slashgeo.org

We are happy to inform you that Slashgeo will be a proud media partner of the upcoming Geospatial Advancement Canada conference in Ottawa in March 3-5!

"Geospatial Advancement Canada will bring together Canada’s leaders in Geomatics to continue the discussion on developing a National Geo strategy. You will network and learn from industry experts who will detail, through case study presentations, how you can develop your own program or improve what you‘ve already achieved. Attending the summit will ensure that you are up-to-date on insights from industry leaders, able to defend against critical obstacles, and are implementing effective methodologies into your GIS programs. Register today to confirm your participation at one of the most sought-after events in the industry."

Slashgeo will publish articles during and after the conference on what has been highlighted in presentation and innovative ideas on the geospatial sphere.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. I don't aggregate geonews as frequently as I used to but the content is there and I hope to return to an increased frequency later this Winter. Are you German? If so, you might be interested in these efforts to have Slashgeo translated in German.

On the open source / open data front:

• The 20 millionth edit in OpenStreetMap, entry that includes some interesting stats such as 1.5 million registered users and 2,17 billion nodes in the database
• Yes, the FOSS4G-CEE is now transformed in a recurrent FOSS4G-Europe conference
• The City of Montreal's textured 3D buildings are now freely available in CityGML
• Some releases, GeoServer 2.4.4 Released, Rasterio 0.5, GeoTools 10.4 Released
• Good news, Brazil's open data and open source satellite monitoring system dramatically reduces illegal deforestation in the Amazon
• From MapBox, new interactive heatmaps plugin, they also shared their beautiful woodcut-inspired map for the entire world, MapBox also gets Customizable maps in Tableau
• It's coming Odyssey.js to "help journalists, bloggers, and other people on the web publish stories that combine narratives with maps and map interactions" (via APB)

On the Esri front:

• From Esri's blog, 10 open source projects every JavaScript geo dev should know about
• SAP being pretty common in the enterprise, Esri Maps for SAP BusinessObjects released!

On the Google front:

• From the official source, Introducing Slovenia Street View and updating Russian imagery
• And of course, Mapping the Sochi Winter Olympics in Google Earth
• They can do that too, How Google identifies house numbers in Street View
• Interesting on WebGL and more, 4 reasons why Google’s Lego-Maps is not your average tech demo
• I haven't seen the movie yet, Every Earth view from “Gravity” identified in Google Earth
• Mountain lover? Awesome Google Earth image of Mount Everest from NASA
• And why not, Snowboarding in Google Earth

Discussed over Slashdot:

• In the U.S.? Map of Publicly-Funded Creationism Teaching
• Locating workers all the time, Virtual Boss Keeps Workers On a Short Leash
• Privacy once again, EU Secretly Plans To Put a Back Door In Every Car By
• Location leaks via Angry Birds and Google Maps, NSA and GCHQ Target "Leaky" Phone Apps To Scoop User Data
• Using Android and care about your privacy? The App That Tracks Who's Tracking You
• Crowdsourcing located tweets, Rome Police Use Twitter To Battle Illegal Parking
• Thanks open data, Open Data Tells NYC Residents Where the Rats Are
• Another indication that 3D printing is getting mainstream, Dell Partners With MakerBot To Resell 3D Printers and Scanners and World's First Multi-Color, Multi-Polymer 3D Printer Unveiled
• History meets digital, Atlas of US Historical Geography Digitized
• Impressive hack, Finnish Hacker Isolates Helicopter GPS Coordinates From YouTube Video Sounds
• Satellite for near real-time measurements of global rain and snowfall
• Mapping outer worlds, First Global Map Outside the Solar System
• You were certainly convinced already, Why We Need OpenStreetMap (Video)
• We knew about that already, Mozilla Is Mapping Cell Towers and WiFi Access Points

In the miscellaneous category:

• Nice, France To Make Older Spot Images Available to Researchers for Free
• It's easy to agree with, Why Leaders Should Learn Geography
• A new initiative GI-N2K, Geographic Information: Need to Know, towards a more demand-driven geospatial workforce education system
• Convincing, LiDAR pushes archaeological revolution
• Location-driven music, Ryan Holladay: To hear this music you have to be there. Literally
• Build your own GPS, no kidding, over Make: Finding Your Way with GPS
• Stilll from Make, Using Quadcopters for Photogrammetry
• Nothing surprising there, How geolocation may play a bigger role in future newsgathering
• Wired on There’s a Science to Foot Traffic, and It Can Help Us Design Better Cities
• Also from Wired, How the U.S. Maps the World’s Most Disputed Territories
• GPS accuracy: GAGAN, India's SBAS (similar to WAAS) is now operational

In the maps category:

• Ok, that's strange / map geeky. Vend they fir jug 45679: the Map Hiding Under Your Fingers
• As always, Brian Timoney is pretty pertinent, In Praise of the Static Map
• A map of scientific research, The Research Map of the World
• Informative, The Last 40 Years Of The World’s Refugees On A Single Map
• And scary, If all the Ice melted: National Geographic’s Interactive map on Rising Seas

No need to say, in the world of geospatial RDBMS, PostgreSQL's open source PostGIS shines and is widely adopted. Lots of us will be happy to learn that the PostGIS Cookbook has been published over PACKT from Paolo Corti, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas J Kraft, Bborie Park.

From the announcement entry: "The book, in a friendly tutorial fashion, covers a plethora of PostGIS related topics such as:

• Importing and exporting data
• Vectorial and Raster management and analysis functions
• Using desktop clients such as QGIS, OpenJump, gvSIG and UDig
• pgRouting and how to use the Nth dimension
• writing PostGIS programs with Python
• using PostGIS to do web GIS with web mapping engines and frameworks such as MapServer, GeoServer, OpenLayers, Leaflet and GeoDjango
• maintenance, optimization and performance tuning"

(late) bloggage update: Global vector datasets on AWS, see the opportunities and challenges.

I wrote a decade ago at Esri that accuracy in geological mapping and interpretation, need no longer be a compromise of computer system speed and storage capacity. Well it appears like we are finally getting to achieve that with the variety of platforms available to we the people as data democracy starts to gain traction.