I've finally attended the GovHack weekend. As a dad, weekends used to be for taking kids to birthday parties and soccer games. But my boys have grown up, giving me the chance to see how GovHack compares to the Open Source communities I've been involved with for decades. I wanted to see what each can learn from the other and signed up as a coach.
GovHack is an annual event where volunteers band together for 48 hours to write applications with Open Government data. Participants compete for prizes for the most innovative and useful applications. It has grown every year since it started in 2009, attracting thousands of volunteers, running in 36 locations across Australia and New Zealand, and attracted numerous sponsors and an excessive list of open government datasets. Credit must go to the organisers for creating such a sustainable winning formula. But lets ask some tough questions and hopefully help GovHack become more impactful in future?

What is the point of GovHack?

What is the point of GovHack? It wasn't obvious from looking at the main website, but I found an answer buried in the GovHack 2016 Year in Review:

In his opening address, Craig Laundy, the Assistant Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science highlighted that open data was one of the keys to the Australian Government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda. He read a letter from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull which paid the following tribute to Govhack:
“Data without ingenuity is like a lamp without power – only when the two are connected do opportunities to innovate become clear. This is why GovHack is so important.”

Recommendation 1: We should be clear about the purpose and value of GovHack. We should prominently promote messages like "GovHack aims to contribute to the government's Innovation Agenda by encouraging and facilitating ingenuity with government's open data."

Is GovHack enabling Innovation?

So how successful has GovHack been at enabling innovation? It's hard to say really. The 2016 Year in Review provides plenty of details about numbers of participants, datasets used, awards, VIP presenters, red carpet events, but there is barely a mention of how successful GovHack has been at enabling innovation. The best I could find was a passing mention of an "IP Nova App" which started in GovHack 2015. I’ve since been told about a couple of others. But the point is that we are measuring how busy everyone is, and how much buzz is being created, but completely failing to report the impact on innovation.
Recommendation 2: Let's measure and report on the realised innovation resulting from GovHack. Let's then assess results and work out ways to improve GovHack's impact on innovation.

Maturing ideas is hard work

Why is it hard to find reports of GovHack ideas progressing into sustained initiatives? I can't say for sure, but suspect very few GovHack ideas actually grow into something. The simple truth is that good software takes substantial effort to design, write, test, deploy and maintain. While a 48 hour GovHack is useful for brainstorming ideas, it stills requires significant follow up if it is to mature into something useful. And here we notice the difference between Open Source Code Sprints and GovHack. On completion of Code Sprints, there are established and experienced communities committed to adopting and advancing worthy ideas. Who in the GovHack community is offering to help take good ideas through to maturity? I don't see such support mentioned in GovHack web pages.

Recommendation 3: GovHack sponsors' should aim to realise true value by helping to mature innovative ideas into reality. 

The majority of people I saw in the Sydney GovHack appeared to be University students or recent graduates. For these young people, GovHack provides a great practical learning experience, some mentoring, and an opportunity to network. However I couldn't help feeling there was an level of exploitation of these young volunteers. Government agencies are gaining significant value from volunteers testing their datasets, something that would cost orders of magnitude more if implemented internally. Morally, I feel these agencies should give more than a free meal and a chance to share in a prize. A good symbiotic relationship would hopefully consider providing more value for our young community.

Recommendation 4: Sponsors should consider formally setting up cadetships or project development opportunities as awards.

How good is the data?

Integrating data into innovative web or mobile applications typically should follow standard design patterns, with data published through a web service, then processed, integrated, and presented in innovative ways. Ideally government agencies should make data really easy to use, setting up data web services and providing clear documentation and examples. Instead teams were spending much of their GovHack time setting up the infrastructure to publish this data rather than spending their time being innovative.
It is worth being reminded of one of The Australian Digital Transformation Agency Design Principles:

Principle 4. Do the hard work to make it simple.
Making something look simple is easy. Making something simple to use is much harder - especially when the underlying systems are complex - but that’s what we should be doing. Don’t take “It’s always been that way” for an answer. It’s usually more and harder work to make things simple, but it’s the right thing to do.

Recommendation 5: Government should define a best practices guide for publishing data services, and then follow this guide.

How does government know if they are doing a good job? Ruthless survival of the fittest principles apply to Open Source and market economies. People don't buy substandard products. Only the best Open Source projects attract communities. Again, refer to the DTA design principles:

Principle 5. Iterate. Then iterate again.The best way to build good services is to start small and iterate wildly. Release minimum viable products early and test them with actual users; move from Alpha to Beta to Live adding features, deleting things that don’t work and making refinements based on feedback. Iteration reduces risk: it makes big failures unlikely and turns small failures into lessons. If a prototype isn’t working, don’t be afraid to scrap it and start again.

Recommendation 6: Agencies should measure the usability and usefulness of their datasets, assess and adjust accordingly. GovHack provides an opportunity to measure these metrics.

How good are we are implementing Open Government?

And so I come to my most pointed point, which was recorded as a video for my GovHack contribution:

I am sitting at FOSS4G with a little smile on my face. We have just handed out the last of ten travel grants to people who would not have been able to have make the trip to Boston without our support. When you meet these people and hear a little more of their stories you know how important it is that we enable more people to experience FOSS4G.

