We have the honour to announce the official constitution of the gvSIG Russian Community. The main community's goal is to organize themselves as a group, identifying persons, companies and Russian institutions interested on the gvSIG project by means of its software products and its business model. The first community's stage will focus on inviting Russian users and developers from differents parts of the country to foster that community group. More information about the gvSIG Russian goals and coordinators can be found at:

  The videos of the report sessions and workshops at the 6th gvSIG Conference, that were held the first week of december, are now available. All the videos are available with English and Spanish audio, excepting the sessions of the small room. They are available to be visualized online. 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.  

Presentations, posters and articles presented during the 6th gvSIG Conference are now available. The Live-DVD given during the Conference is also available. The event was held under the motto "Knowledge for change" and brought about 500 attendees.

The Open Planet 4 magazine and the videos of the presentations will be published soon.

Here's a few recent open source-related geospatial news:

• Via the OSGeo-Discuss list, I learned about pgVersion, a PostGIS versioning tool: "Versioning of Postgis-Layers will become essential, when more than one person edits the same layer concurrently. To manage concurrencing editing of a single Postgis Layer the pgVersion management system supports your work. The idea is to create a versioning system for editing PostGIS-Layers similar to source code versioning systems like CVS or Subversion."
• There's a new Python QGIS Cookbook available from Martin Dobias, named PyQGIS Cookbook
• Geomajas has graduated out of OSGeo incubation, Geomajas is an extensible open source web mapping framework in Java
• Here's a new free GeoServer 2.0 introductory workshop
• Here's an entry on editing gvSIG maps with Inkscape, on a side note, if you don't know Inkscape yet, try it, it's an excellent open source alternative to Illustrator
• The OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.3.0 has been released
• GeoNode is not at version 1.0 yet, but you can learn more about it with this GeoNode presentation

A new final version of gvSIG Desktop has been released: gvSIG Desktop 1.10.

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

The main new features of gvSIG 1.10 are Sextante 0.6 (GRASS 6.4 interface included) and NavTable extensions integration, and Windows Vista and Windows 7 compatibility. Another new features of this version are:

    - gvSIG 1.9 bug fixes
    - Binaries compilation for JVM 1.6 (with JVM 1.5 compatibility)
    - Pie and bar chart legend
    - Relative paths support

The improvements from the previous version, known problems, and other notes can also be consulted.

Next Tuesday November 30th, one day before official beginning of 6th International gvSIG Conference, a CodeSprint will be held where some gvSIG developers will meet to discuss and fix some code problems.

This event is sponsored by ai2 Institute (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia), and will be held in the Innova room of the The Polytechnic City of Innovation at the same University (consult how to arrive) .

The objective is to call gvSIG developers who can be interested. For this, a web page has been created to add bugs or functionalities to deal with. This page is free edition (you can add your ideas with double-click). Although the material of the website is in English, in the CodeSprint there will be an English-speaking developers group.

If you are interested, with the subject "gvSIG CodeSprint", including attendance names and ID card number (it's necessary for network registration). You only will need to take a laptop and an ethernet cable for internet connection.

Here's a few recent open source geospatial software and open data news.

On the open data front:

• MapQuest continues to dive into OpenStreetMap
• Here's an interesting graph on OpenStreetMap data accuracy per contributors density
• Denver will host the State of the Map Conference, at the same place and same month than the OSGeo's FOSS4G Conference.
• Here's an entry named Wikipedia makes OpenStreetMap more prominent
• There's a few entries a critique of OpenStreetMap, another specifically on city labels in OSM
• The Wall Street Journal estimates Open Source Mapping Poses Threat For TomTom, Nokia
• Here's OpenHeatMap, an online tool for creating heat maps and choropleth maps

On the open source software front:

• Shapely 1.2.6 has been released
• OpenGeo won a contract with UK's Odnance Survey
• Here's an entry on using QGIS on Windows with ECW
• And an entry about kml 2.2 in gvSIG

The first gvSIG 1.10 Release Candidate (gvSIG 1.10 RC1) is now available.

We encourage you to test it and send us any errors and suggestions in the users mailing list or directly in the bugtracker (see interesting links for testers ).

Likewise, we would like to remind you of the main new features of gvSIG 1.10 are Sextante 0.6 (GRASS 6.4 interface included) and NavTable extensions integration, and Windows Vista and Windows 7 compatibility. Consult the new features complet list, improvements from the beta distribution, and known problems at the version notes section.

 

A new website is now available [1] where we want to announce the variety of case studies of the gvSIG Project.

Case studies in a very wide range of sectors and geographic places. Official products - gvSIG Desktop, gvSIG Mobile - case studies as well as customized developments from these products.

Searching can be made by country, by sector, by software or by keyword [2].

We encourage every gvSIG user to tell us the experience with gvSIG, and share it with the community. For this, you can fill in the form [3] of the website, and send it to the following e-mail.

gvSIG Mini development team is proud to announce the release of the stable version gvSIG Mini for Android 1.0.

gvSIG Mini is an open source project (GNU/GPL) aimed at Java and Android mobile phones. Released version is 1.0.0 for Android. This version offers, among other features, the ability of a direct download of maps from the phone to the storage card, for a further map displaying in offline mode, with no data connection.

gvSIG Mini is a free viewer of free aceess maps based on tiles (OpenStreetMap, YahooMaps, Microsoft Bing, ...), with an off-line mode, a WMS & WMS-C client, address and POI search, routes and many more things.

Main latest features of 1.0.0 version are the following ones:

• Map download directly from the mobile phone, for off-line usage.
• Off-line mode for viewing maps with no data connection.
• Multitouch support.
• New map rendering system, much more agile.
• Standard Android search button support.
• New layers available by default.
• UK Ordnance Survey official maps (rendered by OS).
• Settings menu with many options.
• New cache options.
• Android 2.2 support (now from 1.5 to 2.2).

More than 20 bugs have also been fixed.

gvSIG Mini has been developed by Prodevelop. Also available at Android Market.

More information at: