of the most important data components of GeoExt, was completed by Frédéric and Stéphane. The examples are still in a Pull Request at the time of writing this, but be sure it's amazing. From now on we'll be able to not only consult our features but also get to interact with them with all the ExtJS potential.

* Forms have been addressed by Eric and François. AttributeModel, AttributeReader, AttributeStore + form components (for editing and search) are all in the pipeline. Combined with the FeatureStore feature, this will provide us interesting applications to consult and edit feature data.

* WMSCapabilities ( [geoext.github.com] ) support was added by Bart and Matt. This key feature needed the model, reader and store to be addressed. They got it working and combined with the LayerStore effort of the previous days, the example is now working just like before.

* Layer Tree architecture design was addressed by Andreas and Julien. This work could have its own blog post. Let us just say that everything is different in ExtJS 4. They finally found a really clean way to configure the Layer Tree using the latest functionalities of ExtJS 4. After a day of design and test, let's hope they we will be able to show us something working tomorrow.

Feel free to download the code on GitHub ( [github.com] ).

The live documentation is here ( [geoext.github.com] )

And after 3 days, here are the examples and tests:

* Tests
* action
* layeropacityslider
* legendpanel
* mappanel
* permalink
* popup
* wmscapabilities
* zoomslider

Thanks Julien-Samuel for this great summary !
19:51
Jackie Ng: Announcing: MapGuide Maestro 5.0 beta and 4.0.1 maintenance release
sur Planet OSGeo

It's actually been over 8 weeks since I last touched a line of code in Maestro (must be a record!), so it's time for a overdue release with not one, but two releases of MapGuide Maestro depending on whether you're adventurous (5.0 beta) or conservative (4.0.1)

Firstly, a brief overview of what's new in Maestro 5.0 beta

A fresh visual coat of paint

Somebody finally managed to make my favourite docking library work under Mono, so we've thrown out our hacky UI manager and replaced it with DockPanelSuite. This gives us some extra UI niceties as well such as icons for our editor tabs.

IronPython Scripting

Maestro now includes the IronPython scripting engine to allow for scripting and automating the application.

You can execute snippets of Python through the IronPython REPL console

Runtime Map Inspection

Maestro 5.0 includes a new Runtime Map Inspector utility (RtMapInspector.exe) that allows you to inspect the state of a runtime map given the session ID and the map name.

This tool still needs some work. For one thing I was hoping to get selection inspection working as well, but it didn't make it for this release.

Resource XML Diffs

The View Changes command allows you to view the comparison between the original resource and its currently edited version.

This tools helps you make better informed decisions whether to save or discard the changes you've made to the currently edited resource.
Assorted UI tweaks
Layer Editors now have a jump button to take you to the related Feature Source / Drawing Source

Text and Path dialogs in the Symbol Definition editor are optimized for better screen usage

The Layer Definition editor gets more screen real estate optimization. Each geometry style is now a separate tab.

4.0.1 Maintenance Release

Maestro 4.0.1 is the first of possibly many long-term maintenance releases and contains a fair number of bug fixes and backported minor enhancements/tweaks from the 5.0 beta. Nothing much to talk about here, 4.0.1 just adds an extra bit of polish to the 4.0 release. You can check out the changelog for all the details.

Download
17:48
Margherita Di Leo: GRASS GIS Community Sprint coming soooon!
sur Planet OSGeo

The next "GRASS GIS Community Sprint" is coming soon! It will take place from May 23 to May 28, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic directly following the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2012 conference.

Timing and Duration:
May 23, 2012 (day of arrival) - May 28, 2012 (day of departure)

Venue:
Department of Mapping and Cartography Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague

The Wiki page of the event is here.

GFOSS.it, OSGeo.org and FOSSGIS.de will offer financial support to the event.

If you like to be a sponsor of the event, and help covering costs such as meals or to help reducing travelling and accommodation expenses for GRASS developers with far arrival, please read about sponsoring the GRASS project and, if needed, contact Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>.
10:18
Simone Giannecchini: Developer's Corner: GeoServer Stunning image quality + max compression rate = New PNG8 quantizer is served!
sur Planet OSGeo
Hi everybody,
in this blog we want to introduce the new GeoServer PNG8 quantizer.

PNG8 is a shorthand for PNG 8bit, that is, a PNG image that uses a fixed palette of 256 (or less) colors and can thus encode each pixel with just one byte.
The interest in the format comes from its smaller size, often between 2 and 3 times smaller than the equivalent 24bit PNG image. Smaller size means:
- proportional size cut in tile cache storage, which normally means cutting away several GB if not TB (depending on the amount of seending and the size of the cached geographic area)
- shorter transfer times over the network, which means snappier front ends for applications delivered over typical Internet connections
- or, in other terms, multiply the amount of clients that can be served in parallel given a fixed upload channel on the serving end
Historically in GeoServer you could get fast, good quality PNG8 images as long as the image was not using translucency, that is, pixels that are only partially transparent. Indeed the existing quantizer, based on the Octree algorithm, was able to produce fully opaque or fully transparent pixels, so any translucency information was lost during the on the fly color reduction.

This approach produces good quality images for opaque sources, but the result against the typical vector overlay left a lot to be desired:

The main issue is that the antialiasing of roads and symbols is lost, since it's actually done with lots of pixels that are not fully opaque, not fully transparent, but translucent instead.

GeoServer 2.2.0 will instead ship with a new Median Cut based algorithm that can generate palettes with RGBA entries, the alpha channel preserves translucency and results in a much better looking output:

The above image can be used as an overlay on top of a background layer (e.g., Google Maps or OpenStreetMap) without significant loss of quality.
The new algorithm is also better at preserving opaque images with lots of different color shades, thought the effect is visible only against the typical DEM coloring. See the following, made with the old algorithm:

and then compare it with the same image going through the median cut version:

Performance wise the two algorithms are close enough, but the octree algorithm is generally faster at the expense of a lower quality output.
So, you may ask, how does one choose one or the other?By default GeoServer picks one or the other according to the image transparency:
- if you ask for PNG8 output and the image is opaque, the octree algorithm is used
- if you ask for PNG8 output and the image has transparency, the median cut algorithm is used instead
In case you are not happy with the default choice it's possible to add the &format_options=quantizer:mediancut or &format_options=quantizer:octree to force the usage of a specific algorithm.

Interested in more image processing related improvements? Let us know!
The GeoSolutions team,
10:02
gvSIG Team: Last days for registrations at gvSIG courses at the gvSIG-Training platform
sur Planet OSGeo
(más abajo en español)

We remind you that the registration period for the courses of the gvSIG-Training e-Learning platform [1] is still opened. The courses that are available now are the following:
- 1st edition of the “gvSIG for users course” in English. Duration: 7 weeks. Starts: 07 May 2012 (there are some vacancies, so registration will be closed this Friday May 11th).
- 1st edition of the “gvSIG 2.0 for developers course” in Spanish. Duration: 10 weeks. Starts: 28 May 2012.
In addition, we remind you that there are another courses with Open Registration:
- 1st edition “Geospatial databases: PostGRES – PostGis course” in Spanish. Duration: 6 weeks.
- 1st edition “OGC Services Publishing Extension on gvSIG” course in Spanish. Duration: 1 week.
- 1st edition “Network Analysis extension on gvSIG” course in Spanish. Duration: 2 weeks.
- 1st edition “Navtable extension and normalization of tables on gvSIG” course in Spanish. Duration: 1 week.
If you participate in any of these courses, you get credits of the gvSIG certification program, that allows you to opt for the “gvSIG User” and “Expert gvSIG User” certification [2].