This year we crowdfunded over $1,500 to enable us to get the 10th person on our list to Boston. Next year FOSS4G will be in Dar es Salaam, we want to enable 30, 50 or even more people to join the FOSS4G community. Let’s start raising that funding early

• If everyone at FOSS4G today gave $10 it would double our TGP funds for 2018 and if you gave a bit more …
• If all of the CEOs of our generous sponsors gave an additional 10% on top of what they have already contributed to this year’s FOSS4G the would double the funds available.

We can do this. You can make a donation right NOW, don’t say “I’ll do it when I get home”

JFDI!

So DONATE NOW (the money will go to The FOSS4G Travel Grant Programme and PayPal waive credit card charges as they are a NFP)

May the FOSS be with you

I did my keynote presentation at FOSS4G 2017 today. Here’s the PDF version of the slide deck and notes. I’ll add a link to the video when it goes online.

We just wrapped up the 3rd QGIS User Conference at the University of Copenhagen’s “Skovskolen” Forestry and Landscape College, just outside of Copenhagen. The conference programme was split into three parts:

1. A general user conference of three days
2. The a QGIS hackfest – where many developers brought their families along
3. A week of workshops where attendees can learn in-depth topics such as expressions or the new QGIS Web Client version 2

We are extremely grateful to the event sponsors (you can find links to our sponsors at the bottom of this page):

Click to view slideshow.

 

Here are some of the highlights from the conference presentations:

Search – a cool unifiedsearch tool for QGIS

Klavs Pihlkjaer (from Septima) showed off the QGIS (version 2) search plugin. The plugin provides a unified search interface for datasets loaded in QGIS. You can also search external OGC services. If you are still using QGIS 2.x releases, run, don’t walk to try the search plugin. The Search Plugin also allows you to create third party plugins (via a simple python API) that integrate with it by adding new search sources to the list. If you are using QGIS 3, check out the ability to write plugins for the new locator bar! Klavs is still looking at porting his work over to work with the upcoming QGIS 3 release.

Impact Analysis plugin

Bo Victor Thomsen showed off the plugin he has built to support searching through many layers in multiple databases and database tables in a fast an efficient way. The layers do not need to be loaded in QGIS and the system uses a centralized configuration management approach so that adding new searchable sources is done once and is then immediately available for all users (e.g. in an enterprise environment) of the plugin. The plugin is currently used when searching municipal databases to see if there is any impact assessment needed or inspection needed in a given place.

Danish National Data Search

Mie Winstrup and Tom Weber showed off the national data search plugins they have developed for Denmark that allow you to easily search for local and national data. They want to be an example for other countries to show how easy it is to make national data searchable and available.

Casper Bertelsen on registering urban green areas

Casper showed the system he has developed for managing a cadaster of green spaces. The system includes versioning so that you can see changes over time. It also implements topology rules to ensure that areas do not overlap. He also provides tools for administrations to e.g. see what the maintenance cost for a given area will be.

QGIS as a digitizing platfom

Saber Razmjooei from Lutra Consulting showed off QGIS as a digitizing platform. He also showed us new digitizing coming in QGIS 3. He showed off some of the great tools coming in QGIS 3 for node editing.

QGIS Web Client – Version 2

Andreas Neumann showed of the new generation of QGIS Web Client (QWC2). The new web client is really nice – responsive design and takes advantage of open layers 3 including rotating maps, permalink for any map view / set of layers, map tools for measure, draw, export etc.

Future plans include improved redlining tools including text, polygons, user authentication via LDAP or oauth, support QGIS ‘drag and drop’ forms, clip and ship and a QGIS plugin for the configuration so you do not need to edit JSON files. Also thinking about supporting vector tiles for the base maps.

I bet you didn’t know you could do this with QGIS

Nyall Dawson gave an awesome demo of the power and capabilities of QGIS’ labelling, symbology and expression features. His demo took us through an adventure story where each scene in the story was rendered using QGIS (based on the upcoming version 3 release). This included animated clouds floating by, lightning effects, electrical effects, smoke effects and many more cool and interesting ideas that really showed off the power and versatility of QGIS.

QGIS 3D

Martin Dobias (Lutra Consulting) gave a presentation on the QGIS grant proposal  work he has been doing to support 3D visualizations natively in QGIS 3.  His work leverages the new Qt 3D framework provided in Qt5 (the toolkit used to develop QGIS) and allows you to use an elevation model to model a 3D terrain and use a new tab in the vector style properties dock to extrude features out from the landscape. We have had a number of 3D  tools in QGIS in the paste but none has ever been a mainstream component of QGIS, enabled and ready to use ‘out of the box’. Expect Martin’s work to change that. There were many ideas passed around about how the 3D support in QGIS could be extended but the grant proposal only supports the first-pass implementation, so please do fund Martin’s work if you would like to see him add specific features in the future.

 

QIGS as a cadastral management platform

Prof. Erik Stubkjaer gave two presentations – one as a call for interest in those interested in building land parcel / cadastral management tools. He also gave an overview of the state of domain models for managing and recording property rights, including LADM (Land Administration Domain Model) and STDM (Standard Tenure Domain Model). He outlined that world aid organizations are increasingly putting an emphasis on enabling better tax revenue as a path to economic and social stability, and having a cadaster is a key element to the enablement. There are already a number of cadastral management tools out there for QGIS – it would be great to heed Prof. Stubkjaer’s clarion call and build a generic toolset for cadastral management in QGIS.

The future of coordinate reference system support in QGIS

Kristian Evers from the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency spoke about the use of Coordinate Reference Systems in QGIS and the use of WGS84. He pointed out the fact that there are 6 different versions of WGS84 and they vary by up to a meter. He also highlighted the issue that e.g. ETRS89 drifts more out of sync each year. In addition the earth is dynamic with plates shifting and different regions moving with different velocities. He showed a really nice video made in Australia highlighting the issue (see here: http://www.icsm.gov.au/gda2020/ for details and the video). They use a plate fixed datum (which moves with the plates) together with a global datum (fixed to the center of the earth). This new approach is being planned / used in other places too (e.g. Iceland) and are called “dynamic datums”.  The dynamic datums will rely on a time stamp too as well as coordinates.

To address this they are introducing the concept of transformation pipelines in Proj.4 (the library used by QGIS to support projection) – there will be a new release of Project.4 which includes support for this.

InaSAFE

Tim Sutton (your humble blog post author) gave a presentation about InaSAFE – a plugin for QGIS that helps communities prepare for disasters.

Jonas van Schrojenstein Lantern (from Nelen & Schuurmans)

Jonas’ company built really fast and efficient models for flood models including 3D visualization. They have a really nice plugin for QGIS that lets you view a pipe model and different behaviors based on changed water levels. It requires a specific data model (d3i) in the Postgres backend and then you can visualize water levels in any pipe section. The plugin also lets you do the digitizing of the pipe network etc. The software also requires the use of som 3di services that Jonas will clarify how the licensing etc. should work.

Mie Winstrup – Septima – sometimes Open Source is just plain better

Mie shared a case study about how they used Open Source to replace a tool built with ArcMap + Model Builder for flood modeling. They used malstroem  – a python command line module and also integrated with QGIS. It assumes the terrain is an impermeable surface and that water flows from one cell to another. The tool models where water will accumulate in the landscape and what the depths are at each ‘blue spot’. It also models how much water will flow from the blue spots (based on modeled precipitation amount e.g. 100mm rain). It generates an event layer which shows how many cubic meters of water will spill over to the neighboring watershed.

https://github.com/Septima/qgis-malstroem

Saber Razmjooei – Lutra consulting – Crayfish plugin

Crayfish C++ plugin for QGIS adds a new renderer for gridded data. Works with HDF, NetCDF and GRIB.

What to watch out for in QGIS 3.

Nyall Dawson (core QGIS developer) gave a talk on what to expect in QGIS 3. The talk was not a feature round up but rather aimed at those concerned about the potential gotchas they will have to take care of when they migrate from QGIS 2 to QGIS 3 in their production environments. I record

 

Monica Balestrin Nunes & Ana Paula Maciel (National Secretariat for Housing in the Ministry of Cities, Brazil)

Monica and Ann Paula presented a talk on how the Ministry of Cities in Brazil are using QGIS and mapping to manage the roll out of housing projects to support  provision of housing for the poor “My House, My Life”. The project aims to help 4.5 million people get into housing.  They used QGIS to develop a site selection process too. They used a simple process to map urban areas, developed versus undeveloped urban areas, schools. They also used public transport as a parameters to further constrain the available areas. These data were used to produce a synthesis map which shows high, medium and low suitability of areas for housing development. They used a digital coding system to classify each area (which can be mapped back to the high, medium and low assessment ratings). They also used GeoServer, GeoKettle, PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

Sophie Commelinck – University of Twente

Automated cadastral mapping using UAVs. Sophie showed workflows she is building for automatic extraction of parcel boundaries from UAV imagery. She showed some interesting work in doing boundary line detection using the SLIC algorithm which creates smoothed lines along boundaries. See http://github.com/scrommelinck/boundarylinedelineation for more details.

Kimberley Briscoe, Abingdon School, UK

Kimberley has been doing interesting things with high school kids learning GIS via QGIS. This work included using the time manager plugin to visualize global earthquakes and using r.lake.coordinates to do flood modeling. They also use ‘field trip gb’ mobile app to do field data collection. Many other plugins were used like EVIS, QGIS2Threejs. They also use interesting national datasets like crime etc. and data from http://data.gov.uk for their classroom work.

Badri Basnet – The University of Southern Queensland

Badri is a lecturer and has 90% online students in many different locations worldwide and with varying levels of internet access.  Badri has made many open content QGIS training videos and worksheets that he uses for his courses (which are based on QGIS). His videos are all on YouTube.

QField – Matthias Kuhn and Marco Bernasocchi (opengis.ch)

Matthias and Marco gave presentations on QField – an Android field data collection app based on QGIS (but with a mobile centric user interface). Matthias showed us many of the cool features QField has, whilst Marco outlined strategies for integrating field work, web publishing and desktop GIS work in a seamless workflow. I made some videos with my phone – audio and video quality is not brilliant but should be enough to follow along for those interested:

Lene Fischer (Skovskolen)

Lene (who also happens to be the event organizer – hurrah for the great job she did along with her team of volunteers!) showed how they approach teaching GIS and QGIS using ‘flipped learning’ where users first need to self study content on their own, and then use the lecturer as a consultant.

Tim Sutton – Cadasta

Your trusty author again – I presented work we have been doing to support mapping land rights of people in developing nations using the Standard Tenure Domain Model style approach where tenure is treated as a continuum rather than an absolute. You can find out more about this project at Cadasta.org

Workshops

The event was also filled with great workshops – two during the main conference, and then a week of post conference workshops. Most of the workshops were presented by developers or QGIS project members and represented a fantastic opportunity for attendees to learn straight from the experts!

Town hall meeting

At the end of the user conference, we held a town hall meeting where developers and active QGIS community members fielded a range of questions from the audience. It is always a please to hold these sessions – we get a direct channel of communication with our users and they get to speak directly to the people making the software they use and find out why we make the choices we make!

Hackfest

The “hackfest” (developer meeting – we use ‘hack’ in the positive sense of the word) was a chance for the QGIS community members to roll up their sleeves and work on new features, bug fixes, documentation and general polish of QGIS and related resources. It is always great to be able to work side by side for a few days – compared to our very geographically dispersed nature over the rest of the year. It was especially nice this event that many developers brought their families along to enjoy the beautiful scenery and great facilities at the Skovskolen. Here is a group photo taken by Mary Anne Lister:

Thanks

On behalf of the whole QGIS community, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Lene Fischer (event organizer), her team of volunteers, all the attendees who took the time to attend the conference – and of course all the developers and QGIS Community Members who attended and made it such a great event!

 

Event sponsor links:

• University of Copenhagen (Host).
• QGIS Usergroup Denmark
• Open Source Geospatial Foundation
  
• Lutra Consulting
• ArtoGIS
• COWI
• Septima
•  SunGIS
• BoundlessGeo

 

 

In this post, we use TimeManager to visualize the position of a moving object over time along a trajectory. This is another example of what is possible thanks to QGIS’ geometry generator feature. The result can look like this:

What makes this approach interesting is that the trajectory is stored in PostGIS as a LinestringM instead of storing individual trajectory points. So there is only one line feature loaded in QGIS:

(In part 2 of this series, we already saw how a geometry generator can be used to visualize speed along a trajectory.)

The layer is added to TimeManager using t_start and t_end attributes to define the trajectory’s temporal extent.

TimeManager exposes an animation_datetime() function which returns the current animation timestamp, that is, the timestamp that is also displayed in the TimeManager dock, as well as on the map (if we don’t explicitly disable this option).

Once TimeManager is set up, we can edit the line style to add a point marker to visualize the position of the moving object at the current animation timestamp. To do that, we interpolate the position along the trajectory segments. The first geometry generator expression splits the trajectory in its segments:

The second geometry generator expression interpolates the position on the segment that contains the current TimeManager animation time:

The WHEN statement compares the trajectory segment’s start and end times to the current TimeManager animation time. Afterwards, the line_interpolate_point function is used to draw the point marker at the correct position along the segment:

CASE 
WHEN (
m(end_point(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num)))
> second(age(animation_datetime(),to_datetime('1970-01-01 00:00')))
AND
m(start_point(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num)))
<= second(age(animation_datetime(),to_datetime('1970-01-01 00:00')))
)
THEN
line_interpolate_point( 
  geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num),
  1.0 * (
    second(age(animation_datetime(),to_datetime('1970-01-01 00:00')))
	- m(start_point(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num)))
  ) / (
    m(end_point(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num)))
	- m(start_point(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num)))
  ) 
  * length(geometry_n($geometry,@geometry_part_num))
)
END

Here is the animation result for a part of the trajectory between 08:00 and 09:00:

TL;DR NodeJS processes runs on a single process, which means it does not take adavantage from multi-core systems by default. If you have an 8 core CPU and run a NodeJS program via $ node app.js it will run in a single process, wasting the rest of CPUs.

Hopefully for us NodeJS offers the cluster module that contains a set of functions and properties that help us to create programs that uses all the CPUs. Not a surprise the mechanism the cluster module uses to maximize the CPU usage was via forking processes, similar to the old fork() system call Unix systems.

TL;DR NodeJS processes runs on a single process, which means it does not take adavantage from multi-core systems by default. If you have an 8 core CPU and run a NodeJS program via $ node app.js it will run in a single process, wasting the rest of CPUs.

Hopefully for us NodeJS offers the cluster module that contains a set of functions and properties that help us to create programs that uses all the CPUs. Not a surprise the mechanism the cluster module uses to maximize the CPU usage was via forking processes, similar to the old fork() system call Unix systems.

Filed under: english, gvSIG Desktop, testing Tagged: gvSIG 2.4, H2, OpenStreetMap, OSM

¿Os gustaría poder descargar directamente desde gvSIG Desktop datos de OpenStreetMap? Esto os interesa…

Como ya os comentamos el nuevo soporte a H2GIS va a permitir multiplicar el potencial de gvSIG Desktop más aún. Hoy os mostramos un claro ejemplo de ello. Una de las funciones de H2GIS permite la descarga directa de datos de OpenStreetMap. Esa sentencia la podríamos ejecutar desde la consola de H2GIS, pero por su utilidad (y para facilitar la vida a los usuarios) hemos optado por añadirla como una herramienta.

¿Qué hace? Algo tan sencillo (y útil!!!) como descargar la cartografía de OSM del encuadre que en ese momento tengamos en la Vista. Esos datos posteriormente los podremos cargar como capa en nuestro gvSIG Desktop.

También podremos importarlos directamente a nuestra base de datos H2, pero eso os lo comentaremos en otro post.

Os dejamos con un vídeo que muestra el funcionamiento de esta herramienta de descarga:

Filed under: gvSIG Desktop, spanish Tagged: descarga, H2, H2GIS, OpenStreetMap, OSM

As inscrições para as 9as Jornadas gvSIG da América Latina e do Caribe (LAC) estão abertas. As jornadas serão realizadas em Santa Maria (Rio Grande do Sul – Brasil) de 4 a 6 de outubro de 2017.

O registo é gratuito, com vagas limitados, por isso recomenda-se a fazê-lo o mais cedo possível no caso de você estiver interessado/a em participar. Para fazer isso você deve preencher o formulário disponível no site do evento.

Por outro lado, continua aberto o período para envio de propostas para comunicações, que podem ser enviadas ao seguinte endereço eletrônico: jornadas.latinoamericanas@gvsig.org. Toda as informações sobre as normas para a apresentação de comunicações podem ser consultadas no tópico comunicações. O período de submissão de resumos se encerra no dia 26 de agosto.

¡Esperamos-vos!

Filed under: community, events, portuguese, training Tagged: 9as Jornadas LAC

Ya están abiertas las inscripciones para las 9as Jornadas de Latinoamérica y Caribe de gvSIG, que se celebrarán en Santa María (Rio Grande do Sul – Brasil) del 4 al 6 de octubre de 2017.

Las inscripciones son gratuitas, con aforo limitado, por lo que se recomienda realizarla cuanto antes en caso de estar interesado/a en asistir. Para ello se debe completar el formulario disponible en la web del evento.

Por otro lado, continua abierto el periodo para el envío de propuestas para comunicaciones para las Jornadas, que pueden enviarse a la dirección de correo electrónico jornadas.latinoamericanas@gvsig.org. Toda la información sobre las normas para la presentación de comunicaciones puede consultarse en el apartado de Comunicaciones de la web. El periodo de recepción de resúmenes finalizará el próximo 26 de agosto.

¡Os esperamos!

 

Filed under: community, events, spanish, training Tagged: 9as Jornadas LAC

Version 11.0 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection has been released, ready for FOSS4G which is the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial - 2017 in Boston, USA.

Download

Download the OSGeo-Live 11.0 image at http://live.osgeo.org/en/download.html

Release Highlights

This release has been a major reboot, with a refocus on leading applications and emphasis on quality over quantity. Less mature parts of the projects have been dropped with a targeted focus placed on upgrading and improving documentation.

Вышла очередная версия “геодистрибутива” Linux – OSGeo-Live 11.0.

Основные изменения связаны с удалением программ, которые мало развиваются или не поддерживаются, и сосредоточением на крупных проектах и документации.

Более подробная информация здесь.

Dear Reader,

we are pleased to announce a new release of MapStore, our flagship Open Source webgis product, which we have called 2017.04.00. The full list of changes for this release can be found here, but the latest most interesting additions are the following.

• Support for vector layer editing (via WFS-T)
• Direct access to the data grid from the TOC
• New data grid with a better look & feel
• Advanced search moved from the TOC into a separate panel, accessible directly from the feature grid
• Legacy maps (from MapStore version 1) are identified. The author that access to a legacy map will be guided to update.
• Localization in Spanish

Support for vector layer editing

This release gives you the opportunity do edit your vector data. If you integrated the authentication system with GeoServer, you will be able to login as administrator and edit your vector data's attributes and Geometries.

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="3631,3634,3652,3643,3642"] Improved access to the vector data with a new data grid. 

Now you can browse data for vector layer in a more intuitive way. You can open the data grid directly from the TOC, without using the query panel. The new data grid has a toolbar on top to access to the main functionalities (search, editing, download...), where available. Advanced search is still accessible from the feature grid.

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="3650,3647,3646,3645"]

If you want to play with the improved feature grid we have loaded some data from Atlantis (yeah, we know where it is, just don't spread the word...) in a MapStore simplified application that you can find here. Don't worry if you mess the data, every night the original data will be restored!

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="3676,3679"] Guided update for legacy maps

The user will be notified when a map that was created with MapStore 1 needs to be updated, if he has the right permissions to do that. Clicking on Update button the update will be performed automatically.

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="3661,3660"] Future Work

The work for the next releases will be focused on TOC & Catalog style review plus code hardening. Take a look on the Proposal or the interactive mockup (both still in progress) for an early preview.

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with open source products like GeoServer, Mapstore, GeoNode and GeoNetwork through our Enterprise Support Services and GeoServer Deployment Warranty offerings, feel free to contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,

If you've been playing with mapguide-react-layout, you'll no doubt have noticed a glaring omission in the ported Quick Plot component.

The interactive map capture box.


Porting across the capture box sounded mostly simple:

• Manage the temporary OL vector layer containing the capture box.
• Attach an OL translate interaction so the capture box feature can be easily moved around by dragging the box around.
• Auto-update box geometry based on change in paper size / orientation / scale

Because I was asked.

