MacRumors shares a long entry named Apple Moving to In-House Mapping Service with 3D Views in iOS 6?

From the 9TO5Mac report: "Apple will drop the Google Maps program running on iOS since 2007 in favor for a new Maps app with an Apple backend. [..] The most important aspect of the new Maps application is a powerful new 3D mode. The 3D mode does not come enabled by default, but users simply need to click a 3D button that is conveniently and visibly stored in the app. Perhaps under the fold like the current traffic, pin, and map view buttons. This 3D mode is said to essentially be technology straight from C3 Technologies: beautiful, realistic graphics based on de-classified missile target algorithms."

We mentioned in the past that Apple Acquired Web Mapping Firm Poly9 and Apple's C3 Technologies 3D Maps Also Offer Street Views and Interior Views.

Related, Apple's iPhoto maps now show attribution to OpenStreetMap, we mentioned Apple using OpenStreetMap data in March.

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While I wait until next week to share geonews in batch mode, James made me aware of a great MapBox project: the Maki open source point of interest icon set for cartography.

What it is? "Designed pixel-by-pixel to look great at small sizes but scale up elegantly. We designed Maki specifically for TileMill with the goal of creating an international, comprehensive, and stylistically unified point of interest icon set. Each symbol is drawn three times at different sizes to maximize crispness and readability. Maki symbols are based on international recognized symbols, following precedents set by AIGA and other international symbol systems, but preserving a unique look at feel.

Use Maki for everything from adding context to the base map of your mobile app to highlighting critical data on your disaster map. Just download the icons and start using them with TileMill or put them on your server to integrate with another mapping API."

As pointed out by James, The Noun Project jumped in the Maki train. Looking for previous related entries, I found, those two: Impacts of Symbology Changes for Organizations and Map Symbols and A Summary of Thematic Mapping Techniques.

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That's the name of the Slashdot story, North Korea Jamming GPS Signals In South Korea.

Their summary: "North Korea has been looking for new and inventive ways to mess with South Korea. It seems that their missile launch fizzled a bit though, so those wacky folks from the North have bought a few GPS jamming trucks from Russia and are now blocking GPS signals around their city of Kaeson. While Kaeson is around 60 Km inside their borders, the jamming circle is around 100 Km, so it actually covers good parts of South Korea including the airports at Inchon and Gimpo. While no accidents have been caused as yet, it has caused quite some disruption and has made ocean going craft suffer as well due to their heavy reliance on GPS signals."

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That's it, after some time in the dark, ESA declares end of mission for Envisat.

From the ESA: "Just weeks after celebrating its tenth year in orbit, communication with the Envisat satellite was suddenly lost on 8 April. Following rigorous attempts to re-establish contact and the investigation of failure scenarios, the end of the mission is being declared. A team of engineers has spent the last month attempting to regain control of Envisat, investigating possible reasons for the problem. Despite continuous commands sent from a widespread network of ground stations, there has been no reaction yet from the satellite."

Want to know more about all sensors that were onboard Envisat? Here's the wikipedia article.

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I've been overly away and busy lately, it just means we'll share the geonews a bit later than usual.

I was a heavy (and happy) ENVI user 10 years ago, and the product, now developed by Exelis, is at ENVI version 5.

Since we mentioned ENVI only about 10 times in the past 7 years, here's the generic summary of what it is: "ENVI is the premier software solution for processing and analyzing geospatial imagery. The newest ENVI release makes your image analysis workflow more efficient than ever and allows you to get the information you need more quickly. With a streamlined user interface, a modern high-speed display, new and advanced processing tools, and a flexible API for easy customization, ENVI 5 makes it easier for you to solve problems using geospatial imagery. And, since all ENVI tools are still conveniently accessible from the ArcGIS® toolbox, GIS users can easily add information to their GIS workflow for enhanced mapping applications."

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That's the name of the Slashdot story, U.S. In Danger of Losing Earth-Observing Satellite Capability.

Their summary: "As reported in Wired, a recent National Research Council report indicates a growing concern for NASA, the NOAA, and USGS. While there are currently 22 Earth-observing satellites in orbit, this number is expected to drop to as low as six by the year 2020. The U.S. relies on this network of satellites for weather forecasting, climate change data, and important geologic and oceanographic information. As with most things space and NASA these days, the root cause is funding cuts. The program to maintain this network was funded at $2 billion as recently as 2002, but has since been scaled back to a current funding level of $1.3 billion, with only two replacement satellites having definite launch dates."