For more information, you can visit our platform [1], or write us to the next e-mail addresses: inscripciones@gvsig-training.com; info@gvsig-training.com

[1] [www.gvsig-training.com]
[2] [www.gvsig.com]

Últimos días de inscripción para los cursos de gvSIG de la plataforma gvSIG-Training

Recordamos que aún está abierta la inscripción para los cursos de la Plataforma de Capacitación a Distancia gvSIG-Training [1]. Los cursos que quedan disponibles son los siguientes:
- gvSIG para usuarios (Idioma: Inglés) 1ra. Edición. Fecha de Inicio: 07 de mayo de 2012 (aún queda alguna plaza disponible, por lo que la inscripción se cerrará finalmente este viernes día 11 de mayo). Duración: 07 Semanas.
- Desarrollo sobre gvSIG v2.0 (Idioma: Español) 1ra. Edición. Fecha de Inicio: 28 de mayo de 2012. Duración: 10 Semanas.
Por otra parte, recordamos que hay otros cursos disponibles con matricula abierta y permanente:
- Base de Datos Geoespaciales: PostgreSQL – PostGIS (Idioma: Español). Duración: 6 Semanas.
- Publicación de Servicios OGC (Idioma: Español). Duración: 1 Semana.
- Análisis de Redes con gvSIG Desktop (Idioma: Español). Duración: 2 Semanas.
- NavTable y Normalización de Tablas (Idioma: Español). Duración: 1 Semana.
Al participar en cualquiera de estos cursos obtienes créditos del programa de certificación gvSIG que te permite optar a la certificación “gvSIG Usuario” y “gvSIG Usuario Experto” [1].

Para mayor información visita nuestra plataforma [1] o escríbenos a la siguientes direcciones de correo electrónico: inscripciones@gvsig-training.com; info@gvsig-training.com

[1] [www.gvsig-training.com]
[2] [www.gvsig.com]

Filed under: opinion
8:36
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings: Batch Shapefile Clipping
sur Planet OSGeo

This is just a quick “note to self” on some interesting information I picked up from the QGIS mailing list today. Kudos to David J. Bakeman for sharing this:

If both the input and the output arguments to ogr2ogr are directories then it will clip all of the shapes in the source directory and write them to the output directory.

So: ogr2ogr -clipsrc mask.shp output source

Shapefiles are the default so you don’t even need the -f “ESRI Shapefile”.
4:19
Matt Sheehan: Is Google Maps GIS Lite?
sur Planet OSGeo

We’ve never been a company which sits on its hands and wonders what is around the corner. Sure we have some key partners, but they don’t limit our reach and exploration. Our goal is to provide the most appropriate solution to our clients. That might be an ESRI solution, Google, MapQuest, technology combination, [read full article]
08 mai 2012
19:41
Jackie Ng: A big shout out
sur Planet OSGeo

Since Maestro 3.0, the user interface that you have seen was done that way because my favourite WinForms docking library DockPanelSuite was riddled with P/Invokes into Win32, rendering the library un-usable on Mono. We use this library in FDO Toolbox because the FDO .net wrapper was already windows-only so we could get away with it, but not for Maestro.

So as a result, I had no choice but to hack my own clunky pseudo-docking library that is driven by SplitContainers and TabControls. This worked to an extent, but as it turns out, those weird and crazy display problems with the Layer Definition editor (you've probably experienced it. Just try resizing the main window) is the result of bugs caused by this combination. The suggested solution in that link didn't work for me btw.

Rather than try to bolt on some bandaids to an already hacky UI which turns out to be composed of 2 components that don't like each other, I thought I'd take another look to see if there has been any effort to get DockPanelSuite working on Mono. Lo and behind, there was a saviour!

Mr Lex Li has made a patched version of DockPanelSuite with the offending P/Invokes patched out for Mono. What do we lose with these patched out P/Invoke calls? According to Lex, we lose the ability to drag and drop Dock Windows around to different areas of the main window. And you know what? We don't even use that feature! So I had to take a look at this patched DockPanelSuite.

10 minutes of UI refactoring later and behold! The new Maestro 5.0 main window!

And more importantly, here's how it looks on Mono (in Ubuntu)

The only problem I get on Mono at the moment is this big stack dump vomit from DockPanelSuite when Maestro exits, but it looks like a problem that can be worked around.

So a big shout out goes to Lex Li for finally making my original UI plans possible!
19:05
GeoExt Team: GeoExt 2 Day 2
sur Planet OSGeo
Day 1 was about getting organized, getting up to speed with Ext JS 4, and starting some work based on what the Terrestris guys did in a previous code sprint. We also started designing the data components, with an initial focus on the Layer Store.

Today we've been essentially consolidating things, focusing on what we started yesterday. To avoid too much dispersion we've essentially worked in pairs.

Here's a brief list of today's achievements:
- We have added tests and docs for the Map Panel, Action, Popup. These components are now in good shape.
- We have agreed on policies regarding setters and getters. The basic rule is to use getters and setters where it makes sense only, as opposed to defining every property in the config object.
- We have ported a number of components from GeoExt 1, including the Zoom Slider, the Slider Tip.
- We have been developing data components for handling features and layers. This work will serve as the base for feature grids and layer trees.
- The test suite is now available online. We still have failing tests, they should be taken care of in the coming days.
- We have attempted to create a Sencha Touch 2 app based on the new Map Panel. Our goal was to determine if the Map Panel could work seamlessly with both Sencha Touch 2 and Ext JS 4.
  It turns out that the Sencha Touch API is very different (or at least too different) from the Ext JS 4 API. Having a Map Panel that works with both libraries is out of reach for the time being.
- We have investigated creating builds using the Sencha build tool. The good news is that it works with GeoExt. But there are still things to sort out in order to include OpenLayers code in the builds.
The GeoExt 2 code base is available on GitHub. And here's what the new API docs look like:
18:39
Fernando Quadro: Lançada a 5ª edição da Revista FOSSGIS Brasil
sur Planet OSGeo
No final do primeiro trimestre de 2011 foi feito o marcante lançamento da Revista FOSSGIS Brasil. Se passou pouco mais de um ano e agora temos muito a comemorar. É nesse ritmo de comemoração, com grande satisfação e prazer que anunciamos o lançamento do 5° número da revista que gerreferencia o conhecimento com tecnologia livre!

O tema da série de capa é DADOS ABERTOS, uma tendência que com certeza vai interessar a você. Nessa linha, há também o artigo sobre o Estado de Alagoas, que já vem empregando as Geotecnologias livres na administração pública, bem como no acesso as informações geográficas.

Para que possamos disponibilizar informações, é necessário que primeiro estas sejam coletadas, e é sobre isso que trata o artigo sobre o Projeto TrackSource, que tem como objetivo mapear o Brasil de uma forma colaborativa.

Você ainda poderá ler artigos sobre o banco de dados geográfico e os projetos de mapas da Pastoral da Criança, conhecer o software de SIG VScenesGIS, o interessante projeto SIGLA, além de um relato detalhado da ultilização do framework degree para desenvolvimento de aplicações espaciais com Java. Não deixe de conferir a matéria sobre o uso do i3Geo no Governo do Pará.

Devido ao aniversário da Revista o entrevistado da edição sou eu (Fernando Quadro), falando sobre como nasceu o projeto, opiniões sobre geotecnologias livres, e uma pré-visão do que vem por aí.