We can't wait to see all the other goodies on your list! #foss4g https://t.co/RkNhQR3wkW

— FOSS4G 2017 (@foss4g) August 8, 2017

Here’s my 2017 FOSS4G list:

• Why We Code, the opening keynote, delivered by me. The least I can do is show up.
• Building the Capital Planning Platform: Leveraging Open Source Software to build data and mapping tools in Local Government, because I like tales about open source navigating the pitfalls of the public sector IT world, and because the presenter was a co-worker with me at Carto who I enjoyed a great deal.
• Protobuf based output formats for PostGIS, because these are new in PostGIS 2.4 and I haven’t read the commits, might as well get some info straight from the horse’s mouth.
• FOSS4G from the Trenches, because the belly of the GIS beast is the local government market, hearing how a practitioner has cracked that most uncrackable and conservative of audiences is very interesting.
• End-to-End Geo Machine Learning, because buzzwords! And because I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
• A Journey through R for Geo, because R and statistics are “AI for the rest of us”, and I don’t know enough (anything) about spatial statistics.
• Best Practice for Serving Imagery using MapServer on Amazon Web Services, because S3/AWS is an under-appreciated solution for the “hosting a bunch of files as a tile service” problem, and the AWS solution gets better every year.
• Two laptops and a bag of thumb drives: knitting together a global community using FOSS4G, because I’ve gotten too far away from the on-the-ground aspect of how real users approach FOSS4G software. Too much time with the coder set gives one a skewed outlook.
• Trillions of points - spatial indexing, organization, and exploitation of massive point clouds, because I know pgpointcloud isn’t the answer, and I think something like this is.
• Accelerating geospatial analytics using Apache Spark, because buzzwords! And someone is promising to do actual spatial joins in a big data tool – bring it on!
• Free Software: Freedom, Privacy, Sovereignty, because Stallman.
• Processing Imagery from the World’s Largest Private Fleet of Satellites, because the Planet image processing chain is a wonder of the world, and I want to know more, more, more.
• CARTO’s spatial analytics extension, an update, because embarrassingly I don’t know much about the non-PostGIS analytics we expose in CARTO, and I want to hear Andy talk.
• Big Weather Data, all about partitions and precipitation, because weather was doing “big data” before it was a buzzword, using nothing but perl and cunning, I want to see what they are up to now.
• Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering, because even though the answer to gerrymandering is electoral reform, not redistricting, I retain an interest in how the “redistricting can be fixed” folks are attacking the impossible problem.

One week and I’ll be in Boston, looking forward to it!

The registration period for the 13th International gvSIG Conference is now open. The conference has been moved earlier this year, and it will be held from October 18th to 20th in Valencia (Spain).

Registrations are free of cost (limited capacity) and must be done through the application form on the Conference web page.

The conference program and all the information about registration for the workshops that are planned, and about the conference rooms will be available at the event website soon.

We also remind you that we have extended the deadline for submitting communication proposals. The extended deadline is September 7th. You can find all the information about communication sending in the event website.

We expect your participation!

Filed under: community, english, events, training Tagged: 13th gvSIG Conference

Ya está abierto el periodo de inscripción de las 13as Jornadas Internacionales gvSIG, que tendrán lugar este año en octubre, concretamente del 18 al 20, en Valencia (España).

La inscripción es totalmente gratuita (con aforo limitado) y se ha de realizar a través del formulario existente en la página web de las Jornadas.

Más adelante se publicará el programa con todas las ponencias y los talleres previstos, con toda la información sobre cómo inscribirse en ellos.

Por otro lado, os recordamos que se ha ampliado el plazo de envío de resúmenes, siendo la nueva fecha límite el 7 de septiembre. Las normas para el envío de comunicaciones podéis encontrarlas en la propia web.

¡Esperamos vuestra participación!

Filed under: community, events, spanish, training Tagged: 13as Jornadas gvSIG

Caros leitores,

Quero convidá-los a participarem do Curso Online de GeoServer que estarei ministrando pela GEOCURSOS. O objetivo do curso é que você aprenda a disponibilizar, compartilhar e editar dados geográficos na internet com o GeoServer.

No curso serão abordados tópicos como: configuração de dados, criação de estilo com SLD, padrões OGC, interface administrativa (web), visualização cartográfica com OpenLayers, REST API, Segurança, entre outros.

O curso ocorrerá entre os dias 19 e 28 de setembro(terças, quartas e quintas) das 20:00 as 22:00 (horário de Brasília).

Aqueles que poderem divulgar para seus contatos, agradeço. Quem quiser saber mais informações sobre o curso, pode obtê-las no site do curso (http://www.geocursos.com.br/geoserver), twitter (http://twitter.com/geo_cursos) e pelo facebook (http://www.facebook.com/geocursosbr).

At the next version of your favourite GIS we have added a pair of options at the “Help” menu that will be used a lot. Sometimes the simplest things are the most useful ones. They allow to access to all the contents of the gvSIG Desktop user manual as well as to search the appropriate documentation for a concrete query.

Simple, easy and extremely useful.

Filed under: english, gvSIG Desktop, testing Tagged: documentation, manual

GeoSolutions will be present with its own booth therefore we will be happy to talk to you about our open source products, like GeoServer, Mapstore, GeoNode and GeoNetwork, as well as about our Enterprise Support Services and GeoServer Deployment Warranty offerings.

We are going to hold a workshop on GeoServer for INSPIRE as well as a few presentations as follows:

• Publishing INSPIRE services with GeoServer and HALE (Workshop), Monday, September 4, 2017 - 9:00, Room f
• Building Interoperable SDI with GeoServer, Mapstore and GeoNetwork: experiences from the trenches, Friday, September 8, 2017, 14:45, Room Amsterdam

There will also be a short corporate presentation for which the exact date and time is yet to publish; we will update this post once we have precise information.