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Bloggage update: Exprodat published a free eBook: Why use GIS in petroleum?, an excellent state-of-play as well as good industry marketing to augment their impressive blog. One of their figures similar to one I published 25 years ago, led me to briefly look at what GIS looked like in oil&gas a generation ago.

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Some pretty interesting Google geonews in batch mode.

From official sources:

• Google announced Photo tours in Google Maps: "Photo tours are available for more than 15,000 popular sites around the world [...] To produce these photo tours, we use advanced computer vision techniques to create a 3D experience from public, user-contributed Picasa and Panaromio photos."
• The new 3D buildings announced last month are now available in Google MapsGL
• There's new 45° imagery available for 19 cities, International: Avignon, France; Reus, Spain; Rotterdam, Netherlands; L'Alcudia, Spain; Gandia, Spain; Sueca, Spain; Burgos, Spain; Los Palacios Y Villafranca, Spain, US: Albany, GA; Omaha, NE; Baytown, TX; Miami, FL; Amarillo, TX; Monroe, LA; Manchester, NH; Alexandria, LA; Rapid City, SD; Loudon, TN; Farmington, NM
• Street View is now available in Ukraine

From other sources:

• It's James that made me aware that the Google Maps game 'Maps Cube' is available, I couldn't test it yet on the Linux machine in front of me. Here's how James describes it: "Basically you use your mouse to tilt a 3D cube and have a ball travel down the transportation networks (road, trails, subways, etc). Since we in GIS all know about topology in these networks, the game isn’t as hard as you might expect. Still it’s a pretty amazing example of using HTML + WebGL for web mapping." APB also links to a short PC Mag article on the Maps Cube Game.
• The GEB shares an update on the impressive Data Appeal visualization tool for Google Earth
• Slashdot also ran the story named Google Releases FCC Report On Street View Probe
• If you want analysis of Trimble's acquisition of SketchUp from Google, read more from the GEB, from Spatial Sustain,
• Here's Plymouth, Michigan in 3D
• And to end with something funny, here's UFO Sightings in Google Earth

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This comes as a surprise to many, Slashdot discusses Trimble To Acquire Google SketchUp.

Their summary: "It looks like Google is selling off SketchUp or, conversely, Trimble is acquiring it. Despite several indications there will continue to be a free version of the 3D modelling software, users are unsure about what this will mean for the SketchUp community at large as indicated by the comments on the official Google SketchUp Blog post. They are, however, rejoicing that they will be freed from Groups for SketchUp discussions."

From the Trimble press release: "[...] we are committed to continuing to provide SketchUp as a free version to millions of users."

We of course mentioned tons of times SketchUp, which is a popular tool to generate 3D models. Trimble also found the road to our users quite a few times.

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Here's the recent geonews in batch mode.

From the open source front:

• Here's a DM summary entry on FOSS4G-NA 2012 that I haven't shared yet, and it's pretty informative
• There's a new video showing us uDig features
• Here's examples of using QGIS in local government, related to QGIS, here's an entry on What's New in QGIS Plugins
• A technical entry on dynamic WMS styling with GeoServer with SLD
• Here's an interesting web browser memory usage experiment for OpenLayers

From the Google front:

• Google announce new StreetView imagery for Israel in an entry named Exploring Jerusalem’s Old City streets with Street View
• There's also an update to the Google Maps API deprecation policy and Terms of Service
• The GEB reminds us the options we have for Sharing your favorite locations in Google Earth

On the Microsoft front:

• You can now Find Venue Maps, Businesses and Buildings Faster on Bing Maps
• Bing Maps is Reducing the Complexity of Rendering Shapes

Discussed over Slashdot:

• A "Big Brother Chip", the Broadcom 4752, that acts as a ubiquitous location chip using everything available: "global navigation satellites, cell phone towers, and Wi-Fi hot spots, coupled with input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, step counters, and altimeters"
• A GPS system that will speed up tsunami warnings
• The Physical Travelling Salesman Challenge
• Using satellite imagery to counting Emperor Penguins from space

Directions Mag articles of note:

• The Top 10 Things You Should Know about GIS Certification, including "In 2012, more than 5,000 people are active GISPs." and "Eight states have recognized and endorsed the GISP"
• A Q&A entry about Is Intergraph’s New GeoMedia Smart Client for You?