Para fazer o download da Revista FOSSGIS Brasil, edição 5, acesse o link abaixo:

[fossgisbrasil.com.br]

Espero que gostem e aproveito a oportunidade para convidá-los a participar da revista, enviando artigos, opiniões e sugestões.

Boa leitura!
Posts Relacionados
18:10
Prodevelop: gvSIG Mini ganará nuevas funcionalidades en el GSOC 2012
sur Planet OSGeo

¿Qué es el Google Summer Of Code?

El Google Summer Of Code es una beca que concede Google a estudiantes para que participen en el desarrollo de aplicaciones de software libre, y en este caso me ha tocado a mí Carlos Sánchez por parte de la Universidad de Valencia. Los alumnos como yo en esta beca tenemos que ser aceptados por un tutor que se encargará de dirigir y puntuar el trabajo que realizamos. Normalmente estos tutores están relacionados con el proyecto o tienen interés en agregar nuevas funcionalidades, motivo por el que se ofrecen para realizar esta tarea. Como no podía ser de otra manera el encargado de tutorizar mi trabajo es Alberto Romeu que se ha encargado desde el inico del proyecto gvSIG Mini por parte de Prodevelop S.L.

gvSIG Mini ya ha evolucionado gracias a esta beca en años anteriores, ya que participa en ella amparado por el proyecto gvSIG dentro de la asociación OSGeo, siendo un año más agraciado con la beca Google Summer of Code 2012, lo que permitirá que avance el proyecto con nuevas funcionalidades mediante el duro trabajo veraniego de alumno y tutor.
Creo yo que es un motivo de celebración para todos los usuarios de este software libre.
¿Qué novedades se piensan desarrollar en gvSIG Mini?
Hasta el verano pasado gvSIG Mini adolecía de soporte para formatos vectoriales y gracias al proyecto del Google Summer of Code 2011 permitió mediante la integración de la librería de gvSIG Desktop GPE, agregar soporte para los formatos KML, GML, GPX, junto con algunas mejoras en la librería algo de aplaudir dado el gran esfuerzo realizado. Sin embargo, uno de los formatos mas habituales en software GIS, los shapefiles, sigue sin estar soportado, esperemos que este verano esto sea cosa del pasado.

Por otro lado, una de las peticiones de la comunidad de usuarios de gvSIG Mini más recurrentes, es la posibilidad de aprovechar el GPS del dispositivo móvil para digitalizar elementos directamente en campo, muy útil también para los aficionados a las mapping parties, como ya lo son muchos fans de OpenStreetMap.
Los elementos más simples que se pretende digitalizar son los puntos, directamente tomando las posiciones del GPS, pero también será posible digitalizar líneas, para situar carreteras, calles, etc, estableciendo el punto inicial y el final. Estas líneas serán polígonos, cuando se cumpla que este punto inicial y final es el mismo.

No es baladí realizar esta tarea ya que es necesario añadir la posibilidad de capturar y guardar las posiciones del GPS en un formato vectorial conocido. Y como colofón se piensa en la utilidad del formato shapefile para almacenar estos datos, lo cual implica añadir la funcionalidad de lectura y escritura dentro de gvSIG Mini.

Este formato nos va a permitir abrir los datos recogidos por nosotros con nuestra aplicación gvSIG Mini en cualquier lugar y también compartirlos con otras muchas aplicaciónes GIS con este soporte.
Abstract del proyecto
12:27
Margherita Di Leo: Sicurezza informatica e strumenti GIS Free e Open Source per l'Ingegneria - Comunicato stampa
sur Planet OSGeo

Venerdì 4 Maggio 2012, si è tenuto il workshop informativo come dal titolo
“Sicurezza informatica e strumenti GIS Free e Open Source per l'Ingegneria”
presso l'Ordine degli Ingegneri della Provincia di Matera. La notevole affluenza di pubblico è stato sintomo oggettivo per il crescente interesse in ambito professionale verso la continua formazione e gli strumenti di elevata qualita` offerti dalla comunita` del software libero. Gli ingegneri e gli altri professionisti intervenuti hanno ascoltato per oltre tre ore le esposizioni degli Ingegneri Margherita Di Leo, Angelo Giordano e Gabriele Nolè che hanno portato alla loro attenzione dei temi di sicuro interesse professionale. Non possiamo riassumere in poche parole le oltre tre ore di interventi e discussioni, tuttavia ecco qui di seguito i link al materiale (presentazioni e riprese video) messi a disposizione del pubblico secondo lettera e spirito della filosofia Open Source:

Video:
Giordano
Nole`
Di Leo

Slides:
Giordano
Nole`
Di Leo

Le tematiche affrontate hanno spaziato dalla Sicurezza Informatica agli applicativi per sistemi operativi Linux dedicati all’Ingengeria per concludersi con un’approfondita disamina dei Sistemi Informativi Geografici (GIS) Open Source e delle relative applicazioni. Dato l’interesse riscontrato è facile prevedere che le soluzioni proposte, capaci di coniugare una migliore efficienza nei processi ingegneristici con un drastico abbattimento dei costi, troveranno terreno fertile e speriamo di poterle vedere concretizzate anche per contribuire a dare ossigeno all'economia cianotica della Basilicata.

Gli organizzatori rivolgono un caldo ringraziamento a tutti gli intervenuti, alla cortesia del Segretario dell'Ordine degli Ingegneri della Provincia di Matera e all'Ing. Pierfrancesco Pellecchia che si è speso per consentire l’agevole svolgimento dell’iniziativa.
07 mai 2012
21:11
GeoExt Team: Hello GeoExt 2 - GeoExt meets Ext JS 4
sur Planet OSGeo
GeoExt 2 Code SprintThis week is an important week in the history of GeoExt: Developers from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States have gathered in Bonn (Germany) for a code sprint to work on GeoExt Version 2, which will be based Sencha's Ext JS 4 framework.

The sprint is a joint effort of terrestris, Mapgears, Camptocamp and OpenGeo, and is accompanied by developers from Occam Labs and m-click.

Other than with many code sprints where only the sprint venue and food are covered by sponsors, the following sponsors generously provided enough funds to cover travel, accommodation and a significant share of the development costs:
- University of Bern, Centre for Development and Environment
- Swisstopo
- David Bitner, Metropolitan Airports Commission
- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- Jacob Westfall
- SYNCADD
- Mettenmeier GmbH Utility Solutions
- FOSSGIS e.V.
- Felix Reichert und Partner
- landplan Büro für Landschaftsgestaltung
Day 1 - Getting Started14 developers participated today, one of them remotely via IRC. The goal was to get up to speed with Ext JS 4, and to port some of the existing examples to the new GeoExt 2 code and GeoExt 4.

