Tag Archives: PostGIS

geojsp - the open source component for geo-BI application is now online

geojsp is a project developed by Inventis (inventis.ca) at the initiative of the UNHC. geojsp is an opensource (GPL) component written in Java that adds geography to business intelligence systems. With geojsp you can connect to a postgreSQL database containing geospatial features (with PostGIS), query the data via MDX queries and encode the geometries in GeoJSON format in order to display it in a OpenLayers web-mapping interface. geojsp is compiled with the SOLAP server GeoMondrian in order to create MDX queries incorporating a spatial component. It also includes JFreeChart, a graphic generator used to display graphs superimposed on geographical elements.

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Thursday Geonews: JavaScript JTS, CNN and Nokia Partnership, ArcGIS 10.1 Improvements, Google Wallet, and much more

Here's the geonews in batch mode, covering the last two weeks, and thus, longer than usual. But first, a quick note to let you know that we updated our open budget after the last donation from WebMapSolutions. From the open source front:

  • Quantum GIS is being ported to Android tablets
  • Here's SpatiaLite for Android smarphones
  • The Java Topology Suite (JTS) is being ported to JavaScript as JSTS
  • Paul Ramsey shared his PgCon notes #1 and notes #2, from a PostGIS developer perspective
  • We mentioned a few times the 'PostGIS in Action' book, here's a new review from Geoweb Guru this time. Here's the book on Amazon: [amazon 1935182269]
  • We also previously mentioned OpenLayers 2.10, a Beginner's Guide, here's a new review from James Fee, here's the book on Amazon: [amazon 1849514127]
  • MapGuide Maestro 3.1 has been released, along with its SDK
  • Here's about Turning GeoServer into an ImageServer
  • EasySDI V2 is now available
From the Google front:
  • Today Google announced Google Wallet, enhancing mobile payments with smartphones
  • Google Maps 5.5 for Android has been released
  • The new Google Correlate tool supports geographic data as input
From the Esri front:
  • SS offers a sneak peek at ArcGIS 10.1 improvements
  • Via APB, ESRI offers a Live Severe Weather Map
  • SS also has an entry named Jack Dangermond Addresses the Origins and Future of GIS
  • The latest Arc2Earth allows you to legally use Google Earth imagery in ArcMap
  • ArcGIS API for JavaScript 2.3 is now available
In the miscellaneous category:
  • APB shares an Oracle Spatial User Conference Wrap Up and two related entries named Oracle Spatial Clients Have ‘‘Big Data’’ Issues and Oracle Exadata Database Machine the Focus of Oracle Spatial User Conference
  • V1 reports on the CNN and Nokia Partner to Map More News and informs us the Ovi Maps brand has died in favor of the Nokia Services name
  • MapTogether mentions the Stats America data portal
  • James Fee recap GIS on the BlackBerry Playbook tablet from WebMapsSolutions
  • APB offers three updates on LightSquared GPS jamming
  • MapQuest integrated gas prices in their main maps
  • The GEB has an entry on Pix4D, turning 2D aerial photos in 3D
  • Here's the track of a tornado seen by the ASTER satellite and from GeoEye
Recent geo-related stories discussed over Slashdot:
  • Wikipedia Edits Around the World and Places With the Most Wikipedia Articles
  • "Space Archeology" Uncovers Lost Pyramids
  • 3D Aerial Photos For the Common Man
  • From Austria, the World's Smallest 3D Printer
  • Hack Targets NASA's Earth Observation System
  • How Companies Are Using Data From Foursquare
In the maps category:
  • Ok, not exactly a map, but this world countries OCDE Better Life Index is still pretty and interesting, and you can specify what matters to you and see the matching countries (via IiB)
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Monday Geonews: Finding Osama Bin Laden in Google Earth, FOSS4G News, More on ‘Locationgate’, and much more

Here's the recent geonews in batch mode. Some of those news could have deserved individual announcements. From the open source / open date front:

  • Regarding the FOSS4G conference, the community can now vote to determine the program of the FOSS4G conference, and there will be an Introduction to Geospatial Open Source day-long event
  • The final version of MapGuide Maestro 3.0 has been announced
  • OpenStreetMap has been recognized by the United Nations Foundation
  • OpenStreetMap data can be used in the X-Plane flight simulator
  • GeoTools 8.0-M0 has been released
  • Here's a new review of the PostGIS in action book, which is now available on Amazon: [amazon 1935182269]
  • Talking about books, here's the new Locate Press, focussing on publishing on open source geospatial projects
  • O'Reilly offered and article named open source tools look to make mapping easier
  • GRASS GIS now has a barb module
From the Google front:
  • Ogle Earth shares a long entry named Finding Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad mansion with Google Earth, with numerous screenshots
  • Slashdot runs a story named Your Location 'Extremely Valuable' To Google
  • The official Google Lat Long blog shares an entry named Post-tornado mapping in Google Maps and Earth
  • Slashdot also discussed a story named Using Google Maps To Simulate Tsunamis
From the ESRI front, Mandown shares several entries, including:
  • ArcGIS 10 Service Pack 2 Released
  • Learn The Basics Of Developing Applications With The ArcGIS API For iOS and ArcGIS API For iOS 1.8 Now Available
  • ArcGIS Viewer For Flex 2.3.1 Released and ArcGIS API For Flex And ArcGIS Viewer For Flex 2.3 Released
In the miscellaneous category:
  • VerySpatial shares iOS Apps for learning Geography while APB mentions the MagicPlan App to easily map your house
  • MacRumors shares a story named Apple Hints at Future Turn-by-Turn GPS Directions With Traffic for iPhone
  • On the same topic, Slashdot ran a story named Share Your iPhone Location Data Like You Mean It
  • While SS shares an entry named Where’s the Geospatial Industry’s Response to ‘Locationgate’?
  • The timing was ripe for O'Reilly to share an article named What does the attention around tracking mean?, especially in the context of online payments
  • V1 informs us that Russia's Putin Invites Sweden Into GLONASS
  • MapQuest is celebrated 15 years of existence
  • It's been a while since RFID has been mentioned, Slashdot discussed a story named Hotel Tracks Towels With RFID Chips
In the maps category:
  • TMR shares an entry named Mapping Long-Term Radiation Exposure at Fukushima too bad Japan lost one Earth Observation Satellite on Tsunami Mapping Mission
  • TMR also shares an interactive map of oil production from 1960 to
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What’s Coming in PostGIS 2.0

If I'm not mistaken, we mentioned only once the upcoming PostGIS 2.0 in the past. Via Kurt, I learned about this excellent article on what's coming in PostGIS 2.0. From the article: "This 2.0 release is poised to be an important milestone not just for speed and stability reasons, but because it extends the database into three new areas: raster data, topology, and 3D. [...] With 2.0, its [PostGIS Raster] functionality will be fully integrated into the main application. Naturally, loading and exporting is not the real work of supporting raster images in addition to vectors, so PostGIS 2.0 adds a slew of functions for analyzing and operating on the data inside the pixels. [...] PostGIS 2.0 adds extensive support for 3D, starting with two geometry types: polygonal surfaces and triangular irregular networks (TINs). [...] In addition to the new geometry types, the existing spatial indices have been made 3D-aware, and a library of 3D-functions added. [...] The last major extension of PostGIS functionality in the 2.0 release is support for topology."

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Friday Geonews: ESRI in China, Road Detection for Bing, Egypt Protests Maps, and more

Here's the Friday geonews in batch mode, well, at least the news not already covered by today's two topic-specific batch mode entries. On the ESRI front:

  • ESRI opened R&D offices in China offering localized software and services
On the Microsoft front:
  • Here's an entry on automatic road detection from imagery for Bing, here's a reaction to this announcement and why it matters for OpenStreetMap
  • Ready for the Super Bowl, there's new imagery in Bing Maps
In the miscellaneous category:
  • Here's an entry on precision in the difference function for PostGIS and SQL Server, the conclusion: both aren't perfect
  • A colleague informed me of localmind, a new location-aware social tool (French link), sadly, their official site offers no information at the moment
  • Spatial Sustain offers a perspective on how can the developing world leap ahead with geospatial technology?
In the maps category:
  • Ed Parsons discusses crime maps in the UK and how Fox News misplaced Egypt for Iraq on a map
  • Regarding Egypt protests, TMR mentions map sources
  • Here's a map and discussion of Europe's wind and solar energy potential
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Open Source Geonews: PostGIS Versioning with pgVersion, Python QGIS Cookbook, and some more

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
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Friday Geonews: Latitude for the Desktop, CityOne Launched, GALILEO needs Funding, Marine Life, and much more

A busy week for these geonews in batch mode.

