slashgeo.org

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 conference, to be held in Tokyo September 6-8th, just before FOSS4G at the same location. [correction: rather same "region" of the world... FOSS4G being held in Beijing, sorry]

This is the third and last of my summary entries on FOSS4G-NA.

First, here are other pertinent summaries I found on the blogosphere;

• Direction Mag offers several entries related to FOSS4G-NA:
  • One named MapStory Soft Launches: "It's a platform for collecting datasets (StoryLayers), and MapStories (animated maps of these datasets over times)."
  • FOSS4GNA Day One Plenary: Recapping Roots and NGA Rhythms
  • FOSS4GNA Day Two Plenary: URLs and Firehoses
  • FOSS4GNA Panel: Gaps and Voids in Open Source Geo Technology
  • Tweets of note for the 11th and for  the 12th,
• Martin Davis (Dr JTS) FOSS4G-NA review

Reminder: here's my notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

Day 3

RadiantBlue - OMAR

• OMAR = Open Mapping ARchive
• About 20 people supporting and developing their open source software, another proof that this business model can work
• Web-based polished raster search user interface with a real fast data viewer
• Apparently easy to import data into OMAR

RadiantBlue - OSSIM

• Advanced C++ remote sensing and geospatial processing
• Started in 1998
• One of the founding projects of OSGeo
• Used in numerous commercial and government solutions

• Long history of government projects
• My main interest was in ossimPlanet, since we have our own in-house scientific virtual globe at MSC
• Along with the ossimPlanet tool, there's ImageLinker and OMAR that work together
• There's OSSIM Libraries
• Image chains for data processing, such as models, filters, combiners, with an excellent UI
• dynamic plugins

• ossimPlanet: virtual globe similar to Google Earth and NASA WorldWind (whatever happened to it), but... supports multiple platform, photogrammetric accuracy, native file access, WMS compliant
  • high performance 3D solution

• Demoed their tools

Skipped some talks that were mostly U.S.-specific

Panel on challenges in implementing FOSS4G software

• Integration with existing 'legacy' software such as SharePoint or Oracle can be a challenge
• Legal components of open source are not an issue. It's unlikely that open licenses will do a great deal of damages to projects and organizations
• Community is essential for the feedback loop in the open source software
• Security audits are the same for open source than for commercial software
• Panelists discussed their success stories

Panel on open source geo in federal IT

• More intimate relation with open source vendors than with proprietary vendors, particularly in regards to feature needs, development, etc
• Open source isn't entirely free, you need to put efforts
• OGC standards are much faster implemented in open source geo software than in proprietary ones
• Funding positions of Geospatial professionals on the long term can be a challenge at the federal level
• Investing in open source consulting vs employ a senior full time expert... sometimes the first option seems to be much more efficient
• Collaboration with the community requires energy, but it pays off over time
• The pertinence of having federal IT coordination in their investment in open geospatial software and access the impact of their investment on each other
• Challenge with reaching stakeholders of the federal gov which has interest in open source geo
  • At the Government of Canada we have the FCGEO (Federal Committee on Geomatics and Earth Observation) and GeoConnections, etc... there are some coordinating bodies and resources
• The best with open source geo is rapid updates and delivery mechanisms
• Expectations that the cloud will impact significantly how geospatial data is managed and stored at the federal level
• GeoCat Bridge, bridging ArcMap to open source SLD compatible software - just can't ignore past ArcMap investments

That's the second out of three summary entries on FOSS4G-NA.