Hello World in GeoExt 2

The above live example shows a basic MapPanel - one of the achievements of efforts. In particular, the following tasks were worked on by the developers:
- Alexandre Dubé, Mapgears: work on the testing framework; updated unit tests; various small fixes.
- Andreas Hocevar, OpenGeo: set up live examples and API docs; investigated how the tree components can be ported.
- Andreas Schmitz, Occam Labs: used JSDuck to parse the API doc comments, and achieved a nice result.
- Bart van den Eijnden, OpenGeo: ported the LegendPanel.
- Christian Mayer, terrestris: ported the Popup.
- Éric Lemoine, Camptocamp: worked with Marc on the MapPanel; paired with Alexandre on the test framework.
- François Van Der Biest, Camptocamp: shared an Ext 4 tutorial; work on the examples; Ext autoloading in examples
- Frédéric Junod, Camptocamp: Ext autloading for GeoExt 2; started on the FeatureGrid and an improved FeatureStore architecture.
- Johannes Weskamm: ported the Action component.
- Julien-Samuel Lacroix, Mapgears: set up the sprint wiki and a wrote a git tutorial; work on the improving the LayerStore architecture.
- Marc Jansen, terrestris: shared an initial set of GeoExt 2 components from a previous code sprint; provided advice on Ext 4 to newbies.
- Matt Priour: LayerStore architecture improvements; provided guidance on Ext 4.
- Stéphane Brunner, Camptocamp: example improvements, work on the PrintPanel.
- Volker Grabsch: our contributor from Berlin, helped with autoloading.
20:35
GeoExt Team: GeoExt Code Sprint
sur Planet OSGeo

This week is held in Bonn, Germany, a code sprint targeting the support of ExtJS 4. The new release of GeoExt, named GeoExt2 can be accessed in a git repository: [https:]]
Good luck to all developers and thanks to all involved in the organization and the sponsoring of this event (more info here)
14:32
gvSIG Team: gvSIG and the protection of cultural heritage.
sur Planet OSGeo

Hi all,
this post is a translation made from the post on the gvSIG Russian blog.

The 26th-27th April 2012, in the State Directorate for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of the Lipetsk region, was held the Scientific-practical workshop Problems of Archaeology of the Late Middle Ages and Modern Times in the Cities of Central Russia. The organizers of the workshop invited to speak the Russian gvSIG Community coordinators S.A.Mikhailov and A.Yu.Karandeev with a report on the usage of GIS technology applied to the problems of protection of cultural heritage.

In its report, the authors described the regulations governing the protection of cultural heritage sites in the Russian Federation, including terms of land law, presented the results of work on the preparation of documentation for land management of cultural heritage territories in the Lipetsk region, which were performed together with employees of the State Directorate for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of the Lipetsk region, and LC SPO “Archaeologist” (Lipetsk) during 2011 – 2012.

In the final part of the presentation authors told the specialists in the field of archeology and cultural heritage about the gvSIG Project, the possibilities of the open source GIS gvSIG, the Russian gvSIG Community and its information resources.

It should be noted that, along with other software products, gvSIG Desktop was used in the process of preparation of documentation for land management of cultural heritage in the projects that were mentioned by the authors.

The authors would like to thank N.D. Ivashova and A.A. Naydenov for the invitation to participate in the workshop and the opportunity to make the presentation.

Filed under: community, english, events, gvSIG Desktop
12:47
Fernando Quadro: Curso Online de GeoServer
sur Planet OSGeo
Caros leitores,

Gostaria de convidá-los a participar do curso online que estarei ministrando de GeoServer. O curso ocorrerá no mês de junho nos dias 16, 23 e 30 (sábados) das 09:00 as 12:00h. As vagas são limitadas, e para as inscrições realizadas até o dia 30/05 possuem desconto.

Aqueles que poderem divulgar para seus contatos, agradeço. Quem quiser saber mais informações sobre o curso, pode obtê-las no site do curso (http://www.geocursos.com.br), twitter (http://twitter.com/geo_cursos) e pelo facebook (http://www.facebook.com/geocursosbr).
Posts Relacionados
6:00
Equipo GeoTux: Transformaciones afínes y de similaridad en R
sur Planet OSGeo
En este post doy un ejemplo de cómo usar mi primer paquete de R, llamado 'vec2dtransf', para realizar transformaciones afínes y de similaridad sobre datos vectoriales.

For English click here.

Casos de uso
Las transformaciones afínes y de similaridad son útiles cuando se integran datos espaciales de distintas fuentes. Suele ocurrir que los vectores de un conjunto de datos (llamémoslo 'A') no coinciden con un conjunto de datos base ('B'), el cual puede ser raster o vector. En dicho escenario uno buscaría reposicionar 'A' tomando como referencia 'B'.

Hay varios casos en los que esta situación ocurre, por ejemplo:
- 'A' no tiene información de su proyección y no hay ninguna pista que la indique.
- 'A' ya fue proyectado pero simplemente no coincide con 'B' (piensen en datos con datum local cuando se migran a WGS84.)
- 'A' tiene un sistema de coordenadas arbitrario o falso y va a ser integrado con datos de carácter nacional. Este puede ser el caso de proyectos arqueológicos o de ingeniería.
- 'A' fue digitalizado a partir de una imagen distorcionada, como un mapa antiguo escaneado.
- 'A' fue digitalizado a partir de una imagen de satélite mal georreferenciada (recientemente ocurrió en OpenStreetMap).
El paquete 'vec2dtransf'
El paquete de R 'vec2dtransf' provee clases para definir y realizar transformaciones afínes y de similaridad sobre datos vectoriales, concretamente en objetos 'sp' (objetos creados por el paquete de R 'sp'). Las transformaciones se pueden definir a partir de puntos de control o directamente desde parámetros de transformación. Si se proveen más puntos de control que los requeridos, se ejecutan mínimos cuadrados, permitiendo obtener residuales y RMSE (error medio cuadrático).

Las transformaciones de similaridad permiten rotar, desplazar y escalar geometrías, mientras que las afines permiten rotar, desplazar, escalar (incluso aplicando diferentes factores de escala en cada eje) y torcer geometrías. Por lo menos dos (2) puntos de…

Read more...
06 mai 2012
21:08
Volker Mische: WhereCamp EU 2012 Amsterdam Part 2
sur Planet OSGeo

I surely enjoyed the WhereCamp EU in Amsterdam, but I didn't realise that I gained so much from it, until I told friends about it. Hence it's time for another blog post about one-dimensional mapping, psychogeograhpy and geo yoga.
The sessions
The topics of the sessions at there WhereCamp EU where widespread. I normally enjoy technical developer focused talks the most, but this time it was different. It was such a great mixture from developers to mapping people that lead to broad variety of talks. Here are my favourite ones.
One-dimensional maps
It started with a historic abstract about one-dimensional maps, which was already interesting by itself. I really got the point, why such maps make sense. Sorry for the lack of more information about it, I should probably ask Laurence Penney for a blog post on this topic.

The final goal of his endeavors is having a nice app for mobile devices, that shows your way to a certain location as a simple list you can scroll through. No panning or zooming would be needed, it's just a simple list that includes everything important you might see, together with simple explanations where to go. It's not about being super precise, but about being simple. An explanation like "cross the park" is easier than a detailed explanation of all the crossings you might hit while walking through the park.
Psychogeography
The talk about Psychogeography from Tim Waters was an eye-opener for me. If never really thought about the impact of geography on the psych. You should really talk with Tim about it, or visit a talk from him if you get the chance. His slides are available on slideshare.

I've recently read a blog post from Chris McDowall about An exercise in getting lost which fits nicely into the topic of psychogeorgaphy.
Canvas for map visualisations/analysis
I've already known the nice demo created by Steven Ottens with Leaflet and the Canvas element. His talk gave lots of background information how he did it and what can be done with the Canvas element. For example displaying a heightmap from a line you draw on the map, all client-sided.
Earthwatchers
Another nice presentation came from Geodan about saving the uranguton by satellite. The project is called Earthwatchers. There you can take the responsibility of a part of the rain forest on Borneo and monitor it for deforestation.

There are plans to have an HTML5 based interface (instead of the current Silverlight one. Given that it is a Geodan project, I hope they'll use MapQuery for it.
Geo yoga
At the end of the WhereCamp, there were some lightning talks, one of the most fun ones was by Tim Waters called geo yoga. You can find pictures at the official geo yoga website. It is all about pantomiming places (e.g. countries.)
My session
My session was about MapQuery, I've already blogged about it last week, hence here's the link.

