Slashgeo

The GDAL mailing list tells us GDAL 1.4.0 has been released, it of course includes updates to OGR as well. Since the what's new is too long, here's what GDAL is: "As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing." These libraries are used by Google, ESRI and numerous open source geospatial projects.

The import cartography blog asks, and get answers, about geospatial software open source licenses which allow commercial applications. From the blog: "I've made proprietary MapServer-based sites -- sites available to paying users, but no downloadable code or configuration -- and when they required enhancements or fixes of MapServer, I made the improvements and then gave them back (with consent of my customers) to the MapServer community. However, most of my MapServer contributions were made through my work on community, for-the-public software. The same goes for MapServer in general: most recent work on MapServer was (i'm digging up the stats on lines of code) done to implement OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WCS, SLD) for public-facing Canadian government web sites." This is an important issue since open source geosoftware is more and more important (one simply has to think of ESRI and Google's uses of GDAL/OGR, amongst many).

In a followup to his previous entry on open source licenses and commercial applications, the import cartography has a short but interesting entry on proprietary development contributions to geospatial open source projects. The two hypothesis from the blog: "Proprietary benefit for open source GIS software is primarily a phenomenon of the GDAL project. [...] Proprietary benefit for open source GIS software goes almost exclusively to low-level projects."

The PerryGeo blog ask an interesting question about comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. From the blog: " FDO, GDAL and FME all seem to operate in roughly the same domain - Providing a data model, API and tools to translate between spatial data formats. Does anyone know of any good write-ups comparing/contrasting the features of these three libraries?" Read the very informative answers on the blog. See also related stories below.

st_0x0ef writes "From Berkaoui blog : "[...] Tiling and speed have always been issues with Internet Mapping — especially with Raster Images. Just recently Klokan Petr Pridal described his Summer of Code project as being able "to allow easy publishing of raster maps on the Internet. Your raster file (like TIFF/GeoTIFF, MrSID, ECW, JPEG2000, JPEG, PNG) is converted into a directory structure of small tiles ( TMS compatible ), which you can just copy to the webserver. Simple webpages with viewers based on Google Maps and OpenLayers are generated as well — so anybody can comfortably explore your maps on-line and you do not need to install or configure any special software (like mapserver) and the map displays very fast in the webbrowser. [...]"" See also this informative OSGeo wikipage on the project.

The GDAL mailing list announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.3. Here's the bugfix list and new features. GDAL is quite mature, being used by ESRI, Google, most open source geospatial software and many more. From the official site: "GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. [...] The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data." Copied below is a link to the previous story on comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. Update: 11/02 18:14 GMT by S : Wouhou! A colleague just made me realize the GDAL WMS driver is included in this release, and with little efforts, we made it work. This is great news and a new easy way to add WMS support for projects which uses GDAL/OGR. However, I don't know yet to which extent the driver can be considered mature or not.