Reminder, here's my notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

Day 2

Mike Byrne FCC Wednesday plenary

• We don't make paper maps
• The importance of URLs
• Unintended consequences of data use are good
• Spatial data is not special... it's just columns in a database
  • I think I personally disagree with that statement; spatial data requires a datum and a projection and implies things like spatial topology and so on, so to me, these major distinctions makes it 'special' to some extent
• Need for low barrier to publish and low barrier to consume

Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL

• Large data collection with continuous processing and aggregation, firehose engineering
• Challenges:
  • volume of data, and volume grows over time
  • constant flow of data, 24/7, data collection component, it means no ETL
  • database size, lots of hardware, backups, redundancy, migration, etc... database growth, many components = many failures
  • component failures, all components fail, and data collection must meanwhile continue
• Data collection must be: continuous, parallel and fault-tolerant
• Don't use cutting edge technology, don't run components to capacity, do not do hot patching
• Little to no geospatial content in this talk

Ramsey - What's new in PostGIS 2.0

• Breaks some backward compatibility
• PostGIS uses a new serialization
• New WKT / WKB parser, Extended WKT vs OGC vs ISO
• New 3D functions
• 4D indexes, nD actually
• New 3D types and formats
• New shapefile loading GUI

• Raster
  • Raster support is there to enable analysis, not visualization, raster objects are very similar to vector objects in PostGIS
  • Many new raster functions
  • Raster Performance is still not great and sensitive to tile size, and function signatures can get very complex

• Integrated raster and vector analysis
• Indexed nearest neighbors, 2 million points, in 9 milliseconds... pretty fast

Tom Payne - OpenWebGlobe WebGL Globe

• Google Earth plugin competitor
• 100% JavaScript and WebGL
• Streaming lod terrain example on SpiderGL
• Spherical Mercator (more)
• Includes buildings, at various levels of quality to accommodate different use cases
• Data in the S3 cloud managed by TileCloud
• WebGL Navigation can't exactly mimic Desktop software
• It may need polishing, but it works well already
• WebGL is also an interest of the gaming industry so there's big pushing from them too
• No mobile browser supports WebGL yet

Bitner - Working with four dimensional flight track data

• Closer to the type of data I have to deal with than the CartoDB and PostGIS presentation
• XYZM (m = minutes)
• Smoothing track data
• Using R and PostgreSQL with the temporal extension on pgxn
• PostgreSQL 9.2 will have native time range data types
• R used for removing outlier data and helping the smoothing via statistics
• During spatial smoothing, must consider the time dimension otherwise it messes with speeds
• Displaying the 4D data
• Github OpenNOMS
• Using GeoExt and OpenLayers to display
• Rather technical presentation

Osti - Cloud-based open source tech to manage natural resources

• Animated web maps, integrating a lot of sensor data, in the Californian delta for a fish and turbidity analysis
• Fully custom-made web page
• The GeoServer talk was probably more interesting

Davis - What's new in the JTS topology suite

• JTS started in
• JTS and GEOS used by many may other software
  • GEOS 3.3.3 released at the beginning of the month
• There's a C# port and a JavaScript port JSTS
• What's new
  • Unary union
  • Delaunay triangulation, supports linear constraints
  • Voronoi diagram
  • Hausdorff distance: "measures how far two subsets of a metric space are from each other"
  • Densification, bounding envelopes
  • Single-sided spatial buffers
  • Magnify topology
• JTS comes with a GUI to test functions

• What's coming
  • Buffer performance improvements again
  • Fast distance computation
  • New algorithms such as concave hull, Bezier smoothing, point clustering, etc
• Future plans: computation in geodetic coordinate systems, improve performance is a constant quest, split packaging into core and algorithms, refactor geometry API to use interfaces
  • For JTS 2.0 since it will break the API backward compatibility
• That was an interesting but short 15 minutes talk... why not show more?

