Slashgeo

The OSGeo-Announce mailing list announced Google's Summer of Code 2007 program accepted the OSGeo submittal. Here's the OSGeo wiki page on their plans regarding the apps and the OSGeo SoC Google page (mostly empty at this time). From the announcement: "OSGeo is pleased to announce that Google has accepted OSGeo as mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2007 program. This program provides funding for students to work on open source projects under the support of experienced mentors. The projects participating through OSGeo are GDAL, GeoServer, GeoTools, GRASS, MapGuide, PostGIS, uDig, OpenJUMP and MapServer. Students interested in participating can find more information on OSGeo's project ideas [website]..." This is a great opportunity for students to work on the incredible projects which are supported by the OSGeo.

jdeolive writes "The GeoServer Project is proud to announce the release of version 1.5.0. This release turns GeoServer in to a complete solution for serving any type of spatial data, as the primary focus has been support for raster formats, starting with GeoTiff, ArcGrid, World Images, GTOPO30, and image mosiacs and pyramids. As always GeoServer is focused on open standards and open data, making the rasters available as a Web Map Service, but also through the Web Coverage Service specification, which gives full access to the raw data, not just the final image. The WCS passes all OGC Compliance tests, and will be fully certified very soon. Other notable improvements for this release include easier adding of data through the web admin tools, better support for Google Earth KML, performance and scalability improvements, and as always a heap of bug fixes." The rest of the announcement below, including links to download this open source software.

Tyler Mitchell writes "The first volume of the OSGeo Journal has now been released. This is a major milestone for spreading the word about open source geospatial applications in general and for helping build communication between projects and users involved with the OSGeo Foundation. The Journal provides news, event summaries, project introductions, case studies, topical articles and more. Volume 2 is currently under development. For more information see http://www.osgeo.org/journal or download the 71 page (15MB) Journal directly from: http://www.osgeo.org/files/journal/final_pdfs/OSGe oJournal_vol1.pdf"

The OSGeo blog shares updates on their blog, first topic is the financial and fundraising issues, then recent membership elections and membership management and finally a reminder on the OSGeo Journal and the upcoming FOSS4G conference. From the first link: "We've never had any real commitment to revenue targets - how many donors, how much from grants, who is responsible for doing it all, etc. - so it is hard to show that we have a plan for meeting our budget expenditures. Autodesk is still committed to helping fund the start-up of OSGeo in the short term but to be truly sustainable we must augment that with additional funds. [...] I have spoken to several members who have grant-writing experience and I believe we have some great opportunities out there - especially for developing educational material and developing/delivering workshops across many domains." See also related stories below.

The GeoServer mailing list informs us the open source webmapping server GeoServer 1.5.2 has been released. From the announcement: "This release brings some new interesting bits of functionality such as: * 8 bit png and gif support * Custom palette support * GetFeatureInfo templates * KML and GeoRSS improvements * GetLegendGraphic enhancements * Ability to serve content directory from data directory, and a heap of bug fixes as usual." Update: 08/08 20:42 GMT by S : An anonymous user told us GeoServer 1.5.2 might not be bug free: Anonymous Voxel writes "Geoserver Blog sent a call for testing on the new "release" of Geoserver: So we were hoping to do a big announcement of GeoServer 1.5.2 today. But our ambitious bug fixes and improvements (over 80 issues) has come back to haunt us, and taught us an important lesson about doing release candidates first, even if 1.5.2-RC1 doesn’t sound great to our ears. We squeezed in lots of Google Earth output improvements, added GeoRSS, improved the Google Maps demo with a better projection, and added paletted images for faster and lighter image generation. And of course those have been where we’ve seen a few problems. We’ve uploaded the release to sourceforge, but users have already reported a few small errors with GeoRSS and Google Maps, so we’re regrouping and hoping to gather any additional bug reports and do the big release announcements next week. [...]"

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.

moovida writes "A code sprint is usually organized by a group that is using an open source project and wants to see something done. The communication that happens from face to face hacking usually lasts the project for a year or more (read more ). The OSGeo GIS community proposes two GIS code sprints for the year 2007. The first occurs at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference in September (more here). The second one will occur at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference 2007 in November (more here). Developers or power users interested in contributing to their favorite projects are invited to add themselves to the official wiki pages reported above. Have a good hunt!"