slashgeo.org

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. I've been struggling with many fires, I currently publish much less frequently than usual, but don't worry, everything major is in there!

From the open source / open data front:

• Dubbed as the Shapefile replacement, we discussed the GeoPackage standard several times, next week March 5 there's a webinar about it
• Certainly useful, GitHub adds visual history for maps, visualizing geojson updates directly on a map
• In case you missed the press release, open source 3D city platform ViziCities released on GitHub
• The power of open data, At Sochi Olympics, Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap Trounces Google Maps
• And if you wonder, Sochi was not mapped for Olympics and look at the nice maps you can do with open data - Sochi, with love
• News of OpenLayers 3 currently in beta 2, OpenLayers 3 Is Coming, Creating a custom build of OpenLayers 3 and there's even The book of OpenLayers3 is coming
• Using MapServer on Windows? Announcing MapServer MapManager 1.0
• In other updates, what's new in QGIS 2.2 which by itself could have deserved it's own entry, GeoTools 10.5 released and Rasterio 0.6
• Interesting entry on PostGIS bugs

From the Esri front:

• An article from readwrite, Esri Enables Federal Agencies To Open GIS Mapping Data To The Public
• We mentioned it last November, Introducing Esri’s Geotrigger Service: Welcome to the Future of Geofencing
• There's CityEngine key new features
• And What’s coming in ArcGIS Online March
• APB also offer Top 10 Take-Aways from the Opening Plenary of Esri’s Federal GIS Conference

From the Google front:

• Here's a very interesting article from Frank Taylor on the future of Google Earth, which apparently is being left aside in favor of Google Maps
• Google is Introducing Google Maps Gallery: Unlocking the World’s Maps
• The Canadian north in Street View, Wandering in the footsteps of the polar bear with Google Maps
• And it goes to India too, Discover the Taj Mahal and other iconic Indian monuments on Street View
• And a frequent topic, Monitoring the World's Forests with Global Forest Watch
• And if you don't like OpenStreetMap and open data, Expanding Google's Map Maker community in Southern and Eastern Europe
• A book review, Google Maps JavaScript API Cookbook
• Pretty nice and useful, Visualizing Google Search Results overlaid over 3D buildings

Discussed over Slashdot:

• DIY, Radar Expert Explains How To Cheaply Add Radar To Your Own Hardware Projects
• Video, not just photo anymore, New 360-Degree Video Capture Method Unveiled
• After autonomous cars, Terrafugia Wants Their Flying Car To Be Autonomous
• Don't tell me you're surprised, Lumia Phones Leaking Private Data To Microsoft
• That's not fun for their users,  Major Vulnerability In Tinder Dating App Allowed User [ Location ] Tracking
• Cellphone tracking, Death By Metadata: The NSA's Secret Role In the US Drone Strike Program
• And some of the time there's hope, ICE License-Plate Tracking Plan Withdrawn Amid Outcry About Privacy
• And there's the good uses, A New Use For Drones: Traffic Scouting
• Not surprising, Australian Police Deploy 3D Crime Scene Scanner
• A New Interactive Map For Understanding Global Flood Risks and here's a related article
• It's not going well for our oceans, 3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean
• It's actually from DigitalGlobe, Google Earth's New Satellites
• Car navigation, Dead Reckoning For Your Car Eliminates GPS Dead Zones
• And cars will chat together, Government To Require Vehicle-to-vehicle Communication

In the everything-else category:

• Interested in Lidar? Read LIDAR Format Wars: Towards an Open Future and it matters, Report predicts that low cost LiDAR will be disruptive in next 5 years, also related, LiDAR Data Quality Standards, Certification Discussed at LiDAR Forum Session
• Here's a list of Free GIS Apps on the Google Play Store
• Earlier this month, the 'father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson, passed away
• It has been a while since we discussed The State of CAD and GIS Integration
• A new article on What Skills Does A GIS Analyst Require
• An anniversary this month, Celebrating 25 Years of Not Getting Lost Thanks to GPS
• Groups on Earth Observations? What is GEO
• Microsoft, 15 New 3D Cities Available in the Bing Maps Preview App
• Law, California Appeals Court Rules State Law Doesn't Prohibit Driver Use of Smartphone Maps
• VIa OR, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
• Via OR, after iBeacons and many others, here's the Nokia Treasure Tag
• OGC news, OGC Activities and Mobile Industry Trends and the Candidate OGC IndoorGML standard available for public comment
• Amazing what you can do for fantasy locations, If Middle-Earth Were Real, These Exquisite Shots Would Be Its Vacation Brochure
• Here's a fake mapped town that became real, Agloe, the Paper Town Stronger than Fiction
• New online courses, New Geo MOOC: From GPS and Google Maps to Spatial Computing

In the maps category:

• Over Canadian national news website, there was a mention of the map of legal cannabis in the U.S.
• Syria over Wired, Hyperlocal Neighborhood Maps Reveal the Chaos in Aleppo
• Nice map, A Map of U.S. Intercity Bus and Train Routes
• The First online Global Freshwater Biodiversity Atlas

And thanks to Andrew Zolnai for his recent donation to Slashgeo, we wouldn't be there without the community!

