The gvSIG-Training e-Learning platform opens its registration period for the second edition of the gvSIG Basic Course in English.

This course lasts seven weeks and it is included in the Certification Program of the gvSIG Association [1].

- Details of the course:

• Subscription until the 1st of April
• Beginning of the course: 8th of April
• End of the Course: 31st of May

The 8th International gvSIG Conference will be held from November 28th to 30th at La Petxina Sports-Cultural Complex (Valencia - Spain). The provisional program is available with the paper sessions and workshops on the Conference web page [1]

All the presentations at the Conference, and the workshops given on Wednesday, will have simultaneous interpretation (Spanish-English and English-Spanish).

Registrations are free of cost (limited capacity) and must be done through the application form on the Conference web page [2].

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."

A new final version of gvSIG Desktop has been released: gvSIG Desktop 1.12.

It's available at the Downloads section of the gvSIG website [1].

The main new features of gvSIG 1.12 are:

• Latest Sextante version (1.0) integrated.
• Usability improvements in general (view maximized by default, random colors, fixed size and color in labelling, “all supported” filter at loading files, more user-friendly mouse wheel zoom, non-modal locator window, etc.).
• Some bugfixes in Postgis driver.
• Khmer and Persian translations included.
• New versions of data access suported: WMS 1.3 and KML (latest).

The other new features, known problems, and other notes can be consulted at [2].

Credits:

• Improvements in the PostGIS driver and in the layout document:
  • Sponsor: Deputación Pontevedra [3] and Consellería de Medio Ambiente, Territorio e Infraestructuras de la Xunta de Galicia [4]
  • Developer: gvSIG Association [5] and Prodevelop [6]
• Improvements in usability, ODBC connections, OGC connections and more:
  • Sponsor: GeoEuskadi [7], Gobierno Vasco [8].
  • Developer: Software Colaborativo [9]
• Version release (bugfixing, testing and some new features)
  • Sponsor: gvSIG Association, Fundación de la Ingeniería Civil de Galicia [10] and universidade da Coruña [11].
  • Developer: CartoLab [12], Icarto [13], Software Colaborativo, and gvSIG Association

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The registration period for the 8th International gvSIG Conference [1], organized by the gvSIG Association, is now open. It will be held from November 28th to 30th in Valencia (Spain).

Registrations are free of cost (limited capacity) and must be done through the application form on the Conference web page [2].

Once the registration is done you will immediately receive a confirmation code. Please, keep this code for later consultations or for update the registration data.

In addition, we remind you that we are expecting communication proposals for the Conference. The deadline is September 28th.

You just have to send an abstract, following the template provided on the Reports section of the Conference web page [3] to and the scientific committee will evaluate it to be in the conference programme. There are two types of communications: presentation and poster.

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source / data front:

• MapBrief claim that the battle for open source in the enterprise in behind us, from the WSJ: "[...] for reasons including ease of innovation and cutting the time to get products to market"
• Interesting, announcing QMap: A simple data collection application using QGIS
• Unless I'm mistaken, we haven't mentioned yet the new 'shp.js' open source javascript Shapefile parser (via GGD)
• In case you missed it in our PR section, there's an Education version of gvSIG
• GeoTools 8.1 has been released, mostly a bug fix release
• Portable GIS version 3 has been released too
• Here's a summary of State of the Map held in Tokyo
• It's done, OpenStreetMap data license is now ODbL
• And yes, some crazy people try to sell open source geospatial code

From the Esri front:

• Here's What’s New in ArcGIS Online for September

From the Microsoft front:

• New imagery to Bing Maps, a lot of it, Global Ortho & 17 Million SqKm of New Satellite Imagery

From the Google front:

• Plenty of geoblogs mentioned the Atlantic article on the secretive Ground Truth program in an article named How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything
• Google shares a breakout of Google Maps search terms by country for this Summer
• They also have an entry on the need to save the elephants and how to do it the geospatial way
• You can also Explore the Forefront of Japanese Space Science with Google Maps
• Here's the official entry on the latest imagery update in Google Maps and Google Earth, a lot of it
• The GEB shares an entry on Viewing city lights in Google Earth and why not, another entry on Google Earth Fractals

Interesting Directions Mag articles:

• Does Your Local Government Need A Drone?
• New Spatial Information Act for Australia
• Trucking Fleets Leverage Traffic Data to Work Smarter, Cut Costs
• New Resources for GIS Job Seekers

In the miscellaneous category:

• The SPOT 6 satellite is alive and well with its first images, it was successfully launched on September 9 and has a spatial resolution of 1.5m
• LizardTech (MrSID) Releases Express Server 8

In the maps category:

• Via APB, here's a Map the World’s Friendships from Facebook and Stamen
• Here's a gigantic 3D map of the deaths in Grand Canyon
• NASA wants you to help map an asteroid

The Minister of Transport and Public Works, Enrique Pintado, presented gvSIG Batoví, the first Uruguayan distribution that has given rise to gvSIG Educa, on Thursday, 6 September.

gvSIG Educa is a customization of the gvSIG Desktop Open Source GIS, adapted as a tool for the education of issues that have a geographic component. The aim of gvSIG Educa is to provide educators with a tool that helps students to analyse and understand space, and which can be adapted to different levels or education systems. gvSIG Educa facilitates learning by letting students interact with the information, by adding a spatial component to the study of the material, and by facilitating the assimilation of concepts through visual tools such as thematic maps or helping to understand spatial relationships.

In this way, gvSIG Batoví is the beginning of an open source software that will be probably adapted and used in a lot of countries. gvSIG Batoví is a software promoted by the National Survey Department for CEIBAL Project, whereby primary and secondary education students will be able to access to educational information represented on maps.

"From the Ceibal Project implementation, the government seeks to promote policies that support the development and benefit of the education of children, our future and present of the country", Pintado highlighted, specifying that by their geographical characteristics, Uruguay can't produce goods on a large scale, "but we can generate unlimited knowledge without any limit".

During the presentation of this new tool, event attended by the Undersecretary of the Ministry, Pablo Genta, the National Director of Surveying, Jorge Franco and the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Héctor Cancela, the Minister noted that "Uruguayan people can distinguish ourselves by the intelligence, capacity for innovating and research, and link that knowledge to development." "And for that, this new software called 'gvSIG Batoví', will be fundamental, because it allows the Gurises to access to a immense universe of knowledge", he said.

The “gvSIG Batoví” application is the result of the joint work between the National Survey Department, the Faculty of Engineering and the gvSIG Association, and students will be able to gain Geography knowledge with it, using the XO -low cost laptops-. It will be applied to other
knowledge areas like History, Biology...

The most interesting thing is that the student or teacher can create their own thematic map from the different information layers. Whit this option, the knowledge by discovery is promoted, converting the cartographic work in a learning knowledge.

With “gvSIG Batoví”, a first group of thematic maps of the Uruguayan territory is offered, for example political and physical maps, population distribution, communication and transport infrastructure and land cover. The ease to access to these thematic maps -as plugins to be installed from the application- will allow to share cartography between teachers and students of the whole users community easily.

Beyond the educational field, the professional users of the gvSIG technology will be able to access to these new functionalities from plugins. It will be an easy way to share territorial information.

Still catching up my August holidays, here's the recent geospatial open source and open data geonews.

In general news:

• O'Reilly publishes an article named With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger: "There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t."
• Esri published an update on their relation with open source: "Esri has always hosted open code and samples in a variety of ways, but more can be done. Focus and motivation needs to be improved, and Esri is now making it a priority to improve its open source participation. More of Esri’s code should and will be open sourced in the coming days, weeks, months, and years." They are also on Github.
• sxdf
• India launched the beta of their open data portal
• MapQuest have a New Geocoding Service and Updated APIs Based on Open Data
• OpenGeo shares an article named Haitidata: using open source geospatial for disaster response planning
• FOSS4G software getting adopted, gvSIG 1.11 now official part of the standard software portfolio in the City of Munich and Luxembourg using open source GIS for cadastre
• DM shares a 2-parts article named Designing an Open Source Geospatial Solution to Manage Airport Noise and Operations
• For the curious ones, here's the new OSGeo Board and Charter members refreshed

In software news:

• The OSGeo-Live 6.0 GIS software collection has been released
• A serious OpenLayers competitor, Leaflet 0.4 has been released, actually, they're at version 0.4.3 now
• Believe it or not, MySQL inches closer to PostGIS with support of true spatial relationship functions
• Here's a short entry on Surface Interpolation in GeoServer and there's a new release, v 1.4.3, of GeoServer-Manager
• Nathan is enthusiastic about Five new awesomely awesome QGIS features, here's more on the Latest Style User Interface Improvements
• There's a new winGRASS 7 with R-integration
• Where's MapGuide Open Source? Here's MapGuide state of the union address (or: Results of the user/developer survey)

We inform you that the recording of the webinar "Know all about gvSIG Desktop" (July 12th) is now available at the Reports section of the gvsig website [1]. The presentation is also available at the same section.

In addition, a new section [2] has been created at the gvSIG Desktop videos section of the website, where the webinars that include demonstrations about gvSIG Desktop will be published.

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 email address: ; they will be evaluated by 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].