Here’s the recent geonews in batch mode. From the open source / open data front: Popular nowadays, Considering a Hybrid Proprietary/Open-Source Architecture Here’s a followup regarding the Open Letter for LiDAR standards, for which Esri’s Jack Dangermond himself provided feedback With the open source GeoMesa that is almost ready for release, Google & GeoServer Support Geospatial Big Data in the ...

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source and open data front:

• Rezoning permits are #1, Open Data Summit Top 10 Most Wanted Municipal Datasets
• New open source tool, batyr: On-demand synchronization of vector data to a PostGIS database
• QGIS improvements the QGIS Field calculator is dead. Long live the Field calculator bar
• Something many end up doing, and here's a guide to do it, A guide to the rasterization of vector coverages in PostGIS
• An extension in development to make OpenLayers more powerful, CAD-like Feature Construction with the OpenLayers Editor
• Open data is everywhere, and any time! OpenHistoricalMap is a project designed to store and display map data throughout the history of the world
• GeoAwesome asks Should navigation companies move to OpenStreetMap like Telenav?
• Is a new website newsworthy? The new GeoServer website is certainly a nice improvement
• Getting closer to version 1.0, here's another summary of GeoGit - Distributed geospatial data versioning based on Git
• Geoff also shares a summary on the state of Canada's open geospatial data initiative
• On the American side, the NED DEM dataset will be replaced by 3DEP - 3D Elevation Program, offering always higher spatial resolution

From the Google front:

• Google provides an update on transit directions in Google Maps, including all transit routes in Great Britain and host cities in Brazil, real-time updates for Vancouver and Chicago, and more, also mentioning that transit is available in "64 countries and more than 15,000 towns and cities worldwide"
• At the beginning of the month, new Google Map apps added several new features, including Uber integration and an offline button for iOS
• The GEB shares Tips to make Google Earth appear more realistic and the screenshot is convincing and here's How the Google Earth cache works
• If you don't already know what those geometric structures are on the sea floor, Did Google Earth discover an underwater alien base?
• Want to understand El Nino? Everything about the El Nino Zone in Google Earth
• We told you about Project Tango already, Slashdot discusses Google Rumored To Be Making 3D-Scanning Tablets
• One article I missed published last month, in forestry, Google Earth Engine Brings Big Data to Environmental Activism
• And yes, here's the list of locations for this month's new Google Earth imagery

In the everything-else category:

• GeoJSON now an official media type registered with the IANA (IANA on Wikipedia)
• Over the Spatial Law site, an entry named White House Big Data and Privacy Report: Wake Up Call for Geospatial Community?
• At the research stage, ‘Quantum Compass’: Navigation technology that might replace GPS, this is also discussed over Slashdot
• Numbers to say it's worth, contribution of Geospatial Industry to Irish Economy in: E69.3m
• Interesting to see what is considered the Big 5 of geospatial: future cities, open geospatial, BIM, big data and policy, it's a series of events planned for next Fall
• Another free online course, Simon Fraser Professor Introduces GIS MOOC
• A short reminder of the potential of Augmented Reality and Geospatial Technology
• It's happening, Volvo Testing Autonomous Cars On Public Roads
• Privacy, US Police Departments Using Car Tracking Database Sworn To Secrecy
• But there's useful uses to tracking? Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed
• Creating 'Swarm', Foursquare Splits To Take On Yelp
• Deeply into remote sensing? A new eNewsletter from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
• The Proba-V mini-satellite, Views of Earth From Europe’s New Plant-Mapping Minisatellite
• I remember discussions about this 12 years ago, Canada might get its hyperspectral spaceborne mission, related press release
• Real-time tracking map of whales around Hawaii

In the maps category:

• Nice moon remote sensing, Help NASA Choose the Most Beautiful Lunar Image
• Less nice is ESA's Cryosat Mission Sees Antarctic Ice Losses Double
• Not useful, but there's something I like about the Worlds Capitals Voronoi map and why not, a Voronoi map of the world divided by airports
• A map according to languages, named by The Economist as The world according to Putin
• One of my favorite topics, Interactive map shows global economical inequality
• Let's end with funny maps, Slicing Europe with 20 stereotypes

Raster support
Since PostGIS version 2, raster has been supported in the database. The raster data model can dramatically increase the use of PostGIS as a analytical and visualization tool. For example elevation models and a lot of environmental data are based on the raster data model.

Now GC2 supports PostGIS raster data. Raster layers will be displayed in the list of layers in the database tab and you can manage them in the same way as vector layers. Raster layers will also be added to the tile and WMS services and you may classify them. You can also query the raster tables through the SQL API.

