In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

The multi-billion dollar GIS industry has historically been confined to expensive and difficult-to-use desktop software. Today GeoCommons turns that market on its head. Now, through GeoCommons, registered users are able to run analyses, perform geoprocessing tasks and visualize their private data in the cloud for free, non-commercial use.

Following the recent release of GeoCommons 2.0, which improved ease-of-use and performance, GeoCommons will now expose to the masses all of the enterprise features that its commercial and government customers have been using within their organizations. See a tour of these new capabilities here. This move builds on GeoCommons' commitment to providing open, accessible GIS through a simple, intuitive workflow for all people, regardless of their experience using legacy mapping tools.

"We want to give everyone the opportunity to use our great products without having to download software, talk to a salesperson or pay a fee," said Sean Gorman, president and founder of GeoCommons. "Our customer base within enterprise and government continues to expand as our products are repeatedly recognized as the best in the industry. By enabling open access for non-commercial use, thousands more users can experience the great value of GeoCommons."

The following features will be released through GeoCommons over the month of June:

• Analytics: Easy-to-use, advanced spatial analytics that users and groups can utilize to answer mission-critical questions. Select among numerous analyses such as filtering, buffers, spatial aggregation and predictive analysis.
• Private Data Support: Keep proprietary data private and unsearchable by others. Now you can upload proprietary data, analyze it with other data and create compelling maps, charts and graphs all within a secure interface.
• Groups and Permissions: Allow others in your group or organization to access and collaborate with you. Enable permissions at various levels to limit or expand data sharing.
• Charts and Graphs: Expand your visualization and analysis by incorporating intuitive charts and graphs into your data visualization. Add bar graphs, spreadsheet views or pie charts to enable multiple interactive views of your analysis.

After exceeding certain usage limits on GeoCommons, users will be given the opportunity to purchase a subscription for commercial use. Additional enterprise features include the ability to connect to databases, deployment behind the firewall, enhanced service levels and customized dashboards.

About GeoCommons
GeoCommons provides GIS in the cloud. Open architecture, beautiful visualization and powerful analytics make GeoCommons the location engine of choice for thousands of enterprises, government organizations, NGOs and citizen groups. With GeoCommons, anyone can find, use and share geographic data and maps, easily create rich interactive visualizations and solve problems without experience using traditional mapping tools.

The new version of AcidMaps has been released with a great change, it works as a Geoserver plugin.

That means you can use your own configured WMS layers to build Heatmaps, Isolines and other interpolated maps ON THE FLY!

For who doesn't know about AcidMaps:

• AcidMaps is an open source library that generates interpolated images from a set of valued points in real time.
• It's can be used to generate advanced visualizations with point datasets: (e.g.: sales, temperature, atmospheric pressure, population, etc...)

You can see a full demo built using Flex/OpenScales where you can play with the parameters to see different results.

If you want to give it a try with you own data, take a look to the Quick Start instructions, it is really simple!

There's a reference doc where you can get more details.

Please, let us know your opinion because it's still in beta and your experience will be very helpful.

Still catching up recent geonews, last week the FGT blog mentioned the open source imagery analysis project named OpenDragon. While the project has been around for over 5 years, we never mentioned it in the past.

From the official website: "OpenDragon provides a robust suite of image processing operations, via an intuitive, responsive, multi-window graphical user interface. Software functionality includes full-color display, annotation, enhancement, measurement, supervised and unsupervised classification, georeferencing, on-screen vector capture, and a broad range of other capabilities to support image processing education and research. OpenDragon can access image and data files created by earlier releases of commercial Dragon, can run scripts created for other versions, and is backward compatible in its organization and navigation. OpenDragon uses an innovative client-server architecture and is based on platform-independent industry standards including Java, XML and HTML. The OpenDragon architecture supports new levels of user extensibility and will eventually allow the software to execute on Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and Solaris and other Unix variants. "

We previously mentioned a few other similar software, Opticks is one example.