You can now register to the FOSS4G conference.

The details: "There are three things you will need to plan:

• Which conference package do I want to book – Full, Day or Student?
• Which extra items do I want to book – workshops, icebreaker, closing party?
• Where am I going to stay – hotel on site, university accommodation, somewhere else?

Details of all the options are shown here. Note that the accommodation options are available once you’ve ticked your registration options checkbox(es), so you don’t need to book accommodation separately. It’s easiest to pay by credit card but if your organisation requires an invoice to pay you can tick that box when you register and we will send you an invoice.

• Please note that you must pay the full amount in £ sterling including any bank charges. 
• Invoices must be paid within 14 days of receipt to secure your room reservation and delegate place.

Early Bird prices are available until 31st May but we recommend booking as soon as you can as there are only a limited number of hotel rooms on the site."

Slashgeo is a proud media partner of FOSS4G.

3D GeoInfo - 8th 3D GeoInfo Conference & ISPRS WG II/2 Workshop

“Advances in Multi-scale and multi-dimensional modeling and data representation”

Submission for papers in the Academic Track of FOSS4G is now open

The FOSS4G Academic Track is bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in the geospatial and the free and open source fields.

With the Academic Track motto “Science for Open Source, Open Source for Science”, we aim to attract academic papers describing:

• The use of open source geospatial software and data, in and for scientific research
• Academic endeavours to conceptualize, create, assess, and teach open source geospatial software and data.

Based on these categories, to promote a strong connection between the Academic Track and the other elements of FOSS4G, we hope for contributions within the following themes:

• Data Quality, Software Quality and Service Quality
• Community Building
• Doing more for less: Assessment of costs and benefits of open source applications and open source business models
• Use of Open Data to inform public services
• FOSS and FOSS4g: Is spatial special?
• Architectures and frameworks for open source software and data
• Teaching Geospatial Sciences with open source solutions
• Open Source GIS application use cases: Government, Participatory GIS, Location based services, Health, Energy, Water, Climate change, etc.
• Human Computer Interfaces and Usability in and around Open GI systems

We invite academics and researchers to submit full papers in English, of maximum 6,000 words, before the deadline of 1 February. Templates for submissions in a variety of formats can be found here, and detailed requirements, regarding layout, formatting and the submission process, can be found on the FOSS4G 2103 Academic Track submission pages

Your contributions will be reviewed (double-blind) by a diverse reviewing committee of experts in the field, who will be asked to assess the papers on originality and academic rigour, as well as interest for the wider FOSS4G community. We expect to select 20-25 papers for presentation and publication. From this selection, a maximum of 8-10 papers will be given the opportunity for inclusion in a special issue of the renowned international journal Transactions in GIS [1]. The remaining papers will be published in the online OSGEO Journal [2].

We would like to specifically invite “early stage researchers” (PhD students, PostDocs) to use this opportunity to aim for a high-ranking publication.

Authors of all selected papers will be expected to present their work in detail in a separate Academic Track (with 20-30 minute slots), and will also be given the opportunity to pitch the central theme of their paper in short ‘lightning’ talks to the larger community, to generate attention and cross-pollenate with industry, developers and users.

Important Dates:

NOW: Submission open
1 February: Deadline for submission of full papers
1 April: Reviewing decisions
1 May: Paper revision deadline
15 September: publication of selected papers
8-10 papers in Early View (on-line) Transactions in GIS
others in on-line OSGEO Journal
17-21 September: FOSS4G Conference
early: printed issue Transactions in GIS
For questions, comments and remarks, do not hesitate to contact the Academic Track co-chairs:

Franz-Josef Behr (Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences):
Barend Köbben (ITC-University of Twente):
[1]: Transactions in GIS. Published by Wiley; included in ISI, with an impact factor of 0.54; edited by John P. Wilson, David O’Sullivan and Alexander Zipf. Print ISSN: 1361-1682 Online ISSN: 1467-9671.

[2]: OSGEO Journal, the official Journal of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation;

We mentioned the first JS.geo event and Peter Batty shares his wrap-up of the event. I strongly recommend reading the full entry if you have any remote interest in web mapping technology.

From the entry: "D3 supports a new format called TopoJSON, which is similar to geoJSON, but supports topology to eliminate redundancy. For polygon data this can reduce data volumes by around 80% (compared to regular geoJSON). It also lends itself to robust simplification of polygons. [...] Several presentations, including this one by Aaron Ogle, confirmed the impression I had that the Leaflet JavaScript mapping API has great momentum. [...] Brendan Kenny from Google gave an interesting talk on WebGL, which brings high performance 3D (and 2D) graphics to (most) web browsers [...]"

The details of FOSS4G North America have been announced­. Everything is there, from registration, the call for presentations, the gala and the code sprint.