In the everything else category:

• The ESA mentions Envisat's mapping of ice shelf disintegration in Antarctic and update on the investigation of Envisat woes, being offline since early April
• @Thierry_G links to interesting impressions on the Where 2012 conference titled From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle, asking where is the geospatial excitement today?
• Via Paul I found this extreme video example of augmented reality
• APB has an entry on TomTom’s New Global Geocoder Targets Power Users
• SS shares a perspective named Have the geospatial technology frontiers changed much in three years?
• SS also shares an interesting summary of a session on capacity building and the expansion of the global geospatial marketplace to a billion plus people

In the maps category:

• O'Reilly shares two visualizations, one on The history of shipping routes and the other on Mapping the Titanic's passengers

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Via this Google story I learned about MapKnitter, an open source tool to upload your own aerial imagery and combine it into a GeoTiff and TMS/OpenLayers map. MapKnitter is aimed at images coming from balloons and kites.

From their wiki: "MapKnitter (MapKnitter.org) is a free and open source tool for combining and positioning images (often from MapMill.org) in geographic space into a composite image map. Known as “orthorectification” or “georectification” to geographers, this step covers the process of figuring out where images can be placed on an existing map, and how they can be combined, or “stitched” together. You are likely to have many images of overlapping or identical areas, which is why MapMill or some type of sorting is used to determine which source images to use from the original set."

MapKnitter uses GDAL, Leaflet, OpenLayers, Prototype, Ruby on Rails and other open source software.

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Probably because of its unusual size, last Friday's newsletter did not reach all subscribers. Here are the stories published last Friday:

• Google Geonews: Analytics for Google Maps API for Business, Snapping in Panoramio, Titanic in Google Earth, Zombie Survival Map, and much more
• Ten Things You Need to Know About OpenStreetMap and SofM 2012 Registration
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 1 and General Notes
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 2
• FOSS4G - North America 2012: Summary for Day 3 and Other Summaries

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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
OGRS2012 :: SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS (closing at May 28th)
Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium

October 24 – 26, 2012 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Hosted by School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD)

Website: http://www.ogrs2012.org
Contact: cfp@ogrs2012.org

Notice, PDF version of this call is available here : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(our apologies for cross-postings)
Dear colleagues,

The Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium (OGRS) is a meeting dedicated to exchanging ideas on development and use of open source geospatial software in both research and education.

Motivated by the inaugural symposium in Nantes, France, OGRS2012 will be held from October 24 – 26, 2012 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The symposium is hosted and organized by the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), in partnership with EPFL Lausanne, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva, which are all academic institutions in Western Switzerland, and the Institute for Research on Urban Sciences and Techniques in France.

The main goals are:
- to build a panel of new scientific research and education practices using and contributing to open source initiatives in the geospatial fields;
- to discuss a framework and highlight a rationale about geospatial open source technology usage in research and education activities;
- to provide an innovation platform to network and develop ideas for future collaborative work between academia – from research to education – and other actors of the field (associations, foundations, local authorities, industry etc.).

For more details, visit the overview page on the website.

Keynote speakers :
- Luc Anselin, Director, Regents' Professor and Walter Isard Chair at School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Director at GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, Arizona State University;
- Gérard Hégron, Scientific Director in charge of sustainable city at IFSTTAR (French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Planning and Networks);
- Helena Mitasova, Associate Professor at Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University;
- Robert Weibel, Professor of Geographical Information Science at Department of Geography, University of Zürich.

Submission :
The symposium will integrate several opportunities for presenting : oral presentations, workshops, posters and discussion groups. To participate in any of these opportunities, authors are invited to submit an extended abstract (1000 to 1500 words, references and keywords excluded) through the conference website. The official language is English.

The international scientific advisory board will review and select abstracts for inclusion in the symposium and publication in the symposium proceedings. A subset of contributions will be invited to submit full papers for possible publication in a special issue of the Journal of Spatial Information Sciences (JOSIS), pending a peer review of full papers.

