Slashgeo

Here's your weekly dose of geonews. There has been less than usual geonews published this week in part because nothing that major came out and also because the little time I can devote to the project has been attributed to our upcoming migration to Drupal. I think our users can expect a migration between April and June. It will be a major improvement for our users and editors. That said, there will probably be some bumps (e.g. data loss, downtime) in the process. I'll keep you updated... and now the geonews!

On the Google front, Google Maps for Android, specifically with the new Google Maps for mobile 4.1, comes with a few new features. There's changes to browser support in the Google Maps JavaScript API v3, exit FF 2 and IE 6. There's a reorganization in Google Earth layers to help users browse places of interest. Can you believe Windsor wants to pay Google to reshoot StreetView over their city because they looked bad when Google visited them. Here's a Google Earth flight simulator with an iPhone controller. And why not, a new tool to search for gold in the U.S. using Google Earth.

On the Microsoft front, with the recent license change, anyone can use Bing Maps in broadcasts for free. Micrsoft's WorldWide Telescope is now getting integrated with Bing Maps. Microsoft announced spatial support for Windows Azure.

On the FOSS4G and open data front, FME will support writing to OpenStreetMap. There's a full entry on the humanitarian OpenStreetMap team deployed to Haiti. The same blog has a entry on why Google MapMaker is not open. Here's an entry arguing a open data needs a micropayment ecosystem. Plenty of geoblogs mentioned the NYT article on Ushahidi crisis tracking system. The FDO Toolbox 0.9.3 has been released. Andrea details the dynamic 'geometry transformations' SLD extension that GeoServer now supports. You can also now customize the builds of GeoExt to your needs.

In the miscellaneous category, SimpleGeo presented SpotRank, a tool using mobile location requests to display where people are. It seems MapQuest now offer a mobile-optimized website. James Fee offers an interesting entry on the 'ESRI Map Sandwich', with this interesting quote: "If your online geo-content isn’t in formats or services that can easily be integrated into popular mapping APIs and libraries, your data is not going be easily used." The FGT blog offers a 2-parts review of the Garmin Oregon 450t GPS for field work. Here's 6 tips for developers who are moving into GIS. Here's an entry on using lidar to identify trees in a city.

In the maps category, a colleague sent me the link to the U.N. Atlas of Water and Health, focusing on Europe data. I wasn't aware there was a 'country' without territory, the Knights of Malta. Oh yes, historical maps can be misleading, even from a source such as Britannica. TMR shares an interesting map of who uses daylight saving time, an entry on USGS satellite maps of post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, another entry for Moon and Mars globes for the iPhone.

Luc Vaillancourt writes "The first WhereCamp in Quebec City will be held March 23 in the afternoon. (www.wherecamp-qc.com)

Date / time : Tuesday, March 23, from 1PM to 5PM
Location : Le Cercle (restau-pub) 228 St-Joseph Est, Québec, QC
Cost : Free
Registration : RSVP on EventBrite here
Hosted by : www.BALIZ-MEDIA.com, the only Canadian online magazine covering the Geospatial industry in French.

The WhereCamp will be followed by an "Happy hour" hosted by the local OSGeo Chapter, OSGeo-Qc.
This will be the perfect occasion to continue the conversations initiated in the afternoon and to meet professionals from the Geospatial industry, involved in Open Source or not !

Welcome to everyone* ...

*the Event will mainly be in French !"

Slashdot runs a discussion named 3-D Printer Creates Buildings From Dust and Glue. Their summary: "D-Shape, an innovative new 3-D printer, builds solid structures like sculptures, furniture, even buildings from the ground up. The device relies on sand and magnesium glue to actually build structures layer by layer from solid stone. The designer, Enrico Dini, is even talking with various organizations about making the printer compatible with moon dust, paying the way for an instant moonbase!" See previous stories below, it's not the first time we discuss 3D printing.

Stefan Knecht via the make-my-day-department writes "The Google Maps Australia Blog has an article that well could be the end of the map as we know it. It suggests that companies might pay Google Maps to place their logo on Google Maps. Only the announcement didn't become too specific on that:

"These easily recognisable logos more closely depict online what the offline world looks like, so next time you're trying to find your way on the map you can navigate more easily using these icons as landmarks."

This is the first step to a "billboardization" of Google Maps.
See here how it could look in Google Maps' wet dreams.