Amongst the keynotes they propose: "Eric Gundersen, CEO, MapBox.  With big names converting from Google Maps to MapBox (USA Today, Foursquare, etc.), Eric will be discussing the business proposition/value of open source geo.

Erek Dyskant, Sr. Analytics Engineer, Democratic National Committee. Whether you were happy or sad with the outcome of the recent election, they must have done something right!  Erek will talk about how open source solutions were used to empower tacticians with geospatial data, and describe what drove the intentional choice of using open source."

Last year, Slashgeo had the chance to be a media partner of the first FOSS4G-NA.

I'm glad to announce that Slashgeo is a proud media partner of the 8th International gvSIG Conference, to be held November 28-30, in Valencia, Spain. We of course frequently mention the open source gvSIG desktop GIS software. gvSIG has its Wikipedia page. One of its strengths is certainly its very active developers community.

From the objective of the 8th International gvSIG conference, with its headline 'Making the Future: Technology, Solidarity and Business': "We have long been hearing and even worse, suffering the consequences of those who really know and are surely making fun of us especially if we tell them that we believe that solidarity should be a core value that guides both scientific and economical development.

Those who have been following us for some time know that in gvSIG we have always been talking about a new model of development and production that would allow us to produce more, better and more fairly; a model where solidarity would substitute rivalry. To construct this new model there has to be new ideas, new schemes, otherwise, if a new model is built based on old schemes this would then lead to utmost failure.

Now more than ever, it is time to consider this new model. Not only by using free software but also by adopting values ​​of collaboration and shared knowledge, replacing individualism with solidarity; this is what guides the development of science and economy, so that the business world follows ethics and responds to different values ​​other than the current ones."

Here's the recent Esri-related geonews. Last week was the Esri International User Conference, we already mentioned the launch of Esri Maps for Microsoft Office.

• Prior to the conference, Esri shared a very long list of Q&A: "We do this every year to keep you informed on our efforts in software development, products, education, and support; future plans in these areas; and thoughts on GIS and the industry as a whole." Since the document is very long, APB graciously shared a useful entry named Digging into the Esri UC Q & A. James took the challenge of providing funny answers.

• The Esri UC Plenary Session Videos are already available

• Mandown provided several related entries:
  • The Top 10 Productivity Improvements In ArcGIS 10.1, the first 3: Sharing, Improved Server Functionality and Performance Improvements
  • Esri And Microsoft To Provide Online Maps And Applications During Disasters
  • ArcGIS For Local Government 10.1 Now Available
• Directions Magazine also share several related entries:
  • A list of pre-conference summits links
  • Nokia Location & Commerce and Esri completed a deal for Location Intelligence
  • An APB entry named ArcGIS Online is Not the Answer to Every Question, James has a related entry I still don't know what ArcGIS Online is
  • An informative entry named Takeaways from Esri UC
  • Here's a summary of Dangermond on Executives Empowering Executives
• It was published as a press release (but it's not one), information on the Advanced Utility Network Analyst (AUNA) extension

The 8th International gvSIG Conference, organized by the gvSIG Association, will be held from November 28th to 30th at La Petxina Sports-Cultural Complex (Valencia - Spain), under the slogan "Making the Future: Technology, Solidarity and Business".

Call for papers is now open. As of today communication proposals can be sent to the scientific committee as to their inclusion in the conference program. There are two types of communication: paper or poster. Information regarding to regulations on communication presentations can be found in the Communications section [2]. Abstracts will be accepted until September 28th.

Organizations interested in collaborating in the event can find information in the section: How to collaborate [3].

Catching up geonews, I learned the sad news that earlier this week the FOSS4G conference in Beijing has been canceled. To learn more, see this reply from Jeff McKenna, former member of the OSGeo Board of Directors.

From the announcement: "With great regret, the FOSS4G Beijing Local Organizing Committee (LOC) has made the difficult decision of cancelling the event due to a lack of financial resources and the unexpected withdrawal of the Professional Conference Organizer. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. For those interested in FOSS4G events, the LOC suggests consider:

• FOSS4G, to be held in Nottingham, United Kingdom
• The Asian Geospatial Forum, September, Hanoi, Vietnam, which will have an OSGeo session:"

Slashgeo participated to several FOSS4G conferences in the past, including FOSS4G-NA (North America) a few months ago. There are plenty of other regional geospatial open source events to take place before we head to FOSS4G in Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 17-21.

The WebGL Camp provides WebGL developers a forum to present updates on their latest projects and frameworks. After five WebGL Camps in the USA, WebGL Camp is now coming to Europe being hosted by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.

The agenda is online now and there are many geo visualization topics, for example Nokia 3D Maps, 3D building visualization, stereovision mobile mapping, CZML: the JSON schema for describing dynamic scenes in virtual globes (Cesium Globe), the OpenWebGlobe SDK for creating new virtual globe applications, and much more.