In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

On June 6 and 7, Geomap GIS America will be hosting its free annual seminar featuring the new releases of Autodesk solutions. This year, Geomap innovates by offering this seminar online,. The goal is to facilitate participation to this event and allow more people to attend. The presenters will cover the complete lifecycle of a BIM-Geomatics project including a LEED® component. This event will offer the opportunity to optimize each of the four important steps of a project: plan, design, build, and manage, by leveraging Autodesk 2013 solutions and Geomap’s expertise. This online event will be accessible from your workstation to encourage a small carbon footprint and for greater flexibility.

All participants will have the opportunity to see the most recent solutions for 3D modeling, infrastructure network conception, land planning, collaboration of information and optimization of a project, to decrease costs, accelerate the realization and minimize the environmental impact.

Here a brief overview of  the Software to be showcased during the seminar: AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013, AutoCAD Map 3D 2013, Autodesk Revit 2013,Autodesk Infrastructure Modeller, Ecotect, Vasari, Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server, Buzzsaw, Vault AEC and much more.

Visit our “Events” section on www.geomapgis.ca to register for free

Visit our web site for more information

About Geomap:

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

Richard Perez

BIM & Architecture Solutions Manager

Phone: 450 461-1158 #226

Email: rperez@geomapgis.ca

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.

DM yesterday published an article named Ten Things You Need to Know About OpenStreetMap. While you probably already know all this if you're a regular reader, it still constitutes an excellent refresher.

Follow the provided link for the details, here's the ten items:

1. OpenStreetMap's definition; "OpenStreetMap is a free worldwide map, created by people like you."
2. OSM’s Name is Singular
3. The OpenStreetMap Foundation Manages and Supports the Effort
4. OSM is Changing its License from Creative Commons to ODbL
5. Mapping Parties are Events to Expand OSM
6. Google’s Recent Decision to Charge Heavy Users of its Google Maps API is Pushing Developers to OSM
7. Where to Get OSM Tiles
8. Many Apps Offer OSM Data as an Option
9. Some Countries are Heavier OSM Contributors and Users than Others
10. OSM has an Annual Conference, The State of the Map

Also announced earlier this week is the opening of the registration for State of the Map 2012 conference, to be held in Tokyo September 6-8th, just before FOSS4G 2012 at the same location. [correction: rather same "region" of the world... FOSS4G 2012 being held in Beijing, sorry]

Join us for a FREE Web-mapping and Geo-enabled Tools Meeting  Wednesday, May 16th from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. at the Oregon Coast Community College in Newport, OR

This all-day conference will introduce participants to some commercial and open-source web-based services, demonstrate how other organizations are using them, and ways to use these services to create and serve your GIS data on the web.  This meeting is hosted by the Central Coast GIS user group (http://www.orurisa.org/ccgisug) and is open to anyone.  There will be people from various disciplines, backgrounds and knowledge level (beginners to developers).  Presentations will be given by ESRI, OSU, OpenGeo, USGS and Ecotrust (and others) on a variety of web mapping topics including; Open source software products, The National Atlas, and Madrona.      

Please Register via:  http://ccgisugwebmapping2012.eventbrite.com/

http://orurisa.org/2012_coastal_Web_Mapping_Meeting

Eli

Another benefit of my participation to FOSS4G-NA 2012 was learning about GeoTrellis, an open source geographic data processing engine for high performance applications.

From the website: "GeoTrellis accelerates geoprocessing tasks by harnessing the power of multiple cores, processors, and servers through distributed geoprocessing. By breaking large or complex tasks into smaller units of work and optimizing their execution, the framework can concurrently leverage massive computational power to produce results 10-100 times faster than traditional geoprocessing software. [...] Faster is not just faster, it’s different. For example, a truly responsive user experience makes it possible to create public participation planning tools or educational games that incorporate sophisticated geospatial models."