Klassen - Build your own cloud, open source approach to imagery storage

• 50 TB of data, essentially raster
• Their workflow is 'write once read many'
• Constraints: little staff time for maintenance, needs to scale, limit access to some datasets
• Image storage solution is OpenStack object storage aka Swift
  • Swift is optimized for long term storage
  • Why swift: no single point of failure, http/REST API, handles large objects over 5GB, security built-in
• They looked at alternatives such as raid servers, NoSQL such as BigCouch, distributed file systems and S3... but ended up using swift
• Proxy nodes: provides "public" URLs
• There's tradeoffs, including a significant learning curve
• Image catalog with a PostGIS backend
• Services viewers with MapServer and MapCache

Ashton - cartography with TileMill, PostGIS and OpenStreetMap

• Presentation focused on digital map making; such as labels
• The import is part of the render
• Using group styles
• Abbreviations: prefix and suffix aren't that important, handling multiple languages abbreviations is a challenge
• Tens of types of 'spaces' in Unicode
• Features of MapBox Street in TileMill

Nathaniel - Watercolor maps using OpenStreetMap

• These maps were massively advertised in the past weeks
• maps.stamen... from stamen design
• Different watercolor textures for each zoom level
• Used Mapnik and python processing
• Blurring things and adding noise, added inner glow
• They didn't render the whole world
  • They user tweets density to identify which areas to prerender at higher zoom levels
  • They also analyzed where people actually searched for watercolor maps

Matthew Davis - Incorporating open source mapping into mobile apps

• Excellent presentation
• Strategy options = native apps, web apps, hybrid apps
• Native apps: fast, mobile app feel, access to sensors, app store... but not cross-platform
  • iOS: 3 closed source maps APIs, none open source
  • Android: 4 mains options; Google Maps, osmdroid, Nutiteq, mapsforge... various tile sources, licensing, offline caching capabilities and vector support
• Web apps:
  • Good = cross platform, but... slower, limited access to sensor, levels of browser support, have to make it feel like a mobile app, no app store, etc...
  • HTML5/CSS3: app can run offline, local data storage, sensor support (GPS well supported, but others not (e.g. accelerometer)), varying degrees of implementation by browsers
  • Mobile frameworks
  • Open source mapping libraries: OpenLayers, Leaflet, Polymaps, Tile5, Modest Maps... things to consider: offline caching, touch gesture support, vector overlays, tile sources, size
• Hybrid apps: good = cross-platform, app store, sensor support, but... not as fast as native app, special attention to mobile app feel... main Hybrid apps solution is PhoneGap
• Detailed a case study & their experience

I was lucky to participate to the first FOSS4G-NA conference in Washington D.C. last week. Here's one of three entries in which I'll share my general notes, talk notes and links to other reviews of the conference. First, I want to acknowledge and thank the FOSS4G-NA organizers for this incredible conference and the complimentary pass as a media partner. There was also a recent official press release from OpenGeo wrapping up the conference. All entries related to FOSS4G-NA on Slashgeo should be found with a simple search.

Here's my general notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

General notes

• For Day 1 and 2, there were 3 concurrent tracks. For day 3, there was 2
• There was 'Ignite Spatial' presentations at the end of Day 2
• There was 350 attendees to FOSS4G-NA
• Met and discussed with several colleagues and developers
• Next FOSS4G-NA will be in Minnesota

Day 1
 

Paul Ramsey Welcome Talk

• Discussed the history of open source
• Geeks and enthusiasm + tools + connectivity
• Paul reminded us that ArcGIS and Google Earth also use gdal, same for other pieces of open source geospatial software
• Open standards are embraced more quickly by open source software
• Exciting open source geospatial: Leaflet as a new OpenLayers competitor
• Proprietary software locks you in
• Open source software offers a lot of choice and it might be overwhelming, it appears 'simpler' with a single vendor solution
• Google is a FOSS4G-NA venue sponsor, and so is ESRI

Keith Barber, NGA

• NGA = National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (United States)
• GeoInt must be on-line and on-demand
• The 'pretty' component counts
• How does the users consume information and data? That matters a lot
• Big data, mobile computing, cloud computing, social networking
• Social networking is harnessing the power of already established associations