Catching up the geonews for the month in my absence, this topic is an important one since it tries to provide a modern alternative to the Shapefile format, the GeoPackage standard is aiming to be "super lean, accessible to all, and implementable by non-GIS experts". The GML standard failed to being widely adopted and GeoPackage is coming to the rescue. We discussed GeoPackage before, and here's the latest and important news about it.

First, on August 6th, the OGC GeoPackage draft standard for sharing spatial data was released for public comment until September 5th. Chris Holmes shared a pretty pertinent entry named Githubbing the GeoPackage specification and he is pretty positive: "I do believe the specification is ‘pretty good’ – it has improved in almost all the ways I was hoping it would [...]. I do believe GeoPackage can improve even more, primarily by feedback from real implementations."

A few days later, Chris shared another insightful entry on Spatialite and GeoPackage: "One of the most important things for me was that it would be possible for implementors to build code to create a geopackage without requiring any special SQLite stuff. The core should just be a file format. And the file should be readable by any SQLite, not one compiled with special options or additional libraries. This means the core GeoPackage is far less than SpatiaLite. [...] Unfortunately SpatiaLite made some small changes so that as a Java programmer I can’t just use JTS‘s Well Known Binary parser, and it’s a similar story in OGR. And it’s the same case for any GIS vendor that has a WKB parser." Read the entry for more details on the differences and why it has / may have to be different.

And yes, there already is an open source libgpkg in the works!

Here's the geonews in batch mode, unusually covering 4 weeks, thus a much longer issue.

On the open source / data front:

• With the GeoPackage standard in the oven and its opportunity to replace the aging shapefile format, read this very pertinent summary named Takeaways from OpenGeo’s Comments on OGC and the Proposed GeoPackage Specification
• An interesting entry on TileMill for Raster Analysis
• In the same vein, expanding TileMill's Building Symbolizer to Visualize Complex 3D Structures
• EasySDI V3 is now available
• The open source virtual globe Marble 1.5 is now available for MacOS X

On the Esri front:

• A book review of "Python Scripting for ArcGIS" by Paul A. Zandbergen
• A new version, and here's what’s new in ArcGIS Explorer Desktop 2500
• The ArcGIS Query Analysis Add-In is available for download
• Here's the ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map February updates and here's the previous update
• ArcGIS applied to tennis, Using spatial analytics to study spatio-temporal patterns in sport
• APB shares a Esri Federal GIS Conference News Roundup

On the Google front:

• Google announced that Public Alerts for Google Search, Google Now and Google Maps available in Japan
• The official entry on Expanding Street View in Europe
• The GEB again mentions Tracking Satellites in Google Earth, this time linking to the new SightSpaceStation website

On the Microsoft front:

• A new Bing Maps Tech Preview at TED Conference: "a new twist: the ability to mine Flickr for geotagged photos and overlay onto Bing Maps streetside imagery for a perfect visual lock"
• Bing Maps got a major overhaul, 46.7 TB of new imagery and a Silverlight version of Bing Maps... I though Silverlight was abandoned?
• Here's the entry on the New Top of the World and High Resolution Satellite Imagery
• An entry on Bing Maps REST Service Tips & Tricks
• And New to REST Services: Elevations API and 3D Elevation Models with Bing Maps WPF
• And training for apps builders, Bing Maps for Windows Store Apps Training Kit

Geospatial-related discussions over Slashdot:

• Startup Uses Radiation Fear To Map Cellphone Coverage
• Fox News: US Solar Energy Investment Less Than Germany Because US Has Less Sun, comparing maps, it's simply far from the truth
• The US Redrawn As 50 Equally Populated States
• Drones Still Face Major Hurdles In US Airspace and AirBurr UAV Navigates By Crashing Into Things
• Canon Demos New Head-Mounted Augmented-Reality Display
• Texas Bills Would Bar Warrantless Snooping On Phone Location

In the everything else category:

• A lot of sources mentioned 3Doodler: The World's First 3D Printing Pen, while not entirely geospatial-related, 3D printing is mainstream now
• APB shares an entry on a Free e-Book on Online GIS which compares ArcGIS Online, CartoDB, CloudGIS, GeoCommons, MangoMap and MapBox
• Trying to amend myself for not having shared this before, here's How Interactivity Works with UTFGrid for web maps, along with a visual demo, and an example using OpenLayers
• APB has an entry named U.S. House Representatives Introduce Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act
• Everything is a geospatial sensor, Rain tracked with mobile network
• A milestone release, MapBox iOS SDK Goes 1.0.0 + New Features
• MapQuest Introduced Free Travel Blogs to help people share their travel adventures
• Mapperz mentions that the USPS Mapping Tool allows you to pick your own delivery routes
• APB links to an article named How Google And Bing Maps Control What You Can See

In the maps category:

• We presented a world map of undersea internet connections, here's the interactive Submarine Cable Map
• Scary, maps of the U.S. Geography of Sin, and here's the U.S. Geography of Happiness