While we did mention Leaflet a few times in the past months, it never had it's own entry on Slashgeo, until today! Leaflet is a modern, lightweight open source JavaScript library for Interactive maps by CloudMade.

Its description: "Weighing just about 22kb of gzipped JS code, it still has all the features most developers ever need for online maps, while providing a fast, pleasant user experience. It is built from the ground up to work efficiently and smoothly on both desktop and mobile platforms like iOS and Android, taking advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 on modern browsers. The focus is on usability, performance, small size, A-grade browser support, convention over configuration and an easy-to-use API. The OOP-based code of the library is designed to be modular, extensible and very easy to understand."

While a user submitted a press release about it last week, we haven't mentioned the 1.0 release of the open source CartoDB project. We did mention CartoDB a few times in the past. There's also a recent blog entry on Comparing Fusion Tables to Open Source CartoDB.

Let me remind our users what CartoDB is: "CartoDB is an open source geospatial database platform that provides an SQL API layer. It allows developers to make querys to a cloud PostrgreSQL + OpenGIS database optimized to geospatial purposes. As a web service API, it is not required a certain database management system."

I'll share a bit more about CartoDB in my upcoming FOSS4G-NA summary.

Via this tweet, I learned about EOxServer, an open source server for Earth Observation data.

Here's how it is described: "EOxServer's mission: To provide an Open Source software framework to ease the online provision of big Earth Observation data archives via Open Standard services for efficient user exploitation.

• Open Source: MIT-style license
• software framework: Entirely based on Open Source (Python, MapServer, Django, GDAL, etc.)
• ease online provision: Admin GUI and command line data registration
• big Earth Observation data archives: Operators register existing raster data archives
• Open Standard services: Open in the sense of freely available; Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); WMS, WCS, EO-WMS, EO-WCS
• efficient user exploitation: User defined sub-setting; view and download"

This project is funded in part by the European Space Agency (ESA).

This is major news: after 26 months of development, the open source geospatial database PostGIS 2.0 has been released. PostGIS is one of the best spatial database system there is. It even has been recently identified as better than Oracle Spatial.

The new features:

• Raster data and raster/vector analysis in the database
• Topological models to handle objects with shared boundaries
• PostgreSQL typmod integration, for an automagical geometry_columns table
• 3D and 4D indexing
• Index-based high performance nearest-neighbour searching
• Many more vector functions including
  • ST_Split
  • ST_Node
  • ST_MakeValid
  • ST_OffsetCurve
  • ST_ConcaveHull
  • ST_AsX3D
  • ST_GeomFromGeoJSON
  • ST_3DDistance
• Integration with the PostgreSQL 9.1 extension system
• Improved commandline shapefile loader/dumper
• Multi-file import support in the shapefile GUI
• Multi-table export support in the shapefile GUI
• A geo-coder optimized for free US Census TIGER (2010) data

Andrew made me aware of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM), a lightning fast routing engine built on OpenStreetMap data with draggable routes.

From their main page: "The Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a C++ implementation of a high-performance routing engine for shortest paths in road networks. It combines sophisticated routing algorithms with the open and free road network data of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. Shortest path computation on a continental sized network can take up to several seconds if it is done without a so-called speedup-technique. OSRM is able to compute and output a shortest path between any origin and destination within a few miliseconds. Since it is designed with OpenStreetMap compatibility in mind, OSM data files can be easily imported. A demo installation (currently offline) is provided by our friends at Geofabrik. OSRM is under active development.

The key features of OSRM are:

• High Performance Routing Algorithm
• Easy import of OSM data files.
• Written entirely in C++ and available under the GNU Affero General Public License for anyone to use.
• Ability to handle continental sized networks.
• Influenced by current and ongoing academic research. [more info]"

It's certainly not the first time we talk about routing with OpenStreetMap data. For example, in 2008 we talked about the OpenRouteService. And you'll get much more by heading to the routing page in the OSM wiki.