I planned for another one for Sunday, which was a Q&A about all sorts of Couch things. It would have taken place on the couch in front of one of the rooms. I'm not sure if people didn't get where it was supposed to take place, or were just not interested in the (Geo)Couch topic.
Conclusion
The whole WhereCamp EU was well organized and the crowd was very diverse, all you need for a great unconference. Hope to see you all next year wherever the camp might be.

12:44

OpenGeo Blog: PostGIS 1.5.4 Released

sur Planet OSGeo

The 1.5 series is still receiving maintenance releases, and today marks another one. Here’s the official news file:

 This is a bug fix release, addressing issues that have been
 filed since the 1.5.3 release.

 - Bug Fixes
   - #547, ST_Contains memory problems (Sandro Santilli)
   - #621, Problem finding intersections with geography (Paul Ramsey)
   - #627, PostGIS/PostgreSQL process die on invalid geometry (Paul Ramsey)
   - #810, Increase accuracy of area calculation (Paul Ramsey)
   - #852, improve spatial predicates robustness (Sandro Santilli, Nicklas Avén)
   - #877, ST_Estimated_Extent returns NULL on empty tables (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1028, ST_AsSVG kills whole postgres server when fails (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1056, Fix boxes of arcs and circle stroking code (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1135, improve testsuite predictability (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum)
   - #1146, images generator crashes (bronaugh)
   - #1170, North Pole intersection fails (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1179, ST_AsText crash with bad value (kjurka)
   - #1184, honour DESTDIR in documentation Makefile (Bryce L Nordgren)
   - #1227, server crash on invalid GML
   - #1252, SRID appearing in WKT (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1264, st_dwithin(g, g, 0) doesn't work (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1344, allow exporting tables with invalid geometries (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1389, wrong proj4text for SRID 31300 and 31370 (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1406, shp2pgsql crashes when loading into geography (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1595, fixed SRID redundancy in ST_Line_SubString (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1596, check SRID in UpdateGeometrySRID (Mike Toews, Sandro Santilli)
   - #1602, fix ST_Polygonize to retain Z (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1697, fix crash with EMPTY entries in GiST index (Paul Ramsey)
   - #1772, fix ST_Line_Locate_Point with collapsed input (Sandro Santilli)
   - #1799, Protect ST_Segmentize from max_length=0  (Sandro Santilli)
   - Alter parameter order in 900913 (Paul Ramsey)
   - Support builds with "gmake" (Greg Troxel)

05 mai 2012
21:03
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings: Loading Zipped Files Directly into QGIS
sur Planet OSGeo

Today’s hot topic on the mailing list was a recently added feature which enables QGIS to load data directly from ZIP archives.

To get the contents of a ZIP archive display in the browser dock, it is necessary to activate this feature in the Options dialog. The setting is called “Scan for contents of compressed files (.zip) in browser dock” and is located right at the bottom of the first tab. Both “basic scan” and “full scan” settings seem to work fine:

Settings – Options

In the file browser panel, archives are now listed like any other folder and their content can be added to the map through both double click and drag and drop.

This can help save tons of disk space: The NaturalEarthData.zip in this example is 280 MB big while the unzipped folders take more than 700 MB.
11:12
Joachim Van der Auwera: Plug-ins and faces overview for Geomajas
sur Planet OSGeo

Last week, I gave a training for the Geomajas spatial application framework. Part of the training includes an overview of all the components of Geomajas. We call these the faces and plug-ins. Most of the components in the list have been released, though some are still work in progress. The presentation with the list is [...]
04 mai 2012
11:58
Andreas Schmitz: deegree updates
sur Planet OSGeo

Hello everyone, it's been a while. Much has changed in deegree since.

From a project and community perspective, the new website would be the most obvious. We are also finally working on a proper documentation handbook for deegree 3, the latest work in progress can be found at [download.occamlabs.de] .

Aside from that, our new company has started out quite nicely, we were sometimes so busy we had no time to write blog posts. I know, a lousy excuse :-)

Let's see what else has changed in deegree. The layers/themes refactoring/rewriting has taken place, and is now in a usable state. In fact, it's now the preferred way of configuring your service content.

Speaking of services, there's also a new member of deegree's little service family, the WMTS. Which means we also have a couple of tile stores to provide data.

I plan to pick out a few of the new features and post about them, but of course you're free to play around with it yourself.

Last but not least, we will of course be attending the OSGeo Bolsena Code Sprint 2012 this year. We haven't finalized our plans yet, but I'll be sure to post updates on our activities here, so stay tuned!
0:50
Tim Sutton: Quick Tip: Build the latest QGIS nightly build as a standalone installer for Windows
sur Planet OSGeo

I’m running a training course next week and will be basing it on the nightly build of QGIS, so I wanted to quickly build an installer for use on the course. I simply ran these commands (starting in a checkout of the Quantum GIS source code). sudo apt-get install nsis cd ms-windows/osgeo4w ./creatensis.pl qgis-dev cd... Read more »
02 mai 2012
22:05
Peter Batty: Geospatial technology in 5 to 10 years
sur Planet OSGeo

I have been absent from blogging for a while, working on various interesting new things behind the scenes! I am planning to make an effort to be posting here more regularly - yes I know everyone says that, we'll see if I can manage it! To kick things off again, the post below is a document I was asked to write for the United Nations Programme on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM),
15:38
csgis: gvSIG CE at 2012 Washington GIS Conference
sur Planet OSGeo

Karsten Vennemann, principal of Terra GIS Ltd. and education contact for the “Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source” group, is ready to present a 4 hour workshop at the WAURISA 2012 conference: “Introduction to gvSIG CE and geo-processing with SEXTANTE”.

The workshop consists of the following three parts (with 15 minutes breaks in between sessions):
1. Introduction to gvSIG CE Desktop GIS
60 minutes, presentation style
Objective: Participants will get a short introduction to free and open source GIS tools, the desktop GIS gvSIG CE (Community Edition) and the SEXTANTE library. The overview will include topics such as general GIS functionality in gvSIG CE, supported data formats, editing of GIS data, layout and cartography, accessing spatial databases and available extensions for gvSIG (e.g. 3D, Raster and Remote Sensing, and Network Data Analysis) . A discussion of geo-processing and spatial analysis with native gvSIG and with SEXTANTE tools will close the general overview.
2. “Hands-on” exercises and examples using gvSIG CE
75 minutes, demonstration style, participants can follow the demos “hands-on” on their own (windows based) laptop with gvSIG CE installed.
The exercises will cover the general use of gvSIG: editing of GIS data, accessing spatial databases, and layout & cartography
Objective: The examples will illustrate how to use gvSIG CE as a general desktop GIS
3. “Hands-on” exercises and examples for Spatial Analysis and Geo-processing with gvSIG CE and SEXTANTE
75 minutes, demonstration style, participants can follow the demos “hands-on” on their own (windows based) laptop with gvSIG CE installed.
The exercises will cover the use of spatial analysis and geo-processing tools in gvSIG CE for raster and vector data: native gvSIG tools, and tools available via the integrated SEXTANTE library (also includes SAGA GIS, GRASS and R (Statistical package) algorithms).
Objective: The examples will illustrate how to use gvSIG CE and SEXTANTE for Spatial Analysis and Geo-processing in order to learn about the capabilities and functionality available.

