Slashgeo

Ann Hitchcock writes "52°North publishes first stable releases - Quality assurance makes the difference! 52°North (http://www.52north.org/ )is proud to announce the first software stable releases which have successfully completed the 52°North quality assurance testing! As an open source software initiative, we emphasize quality management to ensure software's practical suitability and sustainability. This cross-sectional task is anchored in our organizational model and has evoked the creation of a Quality Management Task Force. This Task Force has taken over the task of defining, implementing and continually developing QM processes. Those processes necessary for the quality assurance testing of 52°North software are of particular interest to users and have been successfully applied in the past few months." Read more below. Their Mission makes is clearer: "52°North's mission is to advance the design, development and use of open source software in geoinformatics research, training and application. We will bridge the gap not only between research and application, but also between open source and commercial software."

Here's a part of the press release: Ann Hitchcock writes "[...] 52°North is an open initiative that strives to advance the development of cutting edge open source geospatial software. The initial focii of the open source technology development are Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), Web Security and Digital Rights Management (DRM). The members anticipate that other streams of work will open up according to community direction. [...]" You can read the full press release below. Now, can anyone tell me if there is a relation between this initiave and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation?

The 52° North open source geospatial software initiative has released their third newsletter. The topics covered are: "1 - INTERGEO 2007 2 - FOSS4G 2007 3 - OGC compliant WPS 4 - Participation in OWS-5." The introduction: "52°North looks back on an eventful first year as a company. We facilitated the maturation of two new communities, ILWIS and Geo-processing, thus increasing our number of full-fledged communities, developers and software releases. In addition, the Security community broadened its focus to incorporate and implement new concepts in geo-rights management. Our partners continue to prove their expertise by actively participating in the OGC standardization process and by producing innovative code based on current standards." See also related previous stories about 52° North below.

The AGISRS list has an interesting thread on remote sensing software used for basic RS training. In the discussion, UNESCO's Bilko and Purdue's MultiSpec were on the spot. From Bilko's page: "Bilko is a complete system for learning and teaching remote sensing image analysis skills. Current lessons teach the application of remote sensing to oceanography and coastal management, but Bilko routines may be applied to the analysis of any image in an appropriate format, and include a wide range of standard image processing functions." From MultiSpec's page: "It results from an on-going multiyear research effort which is intended to define robust and fundamentally based technology for analyzing multispectral and hyperspectral image data, and to transfer this technology to the user community in as rapid a manner as possible." gvSIG and Sextante, ILWIS and SPRING were also mentioned, there are other free and open source remote sensing software, such as GRASS GIS, OSSIM and RAT, but they're not focused training newcomers. Our Education topic will reveal a few other tools for the classroom.