Slashgeo

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode. Please allow the less frequent posts lately, I'm quite busy at the moment. I'll also be away next week, so we rely on your contributions and other editors. Thank you for your comprehension.

On the FOSS4G front, the open source GIS uDig 1.2 reached milestone M9. TMR links to a Washington Post article on OpenStreetMap. Plenty of geoblogs/lists pointed to the interesting O'Reilly Radar entry named Rethinking Open Data: "[...] it costs money to make existing data open."

In the Apple front, more from CNET on the iPad and maps (via TMR). APB links to instructions to access Google StreetView on the iPhone (yes you can!). Here's details on a 'GIS app' for the iPhone. Here's an entry comparing free maps and navigation apps.

In other news, several geoblogs mentioned the excellent article on geolocation in html5. It seems the USGS budget cuts hit geospatial as well. NAVTEQ is shutting down Nav4All, used by 27 million users, that uses NAVTEQ data, due to license agreements. Here's an interesting short entry named How KML Succeeds and Fails as a Web Format. Here's another interesting entry named How Coordinates are Referenced in Databases. Here's an interesting graph of artificial satellites by nations, including the functional and non-functional ones.

In the maps category, here's a series of maps on the U.S. State of the Union. Here's various Bing Maps maps of Vancouver, in time for the Olympics. Here's a "Tube Map" of the Milky Way. There's new bedrock maps for the U.K.

Here's recent Google-related geonews. Google added World World II historical imagery to Google Earth: "Images taken in 1943 show the effect of wartime bombing on more than 35 European towns and cities. Imagery for Warsaw, which was heavily destroyed at the time, is available from both years 1935 and 1945." Here's another entry specifically for Warsaw.

The ocean seafloor in Google Earth got updated with new high resolution DEMs. There is a new Ocean Showcase launched that uses the Google Earth plugin. There's an offline installer for Google Earth and updates to the 3D Warehouse and Building Maker. Here's a climate change tour of cold places. There's work to add Google Earth imagery to Microsoft's Flight Simulator. Finally, Google Maps for Mobile adds places and searches syncing capabilities.

An anonymous voxel writes "Geolenz has beta launched a new type of geocoding service, called intelligent contextual geocoding. Unlike traditional geocoding, this one understands the context of a location in both space and time, and provides a rich result of contextual details specific to the location and expressed within a language consistent with the domain. See hands-on demos here. Geolenz is looking to connect with geo-app developers (mobile and web) to explore opportunities for leveraging this type of informative data."

Fernando Quadro writes "The GeoServer-BR Community reached 350 members, in less than 3 years of life. It is very gratifying to see how this community has grown in Brazil, is the now the second largest community GeoServer in the world. The numbers have surprised not only the brazilian community but also the GeoServer Core, only in the year 2009 were 166 new members, and 1068 messages." See previous GeoServer stories.

One of the best geospatial SQL databases out there just got better: the open source geospatial database PostGIS version 1.5 has been released. From the announcement: "This release adds a long-wished-for feature to the open source spatial database—direct support for “geodetic” coordinates. [...] With PostGIS 1.5, the new “geography” type is a 100% sphere-aware type, which can be indexed globally and returns answers in meters, using calculations on the spheroid for maximum correctness. It is built on top of a new disk storage and index format, which the existing “geometry” type will also transition to in version 2.0. [...] We expect that the geography type will make it easier for new users to store their data in PostGIS (without having to learn about projections and coordinate systems before starting) and also allow global data managers to store and query international data sets for effectively." See also related stories below.

Geoweb Guru shares a short technical overview of MapGuide, both the Enterprise and Open Source versions. From the review; "MapGuide is a web-based map platform that includes both server and client components. It is currently available in two forms: "MapGuide Open Source" from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) under the Lesser GPL license; and as "Autodesk MapGuide for Enterprise" directly from Autodesk. [...] The open source version lacks connectivity to data stores to a number of data stores (eg. Oracle), AutoCAD integration, and localized versions. As would be expected for an open source application without a commercial support license, it also lacks additional quality assurance and formal support - both are included with purchases of MapGuide for Enterprise licenses. [...] Despite the design successes of the MapGuide architecture, it has been criticised for a number of limitations. Most MapGuide applications have to rely on a client plug-in, ActiveX control, or Java applet. This client-side plug-in is then controlled using JavaScript. [...] Although MapGuide ships for both Linux and Windows, it is generally recognised as being very Windows-centric." See also related stories below.

Here's the announcement of a new open source project named Pro4J. From the annnouncement: "My main focus for a while has been working on a Java port of the popular PROJ.4 projection library. [...] To answer the question of "Why another Java projection library?", the main reason is that PROJ.4 is popular, well-tested and well-documented, so it seems like a good idea to make it available in the Java world. [...] OSGeo is hosting the codebase as part of the MetaCRS umbrella project. There it lives in the good company of Proj4JS, CS-MAP, spatialreference.org and of course PROJ.4." See also related stories below.