Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice, PDF version of this call is available here : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.
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(our apologies for cross-postings)
Dear colleagues,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best regards,
OGRS2012 program committee

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

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

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

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

On the geospatial open source front:

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

On the Esri front:

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

On the Microsoft front:

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

On the remote sensing front:

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

On the GNSS / GPS front:

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

In the miscellaneous category:

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

In the maps category:

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

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

Is Geospatial Special?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday, Google released Google Earth 6.2. 

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

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

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

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