On the Google front:

  • Google Latitude is now available for our desktop computers, a reminder; Latitude is Google's tool to share your location with friends and see where there are in real-time on map. And yes, you can get alerts when friends are neaby.
  • If you use Google's Panoramio, integrated into Google Maps and Earth, you now have access to new sets of statistics for your photos.
  • The GEB answers the question How often does Google update the imagery in Google Earth? And of course, there was another imagery update this week.
  • The GEB offers an entry named 8 things to do with Historical Imagery in Google Earth

On the FOSS4G / opendata front:

  • Here's an entry on running PostGIS in parallel threads
  • Here's a link on a "GDAL Web driver", GDAL filesystem implemented on HTTP
  • OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast left CloudMade
  • SpotMaps images are now available in OpenStreetMap [French link]

On the Microsoft front:

  • Here's an entry about new options regarding Enabling the New Style in the Bing Maps AJAX Control.
  • Here's an entry on Bing Maps and the use of U.S. 311 issues, specifically for Miami and San Francisco.

On the ESRI front:

  • James Fee informs us Esri Added Parcels to Their World Streets Map Service.
  • There's a new software called GeoCat Bridge for ArcGIS, to publish using OGC services data from ArcGIS Desktop to the open source GeoServer and GeoNetwork.
  • Here's an entry about Trimble Support For ArcGIS 10 And ArcPad 10 Now Available.

In the miscellaneous category:

  • The European GNSS (GPS) system GALILEO needs more funding and more time, completion date is now projected to be.
  • TMR links to Gizmodo's best navigation apps for iOS and Android.
  • IBM launched CityOne, their SimCity-like game to build smarter cities.
  • Spatial Sustain discusses a review of online mapping tools usability and accuracy, specifically Google Maps, Bing Maps and MapQuest.
  • Regarding augmented reality, APB mentions an app with which you point an airplane with your iPhone and you get info about it (flight number, destination, height and speed).

In the maps category:

  • Here's an entry on The Census of Marine Life in Google Earth, "the major international oceanographic research project involving researchers in over 80 countries, who tagged more than 120,000 types of species & millions of organisms over the past decade".
  • Here's a Map of all the munitions dumped in Europe after WWI and WWII.
  • The Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources has been updated
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PostGIS 1.5.2 Released

The popular open source geospatial database PostGIS gets to version 1.5.2. From the announcement: "Last week the PostgreSQL 9.0 release dropped, bringing built-in replication, hot stand-by backup servers, 64-bit Windows support, the schema-less hstore type and much much more. And this morning, PostGIS 1.5.2 was also released, bringing… support for PostgreSQL 9.0! Also a pile of bug fixes that have been building up over the past six months." Follow the link to see which bugs were squashed.

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FOSS4G News: MOSSKitt Geo, Training Workshops Available, FOSS4G Wrap-ups, and much more

Here's an attempt to catch up the "recent" geospatial open source news that were published the past three weeks.

Let's start with the 'everything else' category:

  • In August there was an introduction entry on QGIS MapServer, a "WMS server for the masses"
  • Around the same time, an entry indicating GRASS GIS can make pretty maps
  • There was an introduction to MOSSKitt Geo, an UML tool for spatial databases
  • Here's an entry on comparing Oracle GeoRaster with PostGIS WKT Raster
  • There's news on the OGR MS SQL Spatial driver
  • Shapely 1.2.4 is out and Rtree news
  • The OpenGeo Suite Community Edition 2.1.3 was released at the end of last month and the OpenGeo workshops are also available - what a wonderful resource!
  • Here's the steps done by ESRI towards open sourcing their Geoportal Extension

Specifically on the FOSS4G conference, in addition to my own upcoming note, here's some of the many entries on the topic:

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Cross Comparison of SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below. From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding. [this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below. From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."

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