Workshop presenters/instructors
Karsten Vennemann, Terra GIS (GIS Analyst and instructor for OS GIS)
GIS Consultant, frequent speaker and OS GIS Instructor
http://terragis.net

Links
gvSIG CE (Community Edition): [gvsigce.org]
SEXTANTE: library [www.sextantegis.com]
Terra GIS: [terragis.net]
11:53
gvSIG Team: Acerca de los mercados emergentes
sur Planet OSGeo

Nos encontramos en un momento de cambio mundial -Crisis- sobre el que mucho se habla y opina, y aquí, por supuesto, no vamos a ser menos.

Para entender lo que está pasando debemos abrir bien los ojos y mirar más allá de lo que estamos acostumbrados, al menos los europeos, que seguimos con la tendencia a pensar que todo el mundo gira en torno a nosotros.

Hemos de mirar más allá de nuestro país o nuestra región económica, hemos de ser conscientes de que vivimos un mundo en permanente interoperabilidad.

Se lleva muchos años hablando de los países emergentes, pero quizás no lleguemos a racionalizar en toda su completitud lo que esto significa.

En las últimas décadas la economía mundial venía reglada por el conocido G7, grupo formado por los dirigentes de Alemania, Canadá, Estados Unidos, Francia, Gran Bretaña, Italia y Japón, que como instrumentos de poder tienen al Fondo Monetario Internacional y al Banco Mundial, instituciones que por una regla no escrita alternan hasta la fecha y desde su fundación en su presidencia a un representante de Europa y a un representante de Estados Unidos respectivamente.

No es cuestión ahora de analizar la incidencia que ha tenido en otros lugares del mundo las políticas económicas derivadas del G7 y sus instrumentos, si bien desgraciadamente, al menos en España, estamos sufriéndolas y esto parece que no ha hecho más que empezar. Lo que resulta evidente es que las principales potencias emergentes, o más bien, sus dirigentes, se han organizado en torno a un grupo de poder alternativo, conocido como los BRICS (Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica) que simplemente y por poner un ejemplo están intentando en los últimos tiempos, en caso de que sean capaces de superar sus contradicciones propias, crear un Banco que sea alternativa al Banco Mundial.

Este combate BRICS vs G7 está cambiando la polaridad político-económica del planeta y debemos situar ahí el origen o explicación de grandes cambios que inciden de forma particular en la vida tanto de los ciudadanos como de las empresas.

Si un grupo emergente, BRICS, amenaza el poder del hasta ahora hegemónico, G7, es fácil entender que estas convulsiones afecten directamente y sobre todo, a los eslabones más débiles. Entre los dirigentes, en el caso del G7, este eslabón débil se encuentra ante todo en la Unión Europea, y dentro de ella, España, tras Grecia, Portugal e Irlanda parece ser quien más sufre la actual situación.

Esto entre los dirigentes; a nivel general, cuando se habla de pérdidas, recortes, etc ya sabemos cual es el eslabón verdaderamente débil, los ciudadanos.

Una vez establecida esta visión general, empecemos a recorrer lo particular. Producto de estos movimientos globales se producen numerosas interacciones de un carácter más concreto. En el caso de España se producen interacciones con América Latina y es interesante caracterizar los rasgos principales de esta interacción.

Un complejo histórico en España era el famoso ‘Europa empieza al norte de los pirineos”. ¿Cómo se atrevían estos europeos a decir que nosotros no eramos europeos? Este complejo ha estado durante mucho tiempo, desconozco si sigue, residiendo en la sociedad española. Pero esto al final se acabó. ¿Cuándo? Cuando en España, muerto el dictador, se inició y terminó el proceso de integración en la Unión Europea. Fue el momento del famoso: ‘ya somos europeos’ y empezamos a mirar cada vez más a Europa y a despreciar cada vez más los lazos de relación con Latinoamérica.

Europa era lo moderno y Latinoamérica no era más que las antiguas colonias. Nosotros crecíamos y las antiguas colonias terminaban siendo intervenidas, muchas de ellas, por el FMI.

Y hete aquí que en España nos encontramos en una curiosa situación. Estamos en recesión, siendo eslabón débil y por contra, Latinoamérica se nos muestra como uno de los mercados emergentes.

Esto da a una sencilla ecuación: Latinoamérica creciendo + España en recesión = Empresas españolas a por el mercado Latinoamericano.

Una situación que me recuerda algunas películas clásicas de la conquista del oeste americano, donde se daba un disparo de salida y ahí iba la muchedumbre, cada uno con sus medios, unos a caballo, otros en asno y otros andando a la conquista de los nuevos territorios.

Pues ahí van las empresas. Tanto multinacionales como pymes, cada una con sus medios a la conquista del mercado Latinoamericano. Y no sé si estas empresas terminan por tener en cuenta, por analizar la nueva situación Geopolítica.

Sin lugar alguno a dudas el mercado de referencia en el mercado Latinoamericano es Brasil. Creo que sería interesante que supieran lo que la presidenta de Brasil, Rousseff dijo a la presidenta de Alemania, Merkel [1]

Una cita significativa del artículo es:

El modo como Rousseff encaró a Merkel habla por sí solo. Los países desarrollados quieren "canibalizar" a los emergentes, dijo la presidenta, lo que "no vamos a permitir".

Y creo que esto debería llevar a la reflexión a las empresas. No se debe obviar tampoco que en estos países existe una inercia burocrática muy ligada a la corrupción pero esos circuitos administrativos están reservados para las grandes compañías, las llamadas multinacionales.

Luego tenemos a muchas pymes, en este caso las del sector TIC que van a la conquista del territorio LAC (Latinoamérica y Caribe) sin tener acceso a esos circuitos, sin ser conscientes de la nueva situación. Y esto suele terminar en fracaso. Las multinacionales y las pymes juegan un rol de colonos y aprendices.

La visión a este respecto de la Asociación gvSIG es muy distinto. En primer lugar porque seguimos considerando el software como un medio y no como un fin en si mismo. Por mucho que se utilice software libre, si se va con el modelo clásico, si se sigue pensando en generar dependencia, en no buscar socios de igual a igual en el mercado LAC, se sigue yendo a los esquemas clásicos que conducen al fracaso.

Latinoamérica es un mercado emergente de grandes oportunidades. Nadie lo duda. Pero creemos que hay que ir atendiendo a un nuevo modelo. No ‘sólo’ trabajando con software libre sino adoptando su filosofía, creando esos escenarios donde si todos suman todos ganan.

Cuando en gvSIG hablamos del modelo solemos hacer referencia a las ventajas de trabajar con software libre en cuanto a desarrollo de tejido industrial local de calidad. Pues bien, esos mismos principios han de servir para las colaboraciones internacionales. Los proyectos deben ser ejecutados en colaboración con empresas locales de allá donde surjan las oportunidades y a ser posible que sean esas empresas las que lo dirijan.

Todo esto debería realizarse en una marco de confianza, de colaboración y con la base de conocimiento compartido. ¿Que esto suena bonito pero así la realidad no funciona? Los voceros del modelo clásico, de que la colaboración no es posible que se desarrolle de manera efectiva en el mundo de los negocios, ya sabemos donde nos han llevado con su maravilloso modelo.

En estos momentos de escasez, de crisis, es donde más atento hay que estar para diferenciar entre los que hablan de colaboración como mero marketing social o los que apuestan por el modelo de la colaboración, que ante todo en el sector de las pymes TIC es el único que las puede hacer viables en una realidad donde las grandes compañías hacen valer toda su fuerza con las ya mencionadas, en posts anteriores, prácticas de dumping y dumping predatorio.

