If there's one geospatial library that is ubiquitous, both in open source and proprietary software, it's that one. Lots of users may not even know they're indirectly using the open source GDAL/OGR library. Well, about a year after version 1.10.0, this widely used tool is now improved with this new version, GDAL/OGR 1.11.0.

The major changes according to the release notes:

• New GDAL drivers:
  •  KRO: read/write support for KRO KOKOR Raw format
• New OGR drivers:
  •  CartoDB : read/write support
  • GME (Google Map Engine) : read/write support
  •  GPKG (GeoPackage): read-write support (vector part of the spec.)
  •  OpenFileGDB: read-only support (no external dependency)
  •  SXF: read-only support
  •  WALK : read-only support
  •  WAsP .map : read-write support
• Significantly improved drivers: GML, LIBKML
• RFC 40: enhanced RAT support (#5129)
• RFC 41: multiple geometry fields support
• RFC 42: OGR Layer laundered field lookup
• RFC 43: add GDALMajorObject::GetMetadataDomainList?() (#5275)
• RFC 45: GDAL datasets and raster bands as virtual memory mapping
• Upgrade to EPSG 8.2 database

GeoServer is one of the most popular web mapping / web services server, and it just got to version 2.5.

The key features according to the announcement:

• WCS 2.0 and WCS 2.0 Earth Observation have been added
• The addition of a batch importer to making setting up GeoServer easier
• High performance PNG encoder based on PNGJ library (Andrea Aime). Improved JPEG performance using libjpegturbo available as an optional extension
• Use of ST_Simplify to improve PostGIS rendering performance
• New implementation of GetFeatureInfo that takes into account symbol shapes, offsets, and dynamic line widths into account

We're glad to announce that Slashgeo is once again a proud media partner of the FOSS4G conference, to be held in Portland, Oregon (USA) on September 8th to the 13th. Please find here the FOSS4G calls for workshops, presentations and academic papers.

"The annual FOSS4G conference is the largest global gathering for all those currently or potentially working with open source geospatial software. It brings together a mix of developers, users, decision makers and observers from a broad spectrum of organizations and fields of operation for six days of workshops, presentations, discussions, and cooperation.

Conference Dates

Sep 8th-9th: Workshops
Sep 10th-12th: Main Conference
Sep 13th: Code Sprint"

March 5

Portland, Oregon, USA

FOSS4G calls for workshops, presentations and academic papers

The FOSS4G organizing committee calls for presentations, workshops and academic papers.  FOSS4G, to be held September 8th-12th in Portland, Oregon, USA is the premier international conference on open source geospatial technologies.  With two days of workshops followed by three days of presentations and academic papers, FOSS4G features a diversity of attendees and participants spanning academia, industry, and government.

Dr. Franz-Josef Behr and Drs Barend Köbben have issued the call for academic papers.  

The first two days of FOSS4G are half day workshops.  Participants are invited to submit workshop proposals for audiences ranging from beginner to advanced users, with topics covering the FOSS4G stack from server to client and anywhere between.  Read the detailed call for workshop proposals or submit directly.  Workshop proposals are due by March 15th.

Presentations showcase some of the most interesting developments and uses of Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial.  Read the details in the Call for Presentations.

Thanks to the many early bird sponsors that have already signed up.

See you in Portland,

FOSS4G Local Organizing Committee

About FOSS4G

Put on by OSGeo, the annual FOSS4G conference is the premiere global gathering for people working with and creating open source geospatial software. It brings together developers, users, decision makers, and observers from a broad spectrum of organizations and fields of operation for six days of workshops, presentations, discussions, and cooperation. From this melting pot of great spatial ideas and industry flow numerous successful geospatial products, standards and protocols.

FOSS4G has been held all over the world and draws attendees from over 40 countries. Nottingham, England hosted the conference in. In, Portland, Oregon, USA will host FOSS4G’s tenth year.

Conference Dates

Sep 8th-9th: Workshops

Sep 10th-12th: Main Conference

Sep 13th: Code Sprint and WhereCampPDX

About OSGeo

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation was founded in to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects, data development and education. Many projects live under the OSGeo umbrella, including FOSS4G.

About PDX OSGeo - Portland Area and Oregon OSGeo Chapter

The PDX-OSGeo chapter of OSGeo has been meeting, discussing and promoting the use of open source geospatial technology. Chapter members often organize or present on open source software at regional geospatial conferences. PDX is the airport code and like the PDX airport, the group has a wide catchment area.

- Major read and write performance improvement for very large geospatial files -

Toronto, ON, December 18 - Avenza Systems Inc., producers of MAPublisher® cartographic software for Adobe Illustrator® and the popular PDF Maps mobile app, is pleased to announce the release of Geographic Imager 4.4 for Adobe Photoshop. This latest update includes significant improvements to read and write performance for all geospatial formats supported by Geographic Imager. This is most noticeable when reading or writing very large files in BigTIFF, DEM, IMG, NITF, and MrSID formats and reading ASCII GRID, FLT, and BIL formats. Many formats read up to 20x faster and write up to 30x faster for very large files.

“We're very excited about this speed optimization for our Geographic Imager users,” said Ted Florence, President of Avenza. “Through some major reworking of our code base, we’ve streamlined how geospatial formats are read and written. This breakthrough will provide our power users with a faster and better performing geospatial image editing platform”, he added. “Geospatial professionals handling very large files will be able to cut processing times down significantly.”

