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Maps are at the core of geospatial, and we’re now into the International Map Year.

From the official website: “The International Cartographic Association has decided to celebrate an International Map Year during the years of and and has also formed a working group to plan and organise that task. […] The ICA expects that all ICA member countries will participate in order to give their citizens a broader knowledge of maps – how they are produced and used for many purposes in society. Another goal is to give school children and university students an opportunity to learn more about cartography and about its neighbouring geospatial sciences geodesy, photogrammetry, remote sciences and surveying. ICA has about 80 national members, and the UN will be helpful in establishing contact with all other countries in the world, so that International Map Year will be celebrated worldwide.”

We begin year with pretty interesting and major news. WebGIS is one giant step closer to be seriously useful, thanks to the new open source WebGIS project named Turf.

From the MapBox announcement: “Turf is GIS for web maps. It’s a fast, compact, and open-source JavaScript library that implements the most common geospatial operations: buffering, contouring, triangular irregular networks (TINs), and more. Turf speaks GeoJSON natively, easily connects to Leaflet […]  Unlike the ArcGIS API for JavaScript, Turf can run completely client-side for all operations, so web apps can work offline and sensitive information can be kept local. We’re constantly refining Turf’s performance. Recent research algorithms can make operations like clipping and buffering faster than ever, and as JavaScript engines like V8 continue to optimize, Turf will compete with native code. […] With the building blocks for GIS analysis on the web, you can create your next spatial application in a whole new way: as small pieces joined together intelligently using Turf.”

You can try the examples yourself from MapBox’s entry or look at the list and try examples directly on turfjs. Discussing Turf and why it may succeed, Howard points to Plasio, point cloud rendering capability in a browser for Lidar data. Geospatial directly on the web might indeed see great progress this year.

Here’s the last batch-mode edition, covering most of December. Might interest some of you, Slashgeo’s posts are now mirrored on Google+. Have an excellent holiday break.

On the open source / open data front:

• More support for the standard, GDAL GeoPackage raster support
• Reading, The Book of OpenLayers 3, completed
• And another one announced, 2nd edition of Learning QGIS with a new chapter on expanding QGIS with Python
• OpenLayers 3 now support Drawing Points with WebGL
• WPS, an update to the ZOO-Project 1.4.0 release
• All pieces in one suite, OpenGeo Suite 4.5 released, and you don’t have to write SLD anymore
• Nice Ski maps styles available as open source from MapBox

On the Esri front:

• A new version, ArcGIS 10.3: The Next Generation of GIS Is Here
• You might also be interested in What’s new in ArcGIS 10.3 for Server
• Many will be interested by Now Available: Explorer for ArcGIS on Android
• Useful, ArcGIS Online supports GeoJSON
• New capability, Lossless CityGML support in ArcGIS
• A book review: Building Web Applications with ArcGIS

On the Google front:

• Google deprecated the Google Earth API to be turned off in December, this means no more Google Earth Plugin, and you can migrate to OpenLayers 3 and Cesium for such needs
• Why not? Do some holiday (window) shopping with Google Maps
• Looking for Google My Maps? Map this way—Google My Maps now in Drive, also includes a few more capabilities
• New addition, Drive by Dubai with Street View
• You can also Look at the new 3D in New York City
• Wired has an article named The Huge, Unseen Operation Behind the Accuracy of Google Maps

Discussed over Slashdot:

• Location privacy with a smartphone is really an illusion, Researchers Discover SS7 Flaw, Allowing Total Access To Any Cell Phone, Anywhere
• Hopefully, Uber Limits ‘God View’ To Improve Rider Privacy
• 6,000$, Startup Helps You Build Your Very Own Picosatellite On a Budget
• Sensing, Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space
• Where are you cheater? Study of Massive Preprint Archive Hints At the Geography of Plagiarism
• Babel, Want To Influence the World? Map Reveals the Best Languages To Speak
• Making 3D printing more accessible, U.K. Royal Mail Pilots 3D Printing Service, if that’s within your interests, 3D Printer Owner’s Network Puts Together Buyer’s Guide

In the miscellaneous category:

• You’re into education? Look at the reports on the analysis of the supply and demand for geospatial education and training
• O’Reilly on where UAVs will fly, One more word on drones: Warehouses
• Actually, if drones matter to you, here’s a useful summary named from Spatial Law: The Year of the Drone
• And since it’s so popular, International Conference on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Geomatics - August 30 / September 2, - Toronto,  Canada
• Skydel’s Software-Defined GNSS Simulator,apparently the first real-time, full band, software-defined GPS & GLONASS simulator
• Getting smaller and smaller, DARPA Prepares to Launch “Satlets”
• Lidar, How a Flying Laser Built a 3-D Map of a Massive Alaskan Forest
• GeoA has an article on Mappt, claiming to be the most advanced GIS Android app
• Includes a map, NPR’s Incomplete Story on “Trimmigants” in the California Marijuana Industry
• Interesting partnership, Nokia HERE now powers Chinese Baidu with global map data, and Here navigation app is officially on Google Play
• Nokia is also into autonomous cars, as shown in this article named Autonomous Cars Will Require a Totally New Kind of Map

In the maps category:

• A book review: Cartographer’s Toolkit:Colors, Typography, Patterns by Gretchen N. Peterson
• Scary map and graph included, was Earth’s warmest year ever recorded and Satellite Map Shows Evidence of a Dangerous Arctic Warming Feedback Loop
• You can’t hide, Map showing asteroid hits of past 20 years
• Glass half full?, Interactive map of global corruption
• In the U.S., this map shows the probability of your city to have a White Christmas and yes, You Can See Our Holiday Lights All the Way From Space
• A bit late for that, but for geogeek woman, Christmas gift? Check out custom-made map clothes
• That’s another cool geo-gift, MapWheel – a custom orientation wheel, but it ain’t cheap

We would like to inform you of the availability of presentations, posters and articles presented during the 10th International gvSIG Conference [1], which were held from December 3rd to 5th in Valencia (Spain).

The videos of the report sessions and workshops are also available to be visualized online. All the videos are available with English and Spanish audio, excepting the three workshops given on Wednesday and Thursday, that are only in Spanish.

With this publishing, we pretend to bring the Conference closer to the interested people that couldn’t attend the event, having the possibility to access to the recording of the different sessions.

After the success of the first FOSS4G-Asia in Bangkok last week, we could see a trend in this part of the world in the next years to come. The market seems to be dominated by users and small-medium enterprise for now. As for the use case, disaster management is likely to be on the top of the list, a prove of that is the most popular workshop was the InaSafe one (as a plugin in QGIS). This project uses OpenStreetMap data as input and other open data to analyse scenario of disaster on risk reduction. This project has been applied mostly in Indonesia which has built with the Australian government its capability of risk analysis with now over 1.3 millions of building mapped and involvement of HOT (OSM) Team over the years. With over 110 persons attending this FOSS4G-Asia event from 18 countries (Nigeria, Canada, Germany, Laos, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, etc.), this event was more open to other parts of the world than what we could think at first.

The best user of FOSS4G-Asia was given to eHealth Africa in Nigeria for their work towards polio eradication and Ebola outbreak and their use of FOSS4G such as: OSRM, MapServer, QGIS and CKAN.
The best software development was given to MapMint and their team of developers.
Finally, this Asian community will be involved again next year at the international FOSS4G in Seoul (which will include a technical session only for Asia).

Sanghee Shin from South Korea gives seven reasons why people should go to Seoul next year, such as people (the Asian market is the biggest in the world), South Korea government investment in open source (9 million over the next years), the culture (Asian culture is vibrant) and most of all, because it is with distance that comes new connection!