Kate Chapman, teaching QGIS and OpenStreetMap in Indonesia

• Hot: humanitarian OSM team, full details of their project here
• They did workshops in 9 regions
• Paper maps with no GIS involved
• They also used walkingpapers to input new data
• Using the Bing Maps satellite imagery in OSM, when available
• LearnOSM launched
• No street signs in small villages, only specific people know the street names
• GIS benefits are not obvious to people that don't know GIS
• Using OSM satellite imagery is much easier than buying a GPS and doing surveying
• On site Internet access is an issue, part of the solution is using 3G modems
• The OSM QGIS plugin is too hard to use in practice
• Goal was poverty mapping

Wickman - Emergency response performance analysis with open source geospatial

• Fire service departments
• First responders are the clients, and they're not always tech savvy
• E911 computer aided dispatch cad systems are almost systematically different one from another
• Cops vs fire fighters: they do not always get along happily
• Incident mapping
• Not all city GIS layers align correctly
• Using GeoKettle, PostGIS and MapServer and OpenLayers
• Showed their GeoKettle processing; seems relatively simple to use
• They'll be replacing MapServer with GeoServer, but didn't told us the reasons

De La Torre - CartoDB 1.0

• The 'Government Participation in Open Source' talk was cancelled
• New FOSS4G software, version 1.0 released last week
• Blazing fast drag and drop online mapping
• PostGIS 2 inside, with node.js and Mapnik
• Blazing fast geospatial queries directly on the online map
• Support importing OSM data
• Explained distinctions with Google Fusion Tables

MacWright - Beyond the Google Maps Paradigm

• Mapbox TileMill
• Everybody gets the same tiles on Google Maps and OpenLayers
• The design of today's maps is only possible because of the way we interact with it... There's less elements on maps because it's easy to zoom in and display more details
• OpenLayers weights 900k while Modest Maps API is 40k
• Google Maps got us halfway, TileMill halved it again
• He got a point: traditional geo technologies is evolving real fast, and not always pushed forward by geofolks

Herbert - FOSS, data delivery and discovery services - the Antarctic experience

• British Antarctic survey
• Gdal, PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, WMS, WFS
• From raw data acquisition to processing and distribution
• GeoRSS, kml, OGC services, jpeg
• Using geonames
• Labeling is a challenge, SLD vendor options end up being critical
• Poor metadata and versioning
• They chose GeoNetwork Open Source for data discovery, with some cons
• Polarview.aq, map.arctic.ac and a few more links

Hahn - Rendering the World

• Big world.... it requires a lot of storage and time to generate the tiles
• OpenStreetMap is 54 TB of storage
• Accepted wisdom: only render tiles on demand
• Render servers are slow, costly and stressful
• Pre-rendered tiles are fast, cheap and reliable
• The MBTiles format can store redundancy efficiently
• Tile storage
  • 17.2 billion tiles
  • Open ocean is 60% of World tiles, and it's a single blue tile
  • Solid land tiles are also redundant
  • 4 layers compositing
  • Human tiles is only about 1% of tiles
  • Instead of 10 TB, with removing the redundant tiles, it's 200 GB
• And for time
  • TileMill does all the tiles... With TileMill master, children skipping if redundant, pyramid approach... It mostly works at the moment
  • Instead of 200 days, it needs 4 days
• Still quite a lot of fine tuning to do
• This makes the whole World tile rendering possible

Panel Discussion on Gaps and Voids in open source geo technology

• User interfaces and user experience (UI and UX)
• We need to spend efforts to design interfaces
• Command line is powerful, but you lose plenty of potential users
• Goal is to engage non technical users
• User workflow
• Beyond the UI, there's the documentation too
• Who's the target customer of the software

• Innovation might not come from geoprofessionals if we aren't careful and think out of the box
• There's still not enough geoprofessionals for the industry needs
• It's about value and enabling users
• Investing in FOSS is like investing in fundamental science, it often pays off tremendously on the long term
• Cost of forking software is high and the value of a community is high
• Chose the open license that suits the context

• FOSS4G business models
• API vs download ? The answer is both
• Datasets don't tell you what's wrong with them... they should
• We still can't easily ask what-ifs questions with GIS... such as 'Whats the impact of changing this value or this other value'
• Need more cross projects collaboration