The right picture is taken from the movie Logorama, a 17-minute animated film made by the French collectibe H5. The film depicts events in a stylized Los Angeles, and is told entirely through the use of more than 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and mascots. The film won the Prix Kodak at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 82nd Academy Awards." See also related stories below.

It's my pleasure to announce Slashgeo.org is a media sponsor of the FOSS4G Conference again this year. Next September 6-9th, FOSS4G 2010 will take place in Barcelona, Spain. Here's the official website. You can already register, take a look at the workshops and tutorials and you even have until April 15th to submit abstracts, including on the academic track.

Slashgeo regularly covers FOSS4G-related news; we have a specific FOSS4G topic and one more generic on open source geospatial software. For FOSS4G 2009, I offered my personal summary of the event. Since it's going to be one of the best geospatial conference of the year for certain, I sure hope I'll be able to make it and even if I can't, I'll make sure our readers don't miss anything major out of the conference.

GeoBase Support writes "In celebration of United Nations World Water Day on March 22, National Hydro Network's (NHN)of Canada own contribution is the release of a brand new data format added to its product line of NHN distribution formats. In fact, from now on, NHN product data can be downloaded in ESRI File Geodatabase (FGDB) format, in addition to GML (Geography Markup Language), ESRI Shapefile and KML (Keyhole Markup Language) formats already offered. This new FGDB format is offered with an ESRI ArcMap MXD Project file, which makes NHN data much more easily usable, notably because of the data structure, symbology or graphical semiology and already built-in geometric network it contains. Canada's national coverage of NHN data is now fully available in this new format. All this is accessible at no cost on GeoBase portal. For more details and to access available data, please see the National Hydro Network section." See also several related stories below.

NRCan's GeoConnections.org is sharing a new guide named Best Practices for Sharing Sensitive Environmental Geospatial Data (74-pages pdf). From the executive summary: "The purpose of these Best Practices is to educate Data Contributors, Owners, Custodians, Stewards and Consumers of the issues and concepts associated with protecting, sharing and utilizing sensitive geospatial data, with a focus on supporting programs, services, businesses and / or applications related to the Environment and Sustainable Development (E&SD) community. The intention is to provide practical guidance to those interested in developing their own sensitive environmental geospatial data sharing policies and protocols." See also previous stories below, including their Data Licensing Best Practices Guide.

The excellent open source geospatial database PostGIS 1.4.2 and 1.5.1 just got released. Fixes for 1.5.1: "* #333, remove unnecessary VACUUM from install file (Kevin Neufeld) * #410, update embedded bbox when applying ST_SetPoint, ST_AddPoint ST_RemovePoint to a linestring (Paul Ramsey) * #411, allow dumping tables with invalid geometries (Sandro Santilli, for Regione Toscana-SIGTA) * #414, include geography_columns view when running upgrade scripts (Paul Ramsey) * #419, allow support for multilinestring in ST_Line_Substring (Paul Ramsey, for Lidwala Consulting Engineers) * #421, fix computed string length in ST_AsGML() (Olivier Courtin) * #441, fix GML generation with heterogeneous collections (Olivier Courtin) * #443, incorrect coordinate reversal in GML 3 generation (Olivier Courtin) * #450, wrong area calculation for geography features that cross the date line (Paul Ramsey) * Ensure support for upcoming 9.0 PgSQL release (Paul Ramsey)." See also previous stories below.

Slashdot runs a story named GPS Log Analysis Uncovers Millions In NYC Taxi Overcharges. Their summary: "The NY Times reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission is using GPS data collected in every cab to review millions of trips in New York City over the past 26 months and has discovered a huge number in which out-of-city rates, twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs, were improperly charged. The drivers' scheme, the commission says, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip when drivers flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million. Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester. 'We have not seen anything quite this pervasive,' said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. 'It's very disturbing.' The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city's findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The commission says that 75% out of the city's 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate at least once. Officials hope to roll out a short-term fix in two or three weeks in which an alert will appear on the backseat monitor when a cabbie activates the out-of-town rate." What I find funny, in the previous related stories below, is that in 2007, we discussed one named 'New York Taxi Drivers To Strike Over GPS', and before in 2005, a previous one named 'NYC Cabbies Say No to onboard GPS ', no wonder...

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode.