Read more about raster support and how you upgrade your own GC2 installation

New Ubuntu 14.04 server images
Ubuntu 14.04LTS (Long Term Support) was released in April and is packed with newer versions of the geospatial software. We are ready with a new vmdk file for use in VMWare products, Oracle VirtualBox etc. The highlights are:

PostGreSQL 9.3
PostGIS 2.1
MapServer 6.4
Apache 2.4
GDAL 1.10
PHP 5.5

You can also spin a GC2 server up at Amazon Web Services in a couple of minutes.
Europe or USA

If you want to install from scratch instructions for Ubuntu 14.04 are ready

No need to say, in the world of geospatial RDBMS, PostgreSQL's open source PostGIS shines and is widely adopted. Lots of us will be happy to learn that the PostGIS Cookbook has been published over PACKT from Paolo Corti, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas J Kraft, Bborie Park.

From the announcement entry: "The book, in a friendly tutorial fashion, covers a plethora of PostGIS related topics such as:

• Importing and exporting data
• Vectorial and Raster management and analysis functions
• Using desktop clients such as QGIS, OpenJump, gvSIG and UDig
• pgRouting and how to use the Nth dimension
• writing PostGIS programs with Python
• using PostGIS to do web GIS with web mapping engines and frameworks such as MapServer, GeoServer, OpenLayers, Leaflet and GeoDjango
• maintenance, optimization and performance tuning"

Astun Technology is delighted to announce that it has won a  contract to supply a wide ranging GIS solution that will serve power and casual users of GIS software within the Council, partners in the MKi Observatory and the public through the Council’s website. The solution is underpinned by a fully featured Open Source spatial data warehouse that will provide access to the full range of Ordnance Survey base mapping, as well as the Council’s own mission critical data layers. The solution will also help the Council to meet its INSPIRE obligations.

This GIS refresh includes the adoption of QGIS Open Source software for power users. The remaining requirements are provided by Astun Technology’s iShare platform. iShare provides a fully featured public facing map portal with the ability to embed maps within web pages complete with location based searches, ‘find my nearest’ and incident reporting features.  Additionally iShare, will deliver GIS capabilities to users across the Council’s intranet, the MKi Observatory and via the Internet to mobile and homeworkers.  The whole Milton Keynes solution is delivered under an Open Enterprise Agreement which includes initial and ongoing training, consultancy and maintenance together with formal support contracts for the Open Source components.

“We are really looking forward to working with Milton Keynes Council on this exciting and prestigious project said Mike Saunt, Managing Director of Astun Technology. We will be making the most of Open Source technologies to deliver a hybrid solution tailored to the Council’s precise GIS needs,” continued Saunt.

It's been a crazy week for me and I essentially failed to aggregate geonews - expect me to catch up in the coming days.

The open source routing engine pgRouting version 2.0 has been released, and this a major new release. We mentioned it a few times since.

A reminder of what pgRouting is, from the official website:

pgRouting extends the PostGIS / PostgreSQL geospatial database to provide geospatial routing functionality.

Advantages of the database routing approach are:

• Data and attributes can be modified by many clients, like Quantum GIS and uDig through JDBC, ODBC, or directly using Pl/pgSQL. The clients can either be PCs or mobile devices.
• Data changes can be reflected instantaneously through the routing engine. There is no need for precalculation.
• The “cost” parameter can be dynamically calculated through SQL and its value can come from multiple fields or tables.

And here's a list of features including what's new for version 2.0:

• All Pairs Shortest Path, Johnson’s Algorithm **NEW**
• All Pairs Shortest Path, Floyd-Warshall Algorithm **NEW**
• Shortest Path A*
•  Bi-directional Dijkstra Shortest Path **NEW**
• Bi-directional A* Shortest Path **NEW**
• Shortest Path Dijkstra
• Driving Distance
• K-Shortest Path, Multiple Alternative Paths **NEW**
• K-Dijkstra, One to Many Shortest Path **NEW**
• Traveling Sales Person **NEW Implementation**
• Turn Restriction Shortest Path (TRSP) **NEW**
• New functions for creating routing topology
• New functions for analyzing a graph for problems

Still catching up geonews, this is a major one, the mature open source geospatial database PostGIS 2.1.0 has been released.

In short, "This release contains a ton of speed improvements, function additions , and super sexy new features. It has been over a year in the making. New functions itemized here". The highlights:

• "More terrain analysis functions. In addition so slope and aspect calculations, there are now also roughness, Topographic Position Index and Terrain Ruggedness Index.
• Tiling large rasters into small rasters with ST_Tile. This is useful for analyses that work best on large rasters, but are served out as results best as small tiles. The raster opposite of ST_Tile is ST_Union, which has received performance improvements in 2.1
• New geocoding engine. The TIGER geocoder that has shipped with PostGIS for several years has been enhanced using the address normalization engine from PACG. As a result, batch geocoding is an order of magnitude faster.
• New selectivity calculations, supporting N-D and geographic indexes, as well as improved join selectivity calculations. Will provide generally improved query planning for complex SQL.
• Performance enhancement by up to 20x for ST_Distance calculations on geography.
• Delaunay triangulation inside the database with ST_DelaunayTriangles.
• Performance and functionality enhancements to ST_MapAlgebra, allowing even more crazy in-database raster analytics."

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