Schaub - OpenLayers: the rebirth of cool

• Moving to Github dramatically increased commits and contributors
• Talk focused on what's new 2.11 and upcoming 2.12
• Mobile devices support, this is major
• Html5 and CSS, tile transitions
• Many new keyboard controls via CSS
• Offline tile cache
• Canvas rendering
• UTFGrid interaction
• Continuous zooming

• Ongoing stuff and ideas for the future
• Improved UI/UX, including CSS styling
• Improved APIs
• Animations performance optimizations
• Tile queues with abortable tile requests
• Usability improvements, including documentation
• Custom built library for specific purposes
• Ongoing discussions about WebGL and Canvas 2D

Wadsworth - Raster Storage and Processing with MongoDB

• JSON
• NoSQL, no joins
• Integrated spatial indexing functionality
• Fast, "web scale"
• Mongo huMongous
• Alternatives, CouchDB/ GeoCouch,
• Their company were already into Ruby / Jruby
• Points associated to raster
• Slap: source, lookup, algorithm, process
• Parallel with celluloid on github

It's Slashdot that discussed the bad news about Canada Post Files Copyright Lawsuit Over Crowd-sourced Postal Code Database.

Their summary: "Canada Post has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Geolytica, which operates GeoCoder.ca, a website that provides several geocoding services including free access to a crowd-sourced, compiled database of Canadian postal codes. Canada Post argues that it is the exclusive copyright holder of all Canadian postal codes and claims that GeoCoder appropriated the database and made unauthorized reproductions. GeoCoder compiled the postal code database by using crowdsourcing techniques, without any reliance on Canada Post's database, and argues that there can be no copyright on postal codes and thus no infringement (PDF)."

It's not the first time we discuss postal codes data. In, we mentioned the PAGC open source project that geocodes postal addresses. And since we heard of the global postal codes product from NACGeo, but to my knowledge, it was never really used by anyone (I am wrong?). In there was news of the U.K. opening up their postal code database.

Via the AGISRS mailing list I learned about today's announcement that Envisat is having problems and services are interrupted.

From the ESA announcement: " After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA’s mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite.
 
Although this landmark mission has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed for, ESA hopes to keep the satellite in service until the launch of the successor Sentinel missions."

We're now in FOSS4G-NA day 3. The conference has been great so far, with high quality talks and a stellar event organization. I've been busy enough to not find enough time to clean and complete my conference notes, but don't worry, I expect to share my summaries early next week. And to my satisfaction, I learned much more again than I expected... some important projects should have receive more visibility here on Slashgeo, I'm eager to tell you about them! More soon - thank you for your patience.

It's Easter and I find myself aggregating geonews for you - don't you see how much I love you ;-) Expect less news this week since I'll be participating to the FOSS4G-NA conference. So here's the latest geonews in batch mode.

In the open source and open data front:

• Slashdot discusses a story named Wikipedia Mobile Apps Switch To OpenStreetMap, away from Google Maps, related, James Fee links to a NY Times article on bypassing Google Maps with OpenStreetMap
• and via @teller another article is named Microsoft backing OpenStreetMap, creating Google Maps competitor
• Numerous sources mentioned the beautiful watercolor OpenStreetMap style from Stamen and here's how they were created (via Wes)
• An entry discusses the differences between the Portable GIS and OSGeo Live tools
• There was a few entries on QGIS; one on the qNote plugin, detailed instructions for installing QGIS Server on Windows 7 and on Ubuntu, the custom form feature to streamline data entry, and an entry on the enhanced MS SQLServer support
• With PostGIS 2.0 recently released, here's an entry on validating vector features
• Here's a discussion on OpenStreetMap should be more like Facebook

In the miscellaneous category:

• The Landsat 5 mission is officially suspended after 28 years, we mentioned its recent problems
• Kurt shares four entries on vertical datums
• APB shares an Esri Developer Summit RoundUp
• APB also shares an entry named Doctor’s Offices and Access to primary health care - Esri Map Story
• The GEB mentions GraphEarth, a 25$ tool to generate charts for Google Earth
• Several blogs participated to the raw data vs API discussion
• This infographic will inform you on the current state of MapQuest, MapQuest also have a new section to explore U.S. National Parks
• WebMapSolutions offers two entries whether we should retire the term GIS - my take is that GIS is useful since it refers to something specific and unique
• Somewhat related, Very Spatial shares entry on the new GIS end-user: "These users know how to navigate and interact with consumer maps and expect all their interactions with spatial technology to be this simple. They don’t, in any way, want to “see” GIS or have to learn a new vocabulary of terms like vectors, georeference, buffer, and shapefile." No pain no gain?
• APB mentions a U.S. Congressman Introduces “Map It Once, Use it Many Times Act”
• O'Reilly shares an entry on the do's and don'ts of geo marketing
• Spatial Sustain has an informative entry named Let the Drone Mapping Race Begin
• Unsurprisingly, Slashdot discusses a story named Many Police Departments Engage in Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking
• The recent Direction Mag articles I found interesting:
  • One named HTML5 Canvas: An Open Standard for High Performing GIS Map Visualization in Web Browsers
  • Ten Things to Know about the Geospatial Technology Competency Model
  • And finally The Top 10 Reasons Why You Need to Know About the U.S. GeoTech Center

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly discusses a Facebook app to map your Facebook network
• Many sources shared the beautiful WebGL U.S. wind map also discussed over Slashdot
• TMR shares a nice short video visualizing the world's ocean currents on the globe

The Where conference was held earlier this week. The best summaries I found so far are from the Google Earth Blog (which isn't an official Google blog) - here is the GEB's day one, day two and day three.

From the day three: "Ingredients of a Modern Mapping Service by Brian McClendon, Google's VP of Geo. Brian gave us a brief history of Keyhole and Google Earth, then unveiled some impressive stats:

• In, 37% of the world's population was covered by sub-meter imagery. That number is now up to 75%.
• Each imagery update (roughly every two weeks) is as large as all of the imagery they had in.
• Street View started with five cities in and how covers 35 countries and millions of miles of roads.
• Google Maps driving directions was available in 22 countries with 13 million miles of road in, and now is in 187 countries with over 26 million miles of roads.
• He also encouraged everyone to view the new Project Glass video, which has some amazing geo-related possibilities in the future."

​If you're looking for more, try the #whereconf hashtag on Twitter.

Google is clearly one of the most news-generating entity in the geospatial industry. Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From official sources:

• Google now uses live traffic data alongside with historical data  for trip durations in Google Maps, they use the My Location feature on Google Maps for Android to extrapolate live traffic conditions. This news was also discussed over Slashdot
• And if that isn't enough, we now get typical traffic for roads, not just highways
• Here are the finalists for the Google Model Your Town Competition 2012
• Google Maps for Android got a fresh look with version 6.5
• Google released the Google Maps Floor Plan Marker app, to help orient customer in businesses 
• Mix art and Street View and you get the Google Art Project
• You can now see service alerts for the London Underground in Maps
• Traffic and Transit Come to Google Maps in Malaysia
• And there's new 45° imagery available for 15 cities: US: Atlanta, GA; Canyon Lake, TX; Charleston, SC; Dallas, TX; Houston, TX; Lakeland, FL; Lubbock, TX; Orlando, FL; Port Charlotte, FL; Roanoke, TX; San Luis Obispo, CA; Smyrna, TN; Walker, LA. International: Adelaide, Australia; Cordoba, Argentina
• The Weather Layer is now available in the Google Maps API

From other sources:

• The GEB found out about the latest imagery update in Google Earth yesterday
• The GEB also shares an entry named Exposing Shantytowns in India with Google Earth