Slashgeo

Spatially Adjusted tells us about the release of PostGIS 1.1.1. From the announcement: "The 1.1.1 release is a minor release consisting primarily of bug fixes and code cleanups. Bugs in LRS functions, database migration, and GeometryCollection handling have been resolved. Code has been cleansed of most compiler warnings."

The Programming Consultant Newsletter blog informs us France has elected PostGIS for their geospatial data infrastructure. From the blog: "After a thorough review of their options, IGN opted to go with PostGIS/PostgreSQL, noting that its performance was comparable to proprietary solutions (i.e. similar to Oracle) and the cost savings were significant. They also noted how much easier testing out PostGIS was versus the other systems, as PostGIS and PostgreSQL are free to download and use."

The Lin.ear th.inking blog ran an entry last month on spherical indexing schemes for PostGIS. Thought not exhaustive, the entry is still interesting and reminds us how spatial indexes are important to efficiently analyze huge spatial databases. From the entry: "Handling geodetic data in a correct and efficient way presents quite a few challenges. A major one is: how can geodetic geometry be spatially indexed? Conventional spatial indexes (such as 2D R-trees) all rely on geometry being embedded in a planar space. They don't handle data which can "wrap around", as can occur in a spherical space." See below for other (rare) stories related to spatial indexes.

The Import Cartography blog announced several geospatial data tools for Python users and developers. First there's Shapely 1.0: "Shapely is a Python package for programming with 2D geospatial geometries. It is based on GEOS. Shapely 1.0 is ignorant about coordinate and reference systems. Projection responsibility is left to specific applications", then there's Rtree 0.4: "Whether for in-memory feature stores, Plone content, or whatever -- we need an index to speed up the search for objects that intersect with a spatial bounding box.", SpatialIndex 1.3.0 and WorldMill 0.1. See also the numerous related stories below.

The U.S. TIGER dataset has been rarely mentioned here before. The Free GIS D&I Geoblog linked to the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that the 2007 First Edition Public TIGER/Line will be available in the shapefiles format. What is TIGER? It stands for "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" and from the Wikipedia page: "[...] TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau's process of taking the Decennial Census. TIGER data can be used by GIS applications and is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain." Some related stories below. Update: 01/25 04:42 GMT by S : Humm.. apologies, corrected the story, the data is not yet available, the site say "Starting in January 2008, the Census Bureau will begin releasing TIGER spatial data in shapefile format." but it seems it's not available yet...

Kurt's weblog made me aware the open source GIS project named Minerva, not yet mentioned here before. Here's the Minerva presentation done at the FOSS4G 2007 event. As the presentation show, Minerva can display geodata in 3D over 7 large boards. From the summary: "Minerva's primary strength is the ability to display raster and vector data together from multiple sources with the benefit of high-performance computer graphics (including animating through temporal data sets). By using robust open source toolkits like OSSIMPlanet, we are able to manage gigabytes worth of terrain and image layers. Minerva is an open-source project under active development at Arizona State University's Decision Theater and is used in our production facility to support policy decision-making meetings for our customers. Projects completed with Minerva vary from school enrollment to disease propagation studies." In addition to OSSIM, Minerva uses PostGIS and OpenSceneGraph.

xanadont writes "zigGIS brings view and edit capabilities of PostGIS to ArcMap. Read the announcement here." Update: 01/18 19:32 GMT by S : A little more from the announcement: "For over two years zigGIS has enabled ArcView to view and analyze PostGIS layers. New to version 2.0 is the ability to edit PostGIS data as well as support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008. [...] Such improvements include ArcGIS 9.2 updates, proper handling of renderers, and support for on-the-fly reconciliation of spatial references. Lastly, to be introduced with zigGIS 2.0, is editing of PostGIS data from within ArcMap. In short, zigGIS exposes PostGIS to the full capability of ArcMap. [...] Personal and educational licenses are free. The source code will remain open."

Late last December the Fuzzy Tolerance blog ran a nice demonstration of building a geoportal with open source software such as OpenLayers, TileCache, GeoServer, PostGIS, jQuery, REST and AJAX. Here's the resulting geospatial portal. From the blog: "From a developer’s perspective, the biggest advantages I’ve found with OpenLayers-Tilecache-jQuery-REST is speed and simplicity. The beta site went from an empty text file to release in only a few weeks of actual development time nestled in between other projects, with a lot of that taken up by a jQuery/OpenLayers/GeoServer/SLD learning curve, design, web service work, software setup, etc. It is also marvelously simple, being nothing more than Javascript and HTML. From an end-user perspective, you get a much more responsive application, a nicer map interface than I usually give people via OpenLayers, and everything is free and open source." I copied below some of the previous Slashgeo stories regarding the software used in the demonstration.

Christian Spanring offers news on improved MySQL GIS functions. From the blog: "According to the GIS Functions wiki entry following MySQL GIS functions have been added to the MySQL 5.1.23 beta GIS release: BUFFER, DIFFERENCE, DISTANCE, INTERSECTION, SYM_DIFFERENCE, UNION. I haven’t had the chance to test it yet, but I remember being very excited when I first read about the MySQL spatial extension a couple of years ago, followed by disappointment because of the MBR limits. Finally I decided to go with PostgreSQL/PostGIS back then. " See previous stories below, including a survey of geospatial features of Oracle, MySQL and PostGIS.

[this is old news from July and sharing it with our users to make sure they're aware of it] Spatially Adjusted linked in July to a BostonGIS article named "Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6". Previous such comparison is over 1.5 years old, see also related stories below. From the associated blog entry: "A few people have been asking us what are the pros and cons of using SQL Server 2008 Spatial and PostGIS and as a Windows user, why would you still consider using PostGIS. Rather than simply providing some hand-waving saying "well if you just care about displaying data, then use whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you want to do real intensive sophisticated spatial analysis and geometric processing without having to purchase a bunch of expensive software, then PostGIS is probably better for you. Hell why must you think in either or propositions - just use both using the strengths of each.", we have tried really hard to quantify the similarities and differences between the 2 and to boot - we have also added in MySQL."