Slashgeo

The Open Geospatial Consortium sent out a press release concerning their request for public comments for the Geospatial Web Processing service specification. From the PR: "The candidate Web Processing Service interface specification provides a standardized interface that facilitates the access and publishing of geospatial processes as well as the discovery and binding to those processes by client applications. "Processes" in this context include any sort of calculation or model which operates on spatially referenced data."

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 Open Geospatial Consortium announced that the Web Processing Service (WPS) is now an approved standard with its version 1.0. From the PR: "A WPS can be used to define calculations as simple as subtracting one set of spatially referenced data from another (e.g., determining the difference in influenza cases between two different seasons), or as complicated as a hydrological model. The data required by the WPS can be delivered across a network or it can be made available at the server. This interface specification provides mechanisms to identify the spatially referenced data required by the calculation, initiate the calculation, and manage the output from the calculation so that the client can access it." See also related stories below.

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.

Several recent entries have discussed the newly available demo of WPServer, a web processing server which allow geoprocessing over an Internet connexion. Here's the must-read followup entry: "Want your shapefiles on a map? Use FeatureServer. Want to buffer each of the points in your FeatureServer-served data? Serialize them, and pass them up to WPServer, then display the data that comes back. Want to mix in KML data, to see the intersections? Add a KML layer to OpenLayers, and use WPServer to do the intersections. Crap. I think what OpenLayers can do now might actually be something people would refer to as GIS." Spatially Adjusted discuss this demo and is impressed. Random Nodes also shares his thoughts on this web-based GIS solution. import cartography even claim this open source approach may beat ArcGIS Server directly, this tells you how important the matter is. See also the two previous stories on WPS in the related stories below. Related, there's the release of PyWPS 2.0.

Jesse Eichar writes "User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS 1.1-RC11 has just been released. UDIG is an open source spatial data viewer/editor, with special emphasis on the OpenGIS standards for internet GIS, the Web Map Server and Web Feature Server standards. UDIG provides a common Java platform for building spatial applications with open source components. This release includes:

• improved for maps with many label layers
• Styling is available for the Grid MapGraphic that allows the grid to be customized on a per-layer basis
• ArcSDE support fixed
• Bug fixes for the editing

Download and join the fun:

• Windows
• Linux x86
• Linux x86_64
• Macintosh OS X Intel

If you would like to be involved in this project please check out our website (udig.refractions.net) and join our mailing list."

Anonymous Voxel writes "The open source webmapping server GeoServer 1.5.3 has been released. According to GeosServer Blog [...] This version represents the culmination of a ton of hard work to make GeoServer more compatible with the new formats gaining great popularity in the rapidly expanding geo world. Foremost among the improvements is a number of advances in our support for Google Earth. KML, the format understood by Google Earth, has been available from GeoServer for awhile. But our implementation wasn’t flexible enough to make good looking maps and to take advantage of the advanced features of the format. That has all changed, with better default styling, custom placemarks from templates, support for ‘Super-Overlays’ and Time, and automatic generation of legend information. There is also experimental support for referencing an existing cache of tiles to use in a Super-Overlay. The ability to style one’s 2d map and get the same output in Google Earth has also improved dramatically, as it now picks up proper scale elements." The rest of the announcement below.

The OSGeo Journal offers a nice article named "Evaluation of the OGC Web Processing Service for Use in a Client-Side GIS" by Christopher Michael and Daniel P. Ames [pdf, 330k]. The abstract: "The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service proposed specification is intended as a solution for developing web-based geoprocessing plugins, and for easily sharing algorithms and geoprocessing functionality. This paper seeks to evaluate the WPS proposal with respect to feasibility and potential utility, and to identify areas for improvement. Challenges with the WPS proposal are discussed together with potential solutions. Several potential enhancements to the WPS proposal are introduced and considered, including a mechanism to guide client applications in prompting for correct data and a means to list the data available on a server."