The OSGeo announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. It's hard to ignore GDAL/OGR, which is at the core of many open source and commercial geospatial software. We mention it quite often. Version 1.8.0 was release a year ago. For the curious ones, ESRI's FileGeodatabase format is now officially supported by GDAL/OGR.

The summary of what's new: "This is a major new release including the following major new features:

• New GDAL drivers: ACE2, CTG, E00GRID, ECRGTOC, GRASSASCIIGrid, GTA, NGSGEOID, SNODAS, WebP, ZMap
• New OGR drivers: ARCGEN, CouchDB, DWG, EDIGEO, ESRI FileGDB, Geomedia, Google Fusion Tables, IDRISI, MDB, SEGUKOOA, SEGY, SVG, XLS
• Significantly improved drivers: NetCDF
• Encoding support for shapefile/dbf (#882)
• RFC 35: Delete, reorder and alter field definitions of OGR layers
• RFC 37: Add mechanism to provide user data to CPLErrorHandler (#4295)
• gdalsrsinfo: new supported utility to report SRS in various form (supercedes testepsg)"

Here's the recent open source geospatial news.

• O'Reilly mentioned AntiMap, an open source toolset for recording and visualising your own location data from a smartphone, such lat long, compass direction, speed, distance, time and POI
• Here's the shapefile-js project, allowing you to render local shapefiles with HTML5
• We mentioned Fiona before, Sean reports on where's Fiona, a python OGR API, now at its v0.5 release
• Quantum GIS 1.7.3 has been released, and they're getting closer to QGIS 1.8.0 and 2.0, apparently QGIS benefits from great momentum
• GeoServer 2.1.3 has been release, related, here's an entry named Robust Clustering Solution for GeoServer
• GeoTools 2.7.4 has been released
• Its been since last Spring that we heard about the open source virtual globe Marble, here's an entry on Marble's satellite view
• In this OpenGeo interview of Matt Priour, I learned about MapStory, "MapStory is an infrastructure for enabling “MapStorytelling” as a means of communicating important sociocultural dynamics to a global audience."
• In this entry, you'll learn about using PgRouting on OpenStreetMap data within QGIS
• Still on the same topic here's the vector transparency plugin for QGIS
• Here's how to create coloured rasters with GDAL
• If you're in Europe, the FOSS4G-CEE & Geoinformatics conference will be held in Prague May 21-23

Mapperz made me aware of the open source Google Vector Layers project, allowing you to overlay your data over Google Maps.

Here's what it is: "Google Vector Layers allows you to easily add one or more vector layers from a number of different geo web services to a Google Maps API based application. Currently there's support for ArcGIS Server, Arc2Earth, GeoIQ and CartoDB with more planned."

​And how it's done: "Google Vector Layers works by listening to map events (pan and zoom) and then fetching features within the map bounds after each event. This method works great for data sets with lots of features that you want to interact with, but not load all at once."

There's demos if you want to try it live.

Via O'Reilly I learned about this open source jQuery Plugin for creating subway-style map visualizations directly in HTML5. Now at version 0.5.0, the subwayMap Plugin already creates nice maps.

The intro of the provided step-by-step guide: "Here is a guide to using the Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin. Before you get started, there’s one thing you’ll want to keep in mind — beautiful subway maps are never automatic; they are almost always the result of care in design and placement to ensure that the resulting map is functional, legible and beautiful. This plugin is just a tool…you will still need to plan and design your map in order to produce a good result."

As Jackie says it, after "3 years and 1251 revisions in the making. The 1.0 final version of FDO Toolbox is finally here."

​The FDO Toolbox is described as a "multi-purpose geospatial tool to create, analyze, process and manage spatial data. It is written in C# and uses the Feature Data Objects (FDO) API".

And we can head to the OSGeo website for a reminder of what FDO is: "FDO Data Access Technology is an API for manipulating, defining and analyzing geospatial information regardless of where it is stored. FDO uses a provider-based model for supporting a variety of geospatial data sources, where each provider typically supports a particular data format or data store. FDO (“Feature Data Object”) is free, open source software licensed under the LGPL."