On the FOSS4G and open data front, there's a followup entry reviewing more open source geocoders (initial story). via the OGD blog I found an interesting entry on the failures of Edmonton and Vancouver open data efforts: "[...] two minor mistakes that are preventing the Edmontorcouver opendata initiative from being a tremendous success [...] 1. They expected a new community to build itself. 2. They wrote their own license." GeoServer new supports ImagePyramid imports. There's also a long article about creating interactive charts with Geopublisher 1.4. There's also a short entry on displaying two different graticules in QGIS. Here's a site that let's you overlay OpenStreetMap data transparently On Google/Yahoo Maps.

In the everything-else category, Slashdot discussed a story named about a new phone to track employees movements and a discussion on augmented reality. Here's an entry named Geotag Photos with an Android Phone and Any Digital Camera. Via O'Reilly, here's an entry on Twitter's location policy. You can also embed Bing Maps Twitter Maps on your website. Geolocation is also coming to Facebook next month. In fact, MapQuest has a new feature to share MapQuest maps woth Facebook friends. The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation got confirmed funding in the recently announced federal budget. Using GPS sensors, it seems the Chilean earthquake moved the City of Conception 10 feet to the west. In addition to the Google geonews shared this morning, here's Fredericton, Canada in 3D and Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria in South Africa and Mulhouse in France also in 3D.

From the ERDAS website : "ERDAS has created a Chile Relief Website and web service enabled geospatial datasets free of charge for all organizations participating in the relief efforts to the Chile earthquake and tsunami disasters. 
The following website has been updated to contain a Chile Relief Map context to provide a web map interface to the Chile Web Services:
http://apollopro.erdas.com/apollo-client/index.jsp?fullscreen=true"
Visit the site to see a list of all the data.

A lot of recent major Google geonews lately. Google made the announcement of the addition of biking directions in Google Maps: "This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. [...] When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.". On the Google Lat Long blog, you'll get more information regarding those biking directions: "[...] I can lift the curtain and explain the many factors and variables that we've had to take into account to put this whole feature together [...]". Obviously, offered bike routes are not perfect and will improve over time.

There's an official entry on the major StreetView imagery update. Mapperz shows a map where we learn almost all of U.K. is now available in StreetView. You can now also edit places directly in StreetView. Also adding to integration, there's a new 'Edit this place' capability in Google Maps. There's also Barcelona now in 3D in Google Earth. The GEB offers a nice wrap-up entry named playing games in Google Earth.

Found on Engadget. It demonstrates just how deadly Google can be to the core business of other companies. From their article : "Back in January 2009, as Vodafone was preparing to close a £20 million ($30 million) deal to buy Swedish mapmaker Wayfinder, it was seen as a bold move from a carrier intent on entering the apparently lucrative market for location based services. Fast forward to the present day -- past the bit where free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices, and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps -- and you'll find Wayfinder gently sobbing into a handkerchief as it permanently closes up its doors. Vodafone's Anna Cloke gives us the reason for it with devastating concision:"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free.""

It's been almost a year since we last mentioned Maestro, and yesterday was announced the release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0. Reminder: " MapGuide Maestro is an Open Source (LGPL) map authoring tool for MapGuide Open Source." The first link above offers a list and screenshots of the top 10 features of MapGuide Maestro 2.0: 1. Theming, with ColorBrewer Suport 2. Expression Editor 3. Resource Validation 4. Improved XML Editor 5. Profiling 6. Package Management 7. Custom Resource Templates 8. Duplicate Resource 9. Colour-Coded Resource Tree 10. General Usability. See also related stories below.

phyr writes "The latest release of NEST (Next ESA SAR Toolbox) 3C-1.01 is now available for free at http://earth.esa.int/nest. NEST is an ESA toolbox with an integrated viewer for reading, post-processing and analysing ESA and 3rd party SAR data starting from Level 1. NEST is developed by Array Systems Computing Inc. under contract to ESA. NEST 3C adds the following features:

• Improved ROIs and Bitmasks
• Geometry Import and Export
• Radarsat 1 Reader
• TerraSARX SSC Reader
• Cosmo-Skymed Reader
• ASAR WSS Debursting and Mosaicing
• Layover and Shadow Bitmasks
• Filling Holes in DEM
• Basic C-Band Wind Field Estimation
• New Geotools Reprojection
• Multi-core Support
• Bug fixes and performance enhancements

" We mentioned the open source NEST project before, see related stories below.