For more details on how to submit a contribution, please visit the call for papers page on the website : http://cfp.ogrs2012.org.

Important dates :
- submission deadline for abstracts is May 28, 2012.
- authors will be notified by June 30, 2012 on program inclusion and selection for JOSIS submission
- deadline to submit full papers is September 30, 2012.

We would appreciate if you could kindly distribute this call to other interested parties of your acquaintance.

Best regards,
OGRS2012 program committee

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Here's the recent Google related geonews in batch mode.

From official sources:

• With 100$ kit you can get your own balloon and kite imagery for display in Google Earth, this was also discussed over Slashdot
• You can now easily snap your photos to a location in Panoramio
• There's an entry on remembering the Titanic in Google Earth
• There's a map example from the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG with Google Maps API
• The dev blog also shared a Zombie Survival Map that uses Google services!
• Maybe be useful is visualizing U.S. demographics using Google Maps API for Business and a related announcement of Analytics for Google Maps API for Business
• And there was an imagery update to Google Earth & Maps this week, tons of areas impacted

From the GEB:

• The GEB informs us on ways of using Google Earth on Earth Day
• There's New Street View imagery in Israel and Ukraine
• Also on the Titanic topic, the voyage of the Titanic in Google Earth
• And you can now fly a jetpack in Google Earth
• Still from the GEB, view the recently discovered animal-shaped mounds in Peru
• The GEB finally informs us that the unofficial Google Earth Flight Simulator gets a new home and a slew of enhancements

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DM yesterday published an article named Ten Things You Need to Know About OpenStreetMap. While you probably already know all this if you're a regular reader, it still constitutes an excellent refresher.

Follow the provided link for the details, here's the ten items:

1. OpenStreetMap's definition; "OpenStreetMap is a free worldwide map, created by people like you."
2. OSM’s Name is Singular
3. The OpenStreetMap Foundation Manages and Supports the Effort
4. OSM is Changing its License from Creative Commons to ODbL
5. Mapping Parties are Events to Expand OSM
6. Google’s Recent Decision to Charge Heavy Users of its Google Maps API is Pushing Developers to OSM
7. Where to Get OSM Tiles
8. Many Apps Offer OSM Data as an Option
9. Some Countries are Heavier OSM Contributors and Users than Others
10. OSM has an Annual Conference, The State of the Map

Also announced earlier this week is the opening of the registration for State of the Map 2012 conference, to be held in Tokyo September 6-8th, just before FOSS4G 2012 at the same location.

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This is the third and last of my summary entries on FOSS4G-NA 2012.

First, here are other pertinent summaries I found on the blogosphere;

• Direction Mag offers several entries related to FOSS4G-NA 2012:
  • One named MapStory.org Soft Launches: "It's a platform for collecting datasets (StoryLayers), and MapStories (animated maps of these datasets over times)."
  • FOSS4GNA 2012 Day One Plenary: Recapping Roots and NGA Rhythms
  • FOSS4GNA 2012 Day Two Plenary: URLs and Firehoses
  • FOSS4GNA Panel: Gaps and Voids in Open Source Geo Technology
  • Tweets of note for the 11th and for  the 12th,
• Martin Davis (Dr JTS) FOSS4G-NA 2012 review

Reminder: here's my notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA 2012 talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

Day 3

 

RadiantBlue - OMAR

• OMAR = Open Mapping ARchive
• About 20 people supporting and developing their open source software, another proof that this business model can work
• Web-based polished raster search user interface with a real fast data viewer
• Apparently easy to import data into OMAR

RadiantBlue - OSSIM

• Advanced C++ remote sensing and geospatial processing
• Started in 1998
• One of the founding projects of OSGeo
• Used in numerous commercial and government solutions

• Long history of government projects
• My main interest was in ossimPlanet, since we have our own in-house scientific virtual globe at MSC
• Along with the ossimPlanet tool, there's ImageLinker and OMAR that work together
• There's OSSIM Libraries
• Image chains for data processing, such as models, filters, combiners, with an excellent UI
• dynamic plugins

• ossimPlanet: virtual globe similar to Google Earth and NASA WorldWind (whatever happened to it), but... supports multiple platform, photogrammetric accuracy, native file access, WMS compliant
  • high performance 3D solution