We mentioned FDO quite a few times in the past. I'm no expert, but I believe FDO is mainly used and part of Autodesk's MapGuide Open Source and is sometimes considered as a competitor to GDAL/OGR. What have I missed?

With uDig 1.2 released over a year ago, let's welcome uDig 1.3.0, an open source desktop GIS based on Java.

From new features from the release notes:

• Area of Interest support - define your area of interest based on CRS, current screen or a bookmark
• Filter the Table view using the current area of interest - a great way to focus on what is on screen
• Updated Info and Profile tool for raster data
• Teradata support
• Spatial Toolbox view allowing access to OMS3 processing; with tutorial!
• New import and export formats: CSV and KML

Via the OSGeo-Discuss list, I learned about the open source software named 'Total Open Station' (TOPS), for downloading and processing data from total station devices. TOPS is currently at version 0.3.

Here's why TOPS is different:

• it is free software released under the GNU GPLv3 license;
• it works on any operating system, including mobile platforms like OpenMoko;
• it is designed to support as many devices and formats as possible, all within the same program, opposed to having one program per device.

​Also in the surveying and field measurement and monitoring category, V1 mentions a Datalogger Web Services API.

Here's the recent open source and open data geonews in batch mode.

• Statistics Canada, aka StatCan, will offer a lot (but not all) of its data under an open data license beginning February
• OpenStreetMap now has nothing less than 500,000 registered users, here's new tile sets for the Transport Layer and the MapQuest Open layer, and V1 discusses the idea of OpenFarmMap
• Here's an interactive QGIS tutorial by Harvard's Lex Berman, a detailed entry on the creation of Map Books in QGIS via the EasyPrint plugin, a first glimpse at the pgRouting layer for QGIS, and more on the fusion of QGIS Desktop with web technologies
• Mike at OpenGeo discusses the Esri white paper about using an hybrid approach; using both open source and proprietary GIS software
• A few sources mentioned the 'Public Mapping Project' which develops the open source 'District Builder' redistricting software, this was also discussed over Slashdot
• PostGIS gets GeoJSON support and here's an entry on Topology cleaning with PostGIS
• If you're into Python, here's Kurt lecture on writing KML and SQLite with Python
• We just shared with you the new global GMTED2010 dataset, here's how to seamlessly access to remote Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data with GDAL
• GeoSolutions shared an entry named Serving Meteo data with GeoServer, GeoBatch and GeoNetwork: the LaMMA use case 
• DM shares an article from a Slashgeo editor, named Open Source Software and OGC Web Services: Life-saving Components in Québec’s Emergency and Disaster Management
• Geopaparazzi 2.5.0 has been released

This is major news for anyone using DEM datasets. Here's about a new elevation dataset named Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data - GMTED2010. Here's the USGS report about GMTED2010 and the description and download site on USGS's EROS.

From the article: "The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) have released an updated and more accurate global elevation model that pulls data from Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED®) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); Canadian elevation data; SPOT 5 Reference 3D data; data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); and updated Antarctica and Greenland terrain models. This new elevation data called Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data (GMTED2010),  replaces the thirty year old GTOPO30 terrain model.

GMTED2010 is a suite of seven raster data products: minimum elevation, maximum elevation, mean elevation, median elevation, standard deviation of elevation, systematic subsample, and breakline emphasis. The spatial resolution of GMTED2010 ranges from 30, 15 and 7.5 arc-seconds (approximately 1 kilometer, 500 meters and 250 meters, respectively)."

You might be interested in the ASTER GDEM and the SRTM-DEM CGIAR-CSI v4 datasets, amongst other DEMs.

Lately there was a not much surprising news about Google products and services. Among other things Google has changed the Google Maps API use policy and will charge to those users that exceed some download limits.

It is well known that Google Maps is one of the most (or the most) famous mapping service used around the net and it starts the web GIS revolution some years ago but hopefully it is not the only API we can use. Bing and the discontinued Yahoo Maps, are great competitors but there are great and open alternatives to use.

I wrote this post to summarize the most important JavaScript API alternatives to Google Maps.

[Editor's note: this anonymous submission mainly discusses OpenLayers, Polymaps and Leaflet]