Que la ética y la solidaridad se conviertan en una exigencia en esta nueva forma de hacer negocios es la base del nuevo modelo en el que apuesta la Asociación gvSIG.

[1] [www.jornada.unam.mx]

Filed under: gvSIG Association, opinion, spanish
01 mai 2012
22:52
OSGeo-ES: Comienzan las elecciones en OSGeo-es 2012
sur Planet OSGeo

Me permito copiar en el blog este mensaje de Micho a la lista del capítulo para darle la máxima difusión. Un saludo. Jorge.

Hola a todos,

este año me encargo de actuar de CRO para el proceso de elecciones dentro del Capítulo, y lo que primero que tengo que hacer es comunicaros que hoy a dado comienzo este proceso en el Capítulo Hispanohablante de OSGeo. Tenéis una descripción del mismo y el calendario en el wiki [1].

Siguiendo el proceso, el primer paso será la elección de Miembros con Derecho a Voto [2]. Tenéis de plazo para enviar las candidaturas hasta el 16 de Mayo del 2012. Para ello debéis enviar un correo a mgarcia [arroba] osgeo [punto] org adjuntando en el asunto la palabra clave [CRO]. La candidatura puede ser a uno mismo, a otra persona o a un grupo de ellos y podrá nominar cualquier miembro de la comunidad. Para presentarse como candidato, la persona tiene que estar dada de alta como miembro del Capítulo [3]. Debéis acompañar la candidatura con un párrafo explicando brevemente la razón de la misma. Tenéis información más detallada en [4] y [5].

Una vez cerrado el plazo del nominaciones de MDV el día 16 de Mayo, a partir del 17 y hasta el 23 de mayo se realizará el proceso de votación para los nuevos MDV. Solo podrán votar los actuales MDV[2]. Tenéis la descripción del proceso en [4]. El día 24 de Mayo publicaré el resultado de la votación en esta lista.

Apelamos a la responsabilidad de los actuales MDV para que participen en el proceso, tanto en las nominaciones como en las votaciones.

A partir del día 25 de Mayo se inicia el proceso de elección del Board. Como en el caso de los MDV el primer paso será las nominaciones a miembros del Board. Este proceso irá desde el 25 de Mayo hasta el 6 de Junio. Los correos para presentarse como candidato al Board deberán, como en el caso anterior, ir dirigidos al CRO con la palabra clave [CRO] en el asunto del correo. Asimismo como en el proceso de los MDV se deberá acompañar la candidatura con un pequeño parrafo. Para las candidaturas al Board, solo podrán presentarse los miembros que en ese momento estén dados de alta como MDV[2].

Cerrado el plazo de presentación de candidaturas al Board el día 6 de Junio, desde el 7 hasta el 13 de Junio se realizará el proceso de votación de los miembros del Board. Serán los MDV los que puedan participar en este proceso, enviado sus votaciones al CRO con la palabra clave [CRO] en el asunto.

El día 14 de junio se publicará en esta lista el resultado de las elecciones con los nuevos miembros del Board.

Una vez más apelamos a la responsabilidad de todas las personas del Capítulo para que participen en el proceso.

[1] [wiki.osgeo.org]
[2] [wiki.osgeo.org]
[3] [wiki.osgeo.org]
[4] [wiki.osgeo.org]
[5] [wiki.osgeo.org]
[6] [wiki.osgeo.org]

Micho Garcia
GIS Developer Artisan
michogarcia.org
geomati.co

Filed under: al-planet, blog Tagged: board, cd, charter members, elections, mdv
11:34
Micha Silver: Spatialite: Speedup your query with spatial indexing
sur Planet OSGeo

Spatialite, like any good spatial data management system, can build a spatial index for your layers. Using this index in your spatial queries will dramatically shorten the runtime for that query. The latest version of Spatialite offers a nice compact format for using a spatial index. To demonstrate, I created a point layer of 20,000 theoretical store locations, with sales data for each store, and a polygon layer of over 280 “local councils”. My mission it to sum up the total sales in each local council. So I need to find which stores are located in each local council and aggregate sales for those stores.

We begin with two tables, councils (multipolygon) and stores (point) that look like this:
spatialite> SELECT * FROM councils LIMIT 10; pk_uid Name Geometry ---------- ---------- ---------- 1 Ronneby 2 Sölvesbor 3 Älvdalen ....

spatialite> SELECT * FROM stores LIMIT 10;
pk_uid sales Geometry
---------- ---------------- ----------
1 192617.423921806
2 75489.1390022072
3 163013.639152632
....

Let’s build the query. First, we are using both tables, so the FROM part of our SQL looks like:
FROM councils AS c, stores AS s
and since we want to aggregate total sales for each council, we require a GROUP BY clause:
GROUP BY c.pk_uid
What results do we want? The council name and total sales, so the SELECT part of our query will be:
SELECT c.Name AS Name, SUM(s.sales) AS "Total Sales"
Finally, we formulate the criteria, stores contained in each council, like so:
WHERE ST_Contains(c.Geometry, s.Geometry)

Putting it all together, our “naive” query (no spatial index yet) goes:
SELECT c.Name AS Name, SUM(s.sales) AS "Total Sales" FROM councils AS c, stores AS s WHERE ST_Contains(c.Geometry, s.Geometry) GROUP BY c.pk_uid;
Now this query will run successfully on our two tables as described, but you better go for lunch when you start the query. It might finish on a fast computer by the time you get back… The query loops thru all 20,000 store locations for each of the 280 councils. So that’s over 5,000,000 table scans, and checks for each point in each polygon.

So how do we utilize spatial indexing to speed things up? The R*Tree indexing and its implementation in Spatialite are covered in the Spatialite Cookbook. It’s important to note that Spatialite does NOT make use of a spatial index unless you explicitly incorporate it into the query statement. (BTW, this is unlike PostGIS which automatically uses a spatial index, if it’s available.)
The options to implement a spatial index in a query structure were clearly explained in this thread from the spatialite maillist.

First we create a spatial index for both tables:
spatialite> SELECT CreateSpatialIndex('councils','Geometry'); 1 spatialite> SELECT CreateSpatialIndex('stores','Geometry'); 1

Now the additional WHERE clause, in it’s new incarnation (requires spatialite >=3.0) looks like this for our query:
s.ROWID IN (SELECT ROWID FROM SpatialIndex WHERE f_table_name='stores' AND search_frame=c.Geometry)

“SpatialIndex” is a new virtual table, and using the search_frame component of that table we filter out the store locations in the bounding box (AKA Mbr=Minimum Bounding Rectangle). Searching for points in a rectangle is much faster than the full ST_Contains (or equivalent ST_Within) function. After this filtering, the ST_Contains() function runs on only a small subset of the 20,000 store locations.

So the spatial index enabled query will now look like:
SELECT c.Name AS Name, SUM(s.sales) AS "Total Sales" FROM councils AS c, stores AS s WHERE ST_Contains(c.Geometry, s.Geometry) AND s.ROWID IN (SELECT ROWID FROM SpatialIndex WHERE f_table_name='stores' AND search_frame=c.Geometry) GROUP BY c.pk_uid;
On my machine, this query, aided by the spatial index, completed in less than 1.5 minutes. The first “naive” query took over 35 minutes. Pretty cool, no?
0:07
OpenGeo Blog: The Earth is Not Flat: Volume 2
sur Planet OSGeo

I really want the geography support in PostGIS to be good, so when I get tickets on it, I take the time to investigate, particularly when they say there are problems with correctness.