• Demoed their tools

Skipped some talks that were mostly U.S.-specific

Panel on challenges in implementing FOSS4G software

• Integration with existing 'legacy' software such as SharePoint or Oracle can be a challenge
• Legal components of open source are not an issue. It's unlikely that open licenses will do a great deal of damages to projects and organizations
• Community is essential for the feedback loop in the open source software
• Security audits are the same for open source than for commercial software
• Panelists discussed their success stories

Panel on open source geo in federal IT

• More intimate relation with open source vendors than with proprietary vendors, particularly in regards to feature needs, development, etc
• Open source isn't entirely free, you need to put efforts
• OGC standards are much faster implemented in open source geo software than in proprietary ones
• Funding positions of Geospatial professionals on the long term can be a challenge at the federal level
• Investing in open source consulting vs employ a senior full time expert... sometimes the first option seems to be much more efficient
• Collaboration with the community requires energy, but it pays off over time
• The pertinence of having federal IT coordination in their investment in open geospatial software and access the impact of their investment on each other
• Challenge with reaching stakeholders of the federal gov which has interest in open source geo
  • At the Government of Canada we have the FCGEO (Federal Committee on Geomatics and Earth Observation) and GeoConnections, etc... there are some coordinating bodies and resources
• The best with open source geo is rapid updates and delivery mechanisms
• Expectations that the cloud will impact significantly how geospatial data is managed and stored at the federal level
• GeoCat Bridge, bridging ArcMap to open source SLD compatible software - just can't ignore past ArcMap investments

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That's the second out of three summary entries on FOSS4G-NA 2012.

Reminder, here's my notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA 2012 talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

Day 2

 

Mike Byrne FCC Wednesday plenary

• We don't make paper maps
• The importance of URLs
• Unintended consequences of data use are good
• Spatial data is not special... it's just columns in a database
  • I think I personally disagree with that statement; spatial data requires a datum and a projection and implies things like spatial topology and so on, so to me, these major distinctions makes it 'special' to some extent
• Need for low barrier to publish and low barrier to consume

Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL

• Large data collection with continuous processing and aggregation, firehose engineering
• Challenges:
  • volume of data, and volume grows over time
  • constant flow of data, 24/7, data collection component, it means no ETL
  • database size, lots of hardware, backups, redundancy, migration, etc... database growth, many components = many failures
  • component failures, all components fail, and data collection must meanwhile continue
• Data collection must be: continuous, parallel and fault-tolerant
• Don't use cutting edge technology, don't run components to capacity, do not do hot patching
• Little to no geospatial content in this talk

Ramsey - What's new in PostGIS 2.0

• Breaks some backward compatibility
• PostGIS uses a new serialization
• New WKT / WKB parser, Extended WKT vs OGC vs ISO
• New 3D functions
• 4D indexes, nD actually
• New 3D types and formats
• New shapefile loading GUI

• Raster
  • Raster support is there to enable analysis, not visualization, raster objects are very similar to vector objects in PostGIS
  • Many new raster functions
  • Raster Performance is still not great and sensitive to tile size, and function signatures can get very complex

• Integrated raster and vector analysis
• Indexed nearest neighbors, 2 million points, in 9 milliseconds... pretty fast

Tom Payne - OpenWebGlobe WebGL Globe

• Google Earth plugin competitor
• 100% JavaScript and WebGL
• SpiderGL.org and OpenWebGlobe.org
• Streaming lod terrain example on SpiderGL
• Spherical Mercator (more)
• Includes buildings, at various levels of quality to accommodate different use cases
• Data in the S3 cloud managed by TileCloud
• WebGL Navigation can't exactly mimic Desktop software
• It may need polishing, but it works well already
• VirtualGlobeBook.com for further reading
• WebGL is also an interest of the gaming industry so there's big pushing from them too
• No mobile browser supports WebGL yet