Our director Simone Giannecchini will also participate in the workshop:

• GeoICT SMEs as key-players in the INSPIRE driven innovation: the role of the smeSpire network, Tuesday, September 5, 2017 - 9:00, Romm A

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with our Open Source products and professional services, make sure to visit us at our booth

The GeoSolutions team,

Filed under: community, english, gvSIG Desktop, technical collaborations Tagged: Mac, Mac OS X, macOS, Sierra

Como sabéis gvSIG Desktop dispone de versiones portables para macOS, Windows y Linux. La portable se publicó para macOS Mavericks y se han detectado una serie de problemas que impedían el uso en macOS Sierra.

Con el objetivo de darle mayor difusión, nos hacemos eco de la información publicada en el blog sobre gvSIG y Mac para solucionar estos problemas y poder utilizar vuestro SIG favorito en macOS Sierra:

Hay un problema con otra biblioteca, esta vez libc ++.1.dylib pero después de deshacerse de ella, las cosas parecen estar funcionando.

Mi configuración actual, como la de cualquier otro Mac ejecutando Sierra creo, tiene libc ++. 1.dylib en / usr / lib, por lo que no hay necesidad de tener la misma librería dentro de gvSIG.

He preparado una aplicación de doble clic que funcionará si gvSIG-desktop-2.3.1-2501-final-darwin_macos_10.11-x86_64 se encuentra en la carpeta Aplicaciones.

Así que paso a paso:

1. Descargar gvsig 2.3.1 para mac
2. Arrástralo a la carpeta de aplicaciones
3. Abre un terminal (la aplicación está en Utilidades)
4. Teclea ‘mv /Applications/gvSIG-desktop-2.3.1-2501-final-darwin_macos_10.11-x86_64.app/gvSIG/extensiones/org.gvsig.gdal.app.mainplugin/gdal/libc++.1.dylib /Applications/gvSIG-desktop-2.3.1-2501-final-darwin_macos_10.11-x86_64.app/gvSIG/extensiones/org.gvsig.gdal.app.mainplugin/gdal/libc ++.1.dylib.old’, sin comillas.
5. Descarga la aplicación de doble clic
6. Haga doble clic
7. Disfruta

Todo esto funciona solo si no cambias el nombre de la aplicación y la pones en la carpeta de aplicaciones

Nos despedimos agradeciendo a Agustín Díez el trabajo realizado para que los usuarios de gvSIG pueden disfrutar también de él en macOS Sierra.

Filed under: gvSIG Desktop, spanish Tagged: Mac, Mac OS X, macOS, OS X, portable, Sierra

Картографирование транспортной доступности на основе данных о дорожной сети – одна из классических задач ГИС. Наиболее распространенным способом моделирования транспортной доступности является построение изохрон – линий равных затрат времени на преодоление пространства относительно заданных точек. В представленной статье обсуждается алгоритм построения изохрон по данным OpenStreetMap с использованием открытых ГИС GRASS GIS и QGIS.

Прочитать | Обсудить

En la próxima versión de vuestro SIG favorito hemos añadido un par de opciones en el menú “Ayuda” que seguro que van a ser muy utilizadas. A veces las cosas más sencillas pueden ser las más útiles. Permiten por un lado acceder a todos los contenidos del manual de usuario de gvSIG Desktop y por otro buscar la documentación adecuada a una determinada consulta.

Simple, sencillo y extremadamente útil.

Filed under: gvSIG Desktop, spanish Tagged: ayuda, gvSIG-2.4

The PostGIS development team is pleased to announce the release of PostGIS 2.4.0alpha. This is the first version to support PostgreSQL 10. Best served with PostgreSQL 10beta2. See the full list of changes in the news file.

• Source Download
• html doc download (this version includes Japanese translation postgis-ja.html)
• pdf doc download
• epub doc download
• ChangeLog

Continue Reading by clicking title hyperlink ..

I recently decided to move this blog from octopress, hosted on a commercial site, to hugo, hosted on gitlab pages. Why? I don’t care that Octopress hasn’t been updated for a while but I do care that I didn’t understand what it was doing- I’m not a Ruby/Jekyll/Whatever person. I never took the time to understand how it worked under the hood, my bad. I wasn’t using 99% of the facilities offered with the commercial host.

Enjoyed attending FOSS4G Europe, great chance to catch up with the OSGeo board for a productive face to face meeting and appreciate the vibrant community in Europe first-hand.

Thanks to the organizers for a great event. I really appreciated the chance to promote open source and share the work being done for the new OSGeo website:

There were many thoughtful talks, Ivan providing wisdom on Love, to an exhubrent Jeff McKenna speaking on the foss4g family.

I had three highlights to share:

• Catching up with Marc Vloemans and seeing the community enjoying the new branding that everyone has worked so hard on.
• The code sprint where the enthusiasm was brought into action: with Nicolas Roelandt stepping in to help on content collection forms when I was getting overwhelmed, along with Astrid, Luca, Venka taking on review of the printed materials.
• Having a chance to work through design decisions with Andrea and outline the relationship between JAI-EXT project and the Raster Processing Engine. 

Thanks to Boundless for giving me an opportunity attend and speak at this community event.