This recent ticket took a little while to visualize and confirm, and it’s worth showing so hopefully other folks can debug their issues on their own. The submitter basically said, “look, I have two squares, and I know the smaller one is contained in the larger, and I know that they both contain a marker, and yet when I run containment tests, they say the marker is only contained by the smaller square, but if the larger square contains the smaller it must logically also contain the marker!” And, helpfully, he included the SQL for the tests, which included the squares.

You can see where his concern comes from. The smaller square is inside the larger.

And the marker is inside both.

However, this is a visualization in mercator. The lines between vertices are being drawn as linear interpolations in planar space. The geography calculations involve great circles between vertices in spherical space. What does that look like?

Hm, the lower lines don’t actually line up.

And the marker is actually between the lower lines. It’s contained by the smaller square, but not by the larger one. Just like the geography tests said.

The moral of the story is, we aren’t good at visually reasoning about boundaries on a sphere. Our practice is all cartesian and it causes us to make mistakes.

This is something I learned during the development of geography, when I spent many hours debugging test cases that the code was getting “wrong” only to find in the end that the problem was entirely between my ears. (Example, does POINT(0 1) fall on LINESTRING(-1 1, 1 1)? If you said “yes”, you too have problems between your ears.)

So, plug your problem into KML LineStrings (not Polygons, they aren’t rendered as great circles!) and have a look before reporting correctness issues in geography, please!
30 avril 2012
18:46
Jackie Ng: New mg-desktop binaries
sur Planet OSGeo
It's been a while, but I've just uploaded some new mg-desktop binaries with some new features worthy of a new blog post.

More Controls

The Map Viewer library (OSGeo.MapGuide.Viewer.dll) has been fitted with some extra user controls which should look familiar to what you've used in the AJAX and Fusion web viewers.

Measure

The MgLineMeasureControl allows you to perform distance-based measurements by tracing the segments you wish to measure on the map. The updated MapViewerTest application demonstrates usage of this control.

Buffer

The MgBufferControl functions exactly like its AJAX and Fusion counterparts. Nothing more to say. If you've used the buffer tool in the AJAX and Fusion viewers, this control is exactly the same.

Query

The MgQueryControl is similar to the AJAX and Fusion counterpart.

The difference is that query results are displayed in a new window, with full data grid display of all attributes.

Zooming and Selection can work on multiple rows in the query result grid. Clicking zoom with multiple selected results will zoom to the aggregate bounding box of the selected features. Clicking select will replace the current map selection with your selected query results.

Profiling Support

This release of mg-desktop also merges the new Profiling feature in MapGuide Open Source 2.4 / AIMS 2013. The MapViewerTest application includes a Profile command which displays the same XML content for profiling results as the Site Administrator.

For this release (and future ones). I'll be putting up 2 flavours of mg-desktop:
- One that targets .net Framework 2.0 and requires the Visual C++ 2008 redistributable
- One that targets .net Framework 4.0 and requires the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable
This way you can choose the one that best matches your existing code and libraries, because not everyone is (or can be) on the latest and greatest framework/compiler.

Download mg-desktop
17:05
Matt Sheehan: Mobile Geo Technology Review
sur Planet OSGeo

We’ve mentioned before that the mobile market is in a very fluid state. New hardware releases, differing approaches to app development and new tools to help improve locational accuracy are just a few of these areas of change. The lack of maturity is one of the reasons why the market remains consumer driven. [read full article]
16:16
Slashgeo (FOSS articles): AGSE 2012, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
sur Planet OSGeo

AGSE 2012 - Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment
5th International Conference and Summer School

Conference Theme: "Geoinformation - Catalyst for planning, development and good governance "

Location: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Date: July 16 - 20, 2012

Conference Website: http://applied-geoinformatics.org

Email: agse@hft-stuttgart.de
Google Plus One [http%3A%2F%2Fapplied-geoinformatics.org%0A%09Email%3A+agse%40hft-stuttgart.de%0A&source=Slashgeo.org"] title="Publish this post to LinkedIn">
15:12
geomati.co: Un año de geomati.co
sur Planet OSGeo

“Hoy cumplimos un año y un día, que parece una condena”

Con esta frase comenzó Oscar su ponencia de ICOS en Girona. Han pasado ya unas semanas desde aquel momento pero no habíamos encontrado hasta ahora un hueco en el que poder escribir con calma un post que hiciera balance del año. No ha sido este post lo único que se nos ha resistido. También son recientes la página web y una larga lista de pequeños detalles que hemos ido dejando para más tarde porque andábamos muy ocupados.

Vale, ¿ocupados en qué? Pues en colaborar: entre nosotros, entre algunos que estaréis leyendo este post y en fin, con todos a través de las aportaciones al software libre que hemos realizado. En el último año hemos contribuido código a gvSIG Desktop[1], gvSIG CE[2], gvSIG mini[3], thredds[4], geoserver[5], geoexplorer[6], GGL2[7], Geotools[8], etc. Son en su mayor parte pequeñas colaboraciones, pero reflejan nuestra filosofía de trabajo basada en el software libre.

En efecto, todos los miembros de la red tenemos cierta experiencia trabajando con software libre y el resultado de ello son desarrollos que se enfocan directamente como colaboraciones con proyectos de software libre existentes. Es el caso de ikiMap[9], durante cuyo desarrollo participamos en un pequeño refáctoring de gvSIG mini y que en cuanto se cierre incorporará sus herramientas de edición al proyecto. Aprovechamos la ocasión para agradecer a Alberto Romeu por su trabajo en gvSIG mini y por su espíritu colaborativo, que hizo dicha colaboración posible.

Además de las colaboraciones puntuales, hemos aportado algunos proyectos enteros que han sido liberados tras finalizar el desarrollo. El caso más claro de esto es el propio ICOS, que presentó Oscar en las Jornadas de Software Libre de Girona y que ya ha despertado interés en algunos centros de investigación (no españoles, obviamente, que bastante tienen, pero ese es otro tema).

Por cierto, las jornadas de Girona me parecieron especialmente gratificantes este año. Puede que no sólo fuera por las ponencias, tal vez influyó que era la primera vez que íbamos como “geomati.cos”, o tal vez porque fue allí donde se gestó. En cualquier caso quiero felicitar a los organizadores por su esfuerzo continuado en darnos ese foro para el intercambio, para el enriquecimiento mutuo… y para que surjan cosas como geomati.co.

[1] [www.gvsig.org]
[2] [gvsigce.org]
[3] [https:]]
[4] [www.unidata.ucar.edu]
[5] [geoserver.org]
[6] [blog.opengeo.org]
[7] [www.gearscape.org]
[8] [www.geotools.org]
[9] [www.ikimap.com]

Skip to page: 1 2 3 ... 39

← Blog Interopérabilité &...

Communauté	Ressources	L'emploi	Le marché	L'association	Fils RSS
Forum Blogs Wiki Planet Carte des membres Sites amis	Annuaire Agenda Biblio Netvibes Fiches AMO-CNIG Paris PCGIS Téléchargements	Offres d'emploi Banque de CV Carte des CV Formations Démarche Métiers	Geo-Entreprises Geo-Communiqué Appels d'offres	L'association Qui sommes-nous ? Nous aider Bienfaiteurs Partenaires Historique Statuts	Tout le site Job Géomatique Services GeoBlogs ...	Faire un don Mentions légales

Le portail francophone de la géomatique

Feeds

Planet OSGeo

Enclosure: [download]