Bitner - Working with four dimensional flight track data

• Closer to the type of data I have to deal with than the CartoDB and PostGIS presentation
• XYZM (m = minutes)
• Smoothing track data
• Using R and PostgreSQL with the temporal extension on pgxn
• PostgreSQL 9.2 will have native time range data types
• R used for removing outlier data and helping the smoothing via statistics
• During spatial smoothing, must consider the time dimension otherwise it messes with speeds
• Displaying the 4D data
• Github OpenNOMS
• Using GeoExt and OpenLayers to display
• App.macnoise.com/flighttracker nice interactive map
• Rather technical presentation

Osti - Cloud-based open source tech to manage natural resources

• Opennrm.org
• Animated web maps, integrating a lot of sensor data, in the Californian delta for a fish and turbidity analysis
• Fully custom-made web page
• The GeoServer talk was probably more interesting

Davis - What's new in the JTS topology suite

• JTS started in 2001
• JTS and GEOS used by many may other software
  • GEOS 3.3.3 released at the beginning of the month
• There's a C# port and a JavaScript port JSTS
• What's new
  • Unary union
  • Delaunay triangulation, supports linear constraints
  • Voronoi diagram
  • Hausdorff distance: "measures how far two subsets of a metric space are from each other"
  • Densification, bounding envelopes
  • Single-sided spatial buffers
  • Magnify topology
• JTS comes with a GUI to test functions

• What's coming
  • Buffer performance improvements again
  • Fast distance computation
  • New algorithms such as concave hull, Bezier smoothing, point clustering, etc
• Future plans: computation in geodetic coordinate systems, improve performance is a constant quest, split packaging into core and algorithms, refactor geometry API to use interfaces
  • For JTS 2.0 since it will break the API backward compatibility
• That was an interesting but short 15 minutes talk... why not show more?

Klassen - Build your own cloud, open source approach to imagery storage

• 50 TB of data, essentially raster
• Their workflow is 'write once read many'
• Constraints: little staff time for maintenance, needs to scale, limit access to some datasets
• Image storage solution is OpenStack object storage aka Swift
  • Swift is optimized for long term storage
  • Why swift: no single point of failure, http/REST API, handles large objects over 5GB, security built-in
• They looked at alternatives such as raid servers, NoSQL such as BigCouch, distributed file systems and S3... but ended up using swift
• Proxy nodes: provides "public" URLs
• There's tradeoffs, including a significant learning curve
• Image catalog with a PostGIS backend
• Services viewers with MapServer and MapCache
• OpenAerialMap on Github.com/oam/oam

Ashton - cartography with TileMill, PostGIS and OpenStreetMap

• Presentation focused on digital map making; such as labels
• The import is part of the render
• Using group styles
• Abbreviations: prefix and suffix aren't that important, handling multiple languages abbreviations is a challenge
• Tens of types of 'spaces' in Unicode
• Features of MapBox Street in TileMill

Nathaniel - Watercolor maps using OpenStreetMap

• These maps were massively advertised in the past weeks
• maps.stamen.com... from stamen design
  • citytracking.org
• Different watercolor textures for each zoom level
• Used Mapnik and python processing
• Blurring things and adding noise, added inner glow
• They didn't render the whole world
  • They user tweets density to identify which areas to prerender at higher zoom levels
  • They also analyzed where people actually searched for watercolor maps

Matthew Davis - Incorporating open source mapping into mobile apps

• Excellent presentation
• Strategy options = native apps, web apps, hybrid apps
• Native apps: fast, mobile app feel, access to sensors, app store... but not cross-platform
  • iOS: 3 closed source maps APIs, none open source
  • Android: 4 mains options; Google Maps, osmdroid, Nutiteq, mapsforge... various tile sources, licensing, offline caching capabilities and vector support
• Web apps:
  • Good = cross platform, but... slower, limited access to sensor, levels of browser support, have to make it feel like a mobile app, no app store, etc...
  • HTML5/CSS3: app can run offline, local data storage, sensor support (GPS well supported, but others not (e.g. accelerometer)), varying degrees of implementation by browsers
  • Mobile frameworks
  • Open source mapping libraries: OpenLayers, Leaflet, Polymaps, Tile5, Modest Maps... things to consider: offline caching, touch gesture support, vector overlays, tile sources, size
• Hybrid apps: good = cross-platform, app store, sensor support, but... not as fast as native app, special attention to mobile app feel... main Hybrid apps solution is PhoneGap
• Detailed a case study & their experience

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I was lucky to participate to the first FOSS4G-NA 2012 conference in Washington D.C. last week. Here's one of three entries in which I'll share my general notes, talk notes and links to other reviews of the conference. First, I want to acknowledge and thank the FOSS4G-NA 2012 organizers for this incredible conference and the complimentary pass as a media partner. There was also a recent official press release from OpenGeo wrapping up the conference. All entries related to FOSS4G-NA 2012 on Slashgeo should be found with a simple search.

