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Introductory Open Source GIS Articles
posted by Satri
on Friday August 17, @04:25PM
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from the learning-about-alternatives dept.
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The OSGeo mailing list links to a new articles on open source GIS from the GIS Development magazine, including articles on Quantum GIS and deegree. From the "Open Source Tools for GIS Professionals" article: "Open Source Software (OSS) has been maturing over the last years into robust, well-supported tools whose code base grows exponentially. Open Source GIS is no exception to this trend and it is now able to address the needs of GIS professionals worldwide. [...] Building on existing OSS operating systems, database, web services and software development technologies, today we find well-established OSS systems focused on geospatial applications. These systems range from spatially enabled databases like PostGIS, data analysis environments like GRASS, web server technologies (MapServer, GeoServer, Deegree) and client-building tools (MapBuilder, MapBender) to professional desktop GIS tools like gvSIG. Due to their emphasis on interoperability, these OSS tools have strong support for OGC standards, including web geoservices." See the open source community topic to learn more about previous stories on the subject.
Related Stories
Open Source Geospatial Software Introduction 2 comments
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GEOconnexions runs a generic column about open source geospatial software, clearly presenting the context [pdf, 224k], written by Michael P. Gerlek of the OSGeo. From the column: "Second question: what do these all have in common? MapServer,
MapGuide, PostGIS, GDAL, GRASS, OpenLayers, and QGIS. [...] This column is the first of a monthly
series about the power of those packages, their developers, and their
users. [...] The stability
of the product is often much higher, making it a firmer foundation on
which to build your own applications or perform your own data
analysis. The release cycle is often much faster, meaning important
bug fixes or new features appear more frequently. And while there
certainly are many open source projects aimed at “cloning” popular
closed source products, a number of open source products use
technologies and approaches that are completely new and innovative,
well ahead of their closed source cousins."
Mapbender 2.4.2 Released
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The OSGeo mailing list announces the release of Mapbender 2.4.2. Here's the changelog. From the Mapbender main page: "Mapbender is the software and portal site for geodata management of OGC OWS architectures. The software provides web technology for managing spatial data services implemented in PHP, JavaScript and XML. It provides a data model and interfaces for displaying, navigating and querying OGC compliant map services. The Mapbender framework furthermore provides authentication and authorization services, OWS proxy functionality, management interfaces for user, group and service administration in WebGIS projects." Also see other webmapping apps from the OSGeo.
Mapbender FOSS4G Workshop W-03 and 2.4.3 rc1 Released
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Seven writes "From MapbenderWiki: The Mapbender Project is happy to announce the new release 2.4.3 with some minor changes and all bug fixes since the last version. Change in Release Management: More importantly this is the first release that comes in a regular time cycle and not after a certain set of features have been added. This change in policy has been discussed at length on the Mapbender mailing list and on IRC. It reflects a further maturation of the software and aims at making regular updates to the newest version a lesser issue for users and portal operators. The next release with major changes is due in December 2007, the challenge being whether the Project will keep up with the goal of regular release cycles.
Full Adoption of Trac: After more than a half year of testing, discussion and trial phase all enhancements and bug fixes are now managed via the OSGeo operated Trac instance. Trac is now also used to manage road map and further development.
Keep it Human(e and) Readable: The human readable version continues to be available through the Wiki as a MediaWiki template page that ties into the full Version History of Mapbender.
Online Training Course: In time for FOSS4G 2007 a full fledged Online Training Course (Mapbender 101) is made available through OSGeo's Education infrastructure Moodle (currently still on the OSGeo Test Server. It will receive its baptism of fire (editors: feel free to amend to something less pompous...) during the FOSS4G Mapbender Workshop.
"
Technology: gvSIG 1.1 Released
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The open source GIS gvSIG 1.1 has been recently announced. All Points Blog explains the buzz around gvSIG: "- The team includes two rather large main contractors and a host of smaller ones. There are also volunteers. That's about 40 developers, with total staff (including management) at about 70-80.
- The current funding includes E12 million that runs from 2007 until 2013.
- There are 1000 subscribers on the project list, and the project has been downloaded 70,000 times.
- The plan for success included the idea of starting small, proving the result worked and growing the project from there. The guiding principle is "we have to share knowledge" and the group is anxious to show the success of this new model for collaboration." See below for previous gvSIG coverage.
Technology: GRASS GIS 6.2.3 Released 1 comment
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The powerful open source GRASS GIS team has just released version 6.2.3: "This release fixes a number of bugs discovered in the 6.2.2 source code. It is primarily for stability purposes and adds minimal new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations and updates for the help pages. Highlights include further maturation of the GRASS 6 GUI, vector, and database code. Some improvements have been backported from the GRASS 6.3 development branch where new development continues at a strong pace of approximately one code commit every hour, including major work on an all new cross-platform wxPython GUI and a native MS Windows port." Below I copied a few related previous stories.
Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach
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The GRASS GIS mailing list informs us the book "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach" has released a third edition. The table of contents: "Contents: 1 Open Source software and GIS; 2 GIS concepts; 3 Getting started with GRASS; 4 GRASS data models and data exchange; 5 Working with raster data; 6 Working with vector data; 7 Graphical output and visualization; 8 Image processing; 9 Notes on GRASS programming; 10 Using GRASS with other Open Source tools; Appendix; References; Index." See below for other GRASS GIS related stories.
gvSIG Update Version 1.1.1 and 3D Pilot Extension
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Alvaro Anguix writes "gvSIG 1.1.1, a partial update of gvSIG 1.1, is now available for download in which some problems detected by our users have been fixed, so it is possible to working normally with the application.
As usual, it can be downloaded from the Download section of the web page.
The problems fixed in this distribution can be checked from the Release Notes Section and to install the partial update you must have gvSIG 1.1 correctly installed.
On the other hand, the pilot application awarded the development contract for the 3D Extension by the Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is available too. It allows the creation of 3D Views, XYZ-projected as well as spherical (planetary), where local and remote data sources can be loaded as layers, and displayed using most of the options available in 2D like transparency, labeling, legends, etc.
It's available in the Extensions section of the web page and to install this extension you must have correctly installed gvSIG 1.1.1 version." I copied below several previous stories on the open source GIS gvSIG.
Technology: gvSIG Metadata Prototype is Now Available in gvSIG
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Virtual News Office, gvSIG Project writes "The gvSIG metadata prototype is now available. The aim of this prototype is to make catalogation of geospatial information easier, providing gvSIG with some specific features. First of all, it allows us to extract automatically some metadata from the data source (only from shapefiles right now). Secondlly it has an editor that allows us to complete the rest of the metadata. And finally we´ll be able to publish the metadata on a catalog server (only on Geonetwork right now). It is available in the Extensions section of the web page. Advice: To install this extension you must have correctly installed gvSIG 1.1.x version."
gvSIG has been mentioned regularly. See also related stories below.
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