Additional Geographic Imager 4.4 features

• Significant improvements in read and write performance when handling very large files.
• Various bug fixes and user experience enhancements.

More about Geographic Imager for Adobe Photoshop

Geographic Imager is software for Adobe Photoshop that leverages the superior image editing capabilities of raster-based image editing software and transforms it into a powerful geospatial imagery editing tool. Work with satellite imagery, aerial photography, orthophotos, and DEMs in GeoTIFF and other major GIS image formats using Adobe Photoshop features such as transparencies, filters, and image adjustments while maintaining georeferencing and support for hundreds of coordinate systems and projections.

Geographic Imager 4.4 is immediately available and free of charge to all Geographic Imager Maintenance Program members and at US$319 for non-maintenance upgrades. New fixed licenses start at US$699. Geographic Imager Basic licenses start at US$199. Academic and volume license pricing are also available. Geographic Imager is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS5.1, CS6 and CC.

More about Avenza Systems Inc.

Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools for making better maps and for working with spatial imagery. In addition to software offerings for Mac, Windows and Apple mobile device users, Avenza offers value-added data sets, product training and consulting services.

The open source lightweight web mapping library Leaflet quickly became very popular in the past year or so, and now there's Leaflet version 0.7 released for us to play with.

From the announcement: "This is a bugfix-heavy release — as Leaflet becomes more and more stable feature-wise, the focus shifts towards stability, usability and API improvements over new features. [...] You can check out the detailed changelog of what’s already done over the recent months for 0.7 (about 90 improvements and bugfixes) [...] There are several big undertakings in refactoring Leaflet that I’d want to switch to immediately after releasing 0.7 — I’ve been holding them off for too long, and they’ll be extremely beneficial for plugin and Leaflet-based API authors." The full list is available in their announcement.

We mentioned the project before, and via APB I learned that the open source CLAVIN has released its version 1.0.

From the official page: "CLAVIN (Cartographic Location And Vicinity INdexer) is an award-winning open source software package for document geotagging and geoparsing that employs context-based geographic entity resolution. It extracts location names from unstructured text and resolves them against a gazetteer to produce data-rich geographic entities. CLAVIN does not simply "look up" location names – it uses intelligent heuristics to identify exactly which "Springfield" (for example) was intended by the author, based on the context of the document. CLAVIN also employs fuzzy search to handle incorrectly-spelled location names, and it recognizes alternative names (e.g., "Ivory Coast" and "Côte d'Ivoire") as referring to the same geographic entity. By enriching text documents with structured geo data, CLAVIN enables hierarchical geospatial search and advanced geospatial analytics on unstructured data."

The GeoExt community is proud to announce the release of GeoExt 2.0.0.
GeoExt 2.0.0 is the first official GeoExt version that is built atop of OpenLayers 2.13.1 and ExtJS 4.2.1. It is being released 2 weeks after release candidate 1 was published and no serious bugs were discovered.
The newest major version of GeoExt wants to provide mostly the same API you know and love from the 1.x-series. It comes with support for the autoloading-mechanism of ExtJS, support for the single-file build tool of sencha and with exhaustive documentation that is built using the same tools that the mother library ExtJS.
This release wouldn't have been possible without the sponsors of the above mentioned sprint. Also we want to thank the companies behind the contributors of GeoExt for supporting GeoExt development in numerous ways and for such a long time.
We invite you all to use GeoExt 2!

This year again Slashgeo will be a proud media partner of the 9th International gvSIG Conference to be held from November 27th to 29th in Valencia, Spain.

From their objectives: "So what does this have to do with technology? Everything! In the XXI century, can anyone imagine technology as not part of strategic sectors? There is practically no activity or progress, whether industrial, social or within the business environment where technology is not a fundamental aspect. In this sense, and by following the example of where sovereignty lies, whether with the people or within the financial markets, what we need to ask ourselves is whether we govern technology or if technology governs us. [...] We are again talking about the need of having access to knowledge, and when it comes to software, knowledge is only possible if we are talking about free software, which provides us with technological independence, which enables us to at least aspire to be Sovereign. It is a Matter of Sovereignty, which is the main idea that we are claiming in the 9th International gvSIG Conference in Valencia."

Another software that was released at FOSS4G a week ago was the open source Java library GeoTools 10.0.

From the announcement: "Summary of the new features for the GeoTools 10.x series:

• Structured grid coverage readers allow raster data sources that publish composite data products to expose individual rasters (ie granules) for processing, while still providing a seamless experience for rendering. The mosaic and NetCDF modules are the first ones to implement these new interfaces.
• Efficient support for multiple coverages in GridCoverageReader provides ad-hoc access to raster formats that publish more that one data product. A image mosaic made of NetCDF granules and single file NetCDF sources are the first implementors of these new capabilities
• A new implementation of Shapefile DataStore (based on ContentDataStore superclass). This upgrade should be seamless for all users using DataStoreFactoryFinder. If you explicitly made use of the ShapefileDataStore or IndexedShapefileDataStore class please check the upgrade instructions.
• The transform module graduated to supported status, providing a seamless way to rename, retype and hide SimpleFeatureSource attributes, as well as creating new ones based on OGC Expression
• Additional OGC modules for the WCS 2.0 and WCS 2.0 EO models as well as adding XML parsers and encoders

The 10.x series has a number of research and development activities that may be of interest:

• NetCDF has been updated to take advantage of the new coverage API introduced above
• GeoPackage: a sample implementation of the geopackage spec that is currently being developed by the OGC"