Slashgeo

The import cartography and EarthBrowser blogs have been discussing GeoJSON lately. Probably the best starting point is Direction Mag's excellent recent article on GeoJSON, a peak to Wikipedia JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) article can be useful. From the DM article: "One emerging geospatial technology standard that bears monitoring, GeoJSON (pronounced jee-oh-jay-son, sometimes with emphasis on the last syllable), may result in a viable software messaging language (e.g. a computer software system to computer software system messaging language) that can be simultaneously more compact than XML and more readable by a human. Compactness increases in importance when considering the large amount of geospatial data that must be shared in some system integrations. (Insistence that languages for computer-to-computer communication should be "human readable" is a pervasive theme for many IT standards bodies, and that likely says more about software developers' reluctance to release control than it does the necessity that the information actually ever be readable.) "

Andrea Aime writes "The GeoTools 2.4.0 release is available for download:

        * http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/2.4.0

New for GeoTools 2.4:

        * significant speedups in shapefile and postgis data rendering (and to a lesser measure to other vector data sources as well)
        * many expressions improvements using converters to correctly handle a range of queries
        * style interfaces now use geoapi filter (no more casting!)
        * redirect to an alternate logging api
        * datastore dispose
        * make use of java connection pools (DBCP and the like)
        * use a registered java DataSource for epsg database in a Java EE environment
        * user guide; with a small section for 2.4.0
        * iso geometry implementation available as a supported module
        * community change proposal process has been adopted

For more information on these improvements visit our web site:

        * http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/2.4.x

Release Notes:
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?p rojectId=10270&styleName=Html&version=13062

The GeoTools project has seen a lot of growth over the development of GeoTools 2.4. We have made several important changes to how the project is managed:

        * we have introduced "unsupported" modules; allowing early access to community experiments (for a list of supported modules see http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?relea se_id=574856)
        * we have adopted a formal change proposal system

For more information please visit:

        * http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Upgrade+ to+2.4
        * http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS
        * http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTDOC

Enjoy,
The GeoTools Community"

Geoweb Guru shares a technical overview of GeoJSON. From the entry: "It is a relatively young format, but already has support in the OpenLayers client and the GDAL/OGR library. GeoJSON plug-ins are also available for GeoServer and CartoWeb. The specification can be found at: http://geojson.org/geojson-spec.html GeoJSON supports the standard geometry objects supported by shapefiles, as well as features, collections, bounding boxes, and multiple coordinate systems. [...] GeoJSON is a relatively new format that is seeing increasing use. It is not as verbose as the XML alternatives such as KML or GML, and in most cases should be easier to implement. GeoJSON should be ideal if you are rolling your own AJAX application, for example by writing your own PHP server of geospatial data. It is also ideal if you wish to transfer pure geospatial data without KML's styling baggage, or the verbosity of GML. However, I do not think it will challenge KML as the de facto standard for mashups. This is because KML is already well established, supports styling information, and is better structured." GeoJSON has been mentioned a few times in the past, see related stories below.

After years of development, the open source GIS Quantum GIS, aka QGIS, just released its version 1.0. Slashgeo regularly covered QGIS news for a while, since it has already been a usable alternative for many (obviously depending on what your needs are). See related stories below. Here's the message from the Project Steering Committee Chair: "Welcome to Quantum GIS version 1.0. and version 1.0 of the QGIS Users Guide. This release is the culmination of literally hundreds of hours of work by a team of developers, translators, documentation writers, and graphics designers. QGIS began life in February of 2002, with the first release in June of the same year. The initial goal was to create a viewer for PostGIS data that ran on Linux. From those humble beginnings, QGIS has become a true cross-platform application that runs on all major versions of unix, Linux, as well as Mac and Windows. It supports editing and map composition as well as integration with GRASS to provide powerful GIS capability. At 1.0 we provide a stable API from which you can develop custom solutions in Python or C++. Even though 1.0 is fresh, there are a number of exciting developments underway in both the core application and plugins. Although it took nearly 7 years to get to version 1.0, I think you'll find that this version is the best yet. Thanks for using QGIS---you, the users, have played a large part in its success." A part of what's changed: "QGIS 1.0 brings with it a wealth of improvements, over 265 bug fixes and many new features. This is also a landmark release in that it is our first API stable release and contains a core set of features needed to make QGIS into a very capable and user friendly GIS data browser. There are some things that didn't make it into this release, most notably support for advanced labelling - which we will incorporate into our next point release."

Sometimes a common web search doesn't help you find what you're looking for, you have to ask the 'right persons'. I asked the OSGeo-Discuss list and learned that many open source geospatial software can generate html clickable image maps. Here's the summary of the findings: GRASS GIS, MapServer, GeoServer and QGIS. If you find more, don't hesitate to share it with the Slashgeo users below.

Ogle Earth discusses the preview release of Cartographica, a GIS software for the Mac. From the entry: "I'm not a GIS pro, so getting results like that in a matter of minutes is a good sign on the ease-of-use front :-) While it's early days yet for this application, I think it's clear where its makers aim to position it: Not as an ESRI ArcGIS or Manifold competitor, but as something that is good enough for school users, GIS hobbyists and people who georeference their photos — for the last group, Cartographica has menu items like "Timecode Photos from iPhoto Library" and "Plot GPS encoded Photos"." Let's remember that the open source QGIS works on the Mac and that ArcGIS itself runs on the Mac through virtualization. See also related stories below. Update: 11/24 17:42 GMT by S : The Virtual Earth team also announced that VE 3D now runs well on a mac with virtualization.

OGR2Layers Plugin detects any OGR supported data layer loaded into Quantum GIS, convert it to KML and write an OpenLayers HTML map including the KML overlay. The OpenLayers parameters like WMS base layer, default map extent and layerswitcher control can be configured from the plugin. Outputs KML can also be direcly loaded in Google Earth. See this web page for more information: http://ogr2layers.org/

jdeolive writes "The GeoTools 2.5 release is available for download: http://geotools.codehaus.org/2.5.0 The 2.5.0 release marks the first stable release of a number of exciting developments and features of the 2.5.x series including a new feature model based on GeoAPI, a move to Java 5, and support for units based on JSR-275. And much more. The entire change log can be found at http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?v ersion=13698&styleName=Text&projectId=10270. Other exciting news for the GeoTools community includes graduation from incubation as a project The OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation). Special thanks to everyone who provided feedback and filed bugs for this release. As usual a big thanks to Geomatys, GeoSolutions, Refractions Research, and OpenGeo, and most importantly the user and contributor community for continuing to drive GeoTools and make the project a success. For more information about this release and about the GeoTools project in general please visit http://geotools.org/"

QGIS announced their latest major release 0.10.0 [screenshots included] codenamed Io. From the announcement: "This release includes over 140 bug fixes and stability improvements and introduces several new features including Python support, see below for previews! [...] The digitising tools have received a lot of attention in this release, with improved ability to edit and split features, insert and delete vertices and snap to neighboring features. [...] Another handy new feature in this release is the ability to associate default layer style settings with a layer. [...] We have made many changes to the raster implementation in this release, including the ability to have finer control over transparency in a raster. Also it is now possible to apply custom colour classifications to single band rasters (or multiband rasters when being represented as a single band). [...] The addition of python bindings to QGIS has really raised a lot of interest, with many people beginning to implement some really neat python based plugins for QGIS. We have now set up a central repository for contributed python plugins. [...] This version of QGIS introduces the ability to rotate and scale vector point symbols based on the value in a selected field of the attribute table." QGIS is participating to Google's Summer of Code and contour lines for QGIS has been recently discussed. See also the QGIS previous stories below.