Este webinar vai abordar assuntos como análise da utilização de serviços geoespaciais padrão OGC (WMS, WFS, WMTS), como economizar tempo e dinheiro em seus processos que usam dados espaciais, automatizar de tarefas de rotina, comprovando o retorno do investimento em sua infraestrutura de dados espacias e ao mesmo tempo fornecer serviços altamente confiáveis.

Você verá com é importante conhecer o número de solicitações que os serviços podem lidar em um ambiente em constante crescimento e evolução e desta forma, garantir que a capacidade do serviço seja suficiente para atender às necessidades futuras.

Nossos clientes sabem o desempenho e quem está usando seus serviços espaciais, e você? Venha descobrir como nesse webinar que ocorrerá no dia 17/08 as 11:00h (horário de Brasília).

Link para se registrar no webinar: http://bit.ly/2vsYRIA

The deadline for submitting communication proposals for 13th International gvSIG Conference has been extended because of the public holidays in several countries. The new deadline is September 7^th.

The 13th International gvSIG Conference will take place at School of Engineering in Geodesy, Cartography and Surveying (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) from October 18th to 20th.

We encourage you to participate, not only as participant but also presenting your projects about gvSIG. You can find all the information about how to send them in the event website.

In September we will inform you about the workshops of the conference at the gvSIG Blog.

We expect your participation!

Filed under: english, events Tagged: 13th gvSIG Conference

Se ha ampliado el plazo de envío de resúmenes para las 13as Jornadas Internacionales gvSIG, que con motivo del periodo vacacional en algunos países se prolonga un mes, siendo la nueva fecha límite el día 7 de septiembre.

Las jornadas se celebrarán del 18 al 20 de octubre en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica (Universitat Politècnica de València, España).

Os animamos a participar no solo como asistentes, sino como ponentes, presentando vuestros trabajos realizados sobre gvSIG. Toda la información sobre el envío de comunicaciones podéis encontrarla en la web del evento.

Durante el mes de septiembre se irá publicando toda la información sobre los talleres que tendrán lugar en las jornadas en el blog de gvSIG.

¡Os esperamos!

 

Filed under: events, spanish, training Tagged: 13as Jornadas gvSIG

The next gvSIG Desktop version has a lot of novelties related to databases, but the most interesting that increases the existing tools is the H2GIS support, the H2 spatial engine.

H2 is a light Java database, very easy to use, that is included in gvSIG Desktop directly, so any installation is required.

Just as Spatialite it’s based on files, so distributing an H2 database is as much easy as sharing a concrete file.

One of the main advantages is to access to the own H2 administration tools from gvSIG Desktop, so we can perform any of the H2 operations allowed by H2GIS.

Something as much easy as creating an spatial index on an H2 table (or linked tables) multiplies its performance considerably.

Besides we can work from the H2 administration tool, not only with H2 tables but with any layer (for example a shapefile) that we have linked with the database.

Here you have a video where we export a shapefile to an H2 database, and we perform some easy spatial operations later (selection of elements by attribute and creation of a new layer), and finally linking a shapefile with the database. Besides we show you the H2GIS website where you can see examples of SQL queries for any type of spatial operations.

You have a new world of possibilities to discover in gvSIG Desktop!

Filed under: english, gvSIG Desktop, testing Tagged: geodb, gvSIG-2.4, H2, H2GIS

La próxima versión de gvSIG Desktop viene cargada de novedades relacionadas con bases de datos, pero de todas ellas quizá la que abre más posibilidades es el soporte de H2GIS, el motor espacial de H2.

H2 es una base de datos Java ligera, muy fácil de usar y que en nuestro caso va directamente incluida en gvSIG Desktop, por lo que no requiere ninguna instalación.

Al igual que ocurre con Spatialite se basa en ficheros, por lo que distribuir una base de datos de H2 es tan sencillo como compartir un determinado fichero.

Entre sus ventajas se encuentra el acceso a las propias herramientas de administración de H2 desde gvSIG Desktop, con lo que utilizando el lenguaje SQL podemos realizar cualquier operación de las muchas que permite H2GIS.

Algo tan sencillo como crear un índice espacial sobre una tabla de H2 (o capas enlazadas) multiplica considerablemente su rendimiento.

Además podemos trabajar desde la herramienta de administración de H2 no sólo con tablas de H2 sino con cualquier capa (por ejemplo un shape) que hayamos enlazado con la base de datos.

Os dejamos con un vídeo en el que exportamos un shape a una base de datos H2GIS, para posteriormente realizar unas sencillas operaciones espaciales (selección de elementos por un atributo y creación de una capa nueva), y por último enlazar un shapefile con la base de datos. Además os mostramos la web de H2GIS donde podéis ver ejemplos de sentencias de SQL para todo tipo de operaciones espaciales.

¡Ya tenéis todo un nuevo mundo de posibilidades para descubrir con gvSIG Desktop!

Filed under: gvSIG Desktop, spanish Tagged: geodb, gvSIG-2.4, H2, H2GIS

Reminder: Right after the Free and Open Source GIS conference in Boston is the OSGeo / LocationTech code sprint on Saturday August 19th 9AM-5PM at District Hall where project members from various Open Source Geospatial projects will be fleshing out ideas, documenting, coding, and introducing new folks to open source development. All are welcome including those who are unable to make the conference.

We are getting a final head-count this week to plan for food arrangements. If you are planning to attend, add your name to the list https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2017_Code_Sprint#Registered_Attendees. If you are unable to add your name to the list, feel free to send Regina an email at lr@pcorp