Here's my general notes, stripped from content directly related to my employer. These notes intend to provide some level of information on components that I considered interesting or pertinent. Most, if not all, FOSS4G-NA 2012 talks are or will be freely available online, many with full video recording. The program schedule is available online.

General notes

• For Day 1 and 2, there were 3 concurrent tracks. For day 3, there was 2
• There was 'Ignite Spatial' presentations at the end of Day 2
• There was 350 attendees to FOSS4G-NA 2012
• Met and discussed with several colleagues and developers
• Next FOSS4G-NA 2013 will be in Minnesota

 

Day 1
  Paul Ramsey Welcome Talk

• Discussed the history of open source
• Geeks and enthusiasm + tools + connectivity
• Paul reminded us that ArcGIS and Google Earth also use gdal, same for other pieces of open source geospatial software
• Open standards are embraced more quickly by open source software
• Exciting open source geospatial: Leaflet as a new OpenLayers competitor
• Proprietary software locks you in
• Open source software offers a lot of choice and it might be overwhelming, it appears 'simpler' with a single vendor solution
• Google is a FOSS4G-NA 2012 venue sponsor, and so is ESRI

Keith Barber, NGA

• NGA = National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (United States)
• GeoInt must be on-line and on-demand
• The 'pretty' component counts
• How does the users consume information and data? That matters a lot
• Big data, mobile computing, cloud computing, social networking
• Social networking is harnessing the power of already established associations

Kate Chapman, teaching QGIS and OpenStreetMap in Indonesia

• Hot: humanitarian OSM team, full details of their project here
• They did workshops in 9 regions
• Paper maps with no GIS involved
• They also used walkingpapers.org to input new data
• Using the Bing Maps satellite imagery in OSM, when available
• LearnOSM.org launched
• No street signs in small villages, only specific people know the street names
• GIS benefits are not obvious to people that don't know GIS
• Using OSM satellite imagery is much easier than buying a GPS and doing surveying
• On site Internet access is an issue, part of the solution is using 3G modems
• The OSM QGIS plugin is too hard to use in practice
• Goal was poverty mapping

Wickman - Emergency response performance analysis with open source geospatial

• Fire service departments
• First responders are the clients, and they're not always tech savvy
• E911 computer aided dispatch cad systems are almost systematically different one from another
• Cops vs fire fighters: they do not always get along happily
• Incident mapping
• Not all city GIS layers align correctly
• Using GeoKettle, PostGIS and MapServer and OpenLayers
• Showed their GeoKettle processing; seems relatively simple to use
• They'll be replacing MapServer with GeoServer, but didn't told us the reasons

De La Torre - CartoDB 1.0

• The 'Government Participation in Open Source' talk was cancelled
• New FOSS4G software, version 1.0 released last week
• Blazing fast drag and drop online mapping
• PostGIS 2 inside, with node.js and Mapnik
• Blazing fast geospatial queries directly on the online map
• Support importing OSM data
• Explained distinctions with Google Fusion Tables

MacWright - Beyond the Google Maps Paradigm

• Mapbox TileMill
• Everybody gets the same tiles on Google Maps and OpenLayers
• The design of today's maps is only possible because of the way we interact with it... There's less elements on maps because it's easy to zoom in and display more details
• OpenLayers weights 900k while Modest Maps API is 40k
• Google Maps got us halfway, TileMill halved it again
• He got a point: traditional geo technologies is evolving real fast, and not always pushed forward by geofolks

Herbert - FOSS, data delivery and discovery services - the Antarctic experience

• British Antarctic survey
• Gdal, PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, WMS, WFS
• From raw data acquisition to processing and distribution
• GeoRSS, kml, OGC services, jpeg 2000
• Using geonames.org
• Labeling is a challenge, SLD vendor options end up being critical
• Poor metadata and versioning
• They chose GeoNetwork Open Source for data discovery, with some cons
• Polarview.aq, map.arctic.ac.uk and a few more links

Hahn - Rendering the World

• Big world.... it requires a lot of storage and time to generate the tiles
• OpenStreetMap is 54 TB of storage
• Accepted wisdom: only render tiles on demand
• Render servers are slow, costly and stressful
• Pre-rendered tiles are fast, cheap and reliable
• The MBTiles format can store redundancy efficiently
• Tile storage
  • 17.2 billion tiles
  • Open ocean is 60% of World tiles, and it's a single blue tile
  • Solid land tiles are also redundant
  • 4 layers compositing
  • Human tiles is only about 1% of tiles
  • Instead of 10 TB, with removing the redundant tiles, it's 200 GB
• And for time
  • TileMill does all the tiles... With TileMill master, children skipping if redundant, pyramid approach... It mostly works at the moment
  • Instead of 200 days, it needs 4 days
• Still quite a lot of fine tuning to do
• This makes the whole World tile rendering possible

Panel Discussion on Gaps and Voids in open source geo technology

• User interfaces and user experience (UI and UX)
• We need to spend efforts to design interfaces
• Command line is powerful, but you lose plenty of potential users
• Goal is to engage non technical users
• User workflow
• Beyond the UI, there's the documentation too
• Who's the target customer of the software

• Innovation might not come from geoprofessionals if we aren't careful and think out of the box
• There's still not enough geoprofessionals for the industry needs
• It's about value and enabling users
• Investing in FOSS is like investing in fundamental science, it often pays off tremendously on the long term
• Cost of forking software is high and the value of a community is high
• Chose the open license that suits the context

• FOSS4G business models
• API vs download ? The answer is both
• Datasets don't tell you what's wrong with them... they should
• We still can't easily ask what-ifs questions with GIS... such as 'Whats the impact of changing this value or this other value'
• Need more cross projects collaboration

Schaub - OpenLayers: the rebirth of cool

• Moving to Github dramatically increased commits and contributors
• Talk focused on what's new 2.11 and upcoming 2.12
• Mobile devices support, this is major
• Html5 and CSS, tile transitions
• Many new keyboard controls via CSS
• Offline tile cache
• Canvas rendering
• UTFGrid interaction
• Continuous zooming

• Ongoing stuff and ideas for the future
• Improved UI/UX, including CSS styling
• Improved APIs
• Animations performance optimizations
• Tile queues with abortable tile requests
• Usability improvements, including documentation
• Custom built library for specific purposes
• Ongoing discussions about WebGL and Canvas 2D

Wadsworth - Raster Storage and Processing with MongoDB

• JSON
• NoSQL, no joins
• Integrated spatial indexing functionality
• Fast, "web scale"
• Mongo huMongous
• Alternatives, CouchDB/ GeoCouch,
• Their company were already into Ruby / Jruby
• Points associated to raster
• Slap: source, lookup, algorithm, process
• Parallel with celluloid on github

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Another benefit of my participation to FOSS4G-NA 2012 was learning about GeoTrellis, an open source geographic data processing engine for high performance applications.

From the website: "GeoTrellis accelerates geoprocessing tasks by harnessing the power of multiple cores, processors, and servers through distributed geoprocessing. By breaking large or complex tasks into smaller units of work and optimizing their execution, the framework can concurrently leverage massive computational power to produce results 10-100 times faster than traditional geoprocessing software. [...] Faster is not just faster, it’s different. For example, a truly responsive user experience makes it possible to create public participation planning tools or educational games that incorporate sophisticated geospatial models."

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While we did mention Leaflet a few times in the past months, it never had it's own entry on Slashgeo, until today! Leaflet is a modern, lightweight open source JavaScript library for Interactive maps by CloudMade.

Its description: "Weighing just about 22kb of gzipped JS code, it still has all the features most developers ever need for online maps, while providing a fast, pleasant user experience. It is built from the ground up to work efficiently and smoothly on both desktop and mobile platforms like iOS and Android, taking advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 on modern browsers. The focus is on usability, performance, small size, A-grade browser support, convention over configuration and an easy-to-use API. The OOP-based code of the library is designed to be modular, extensible and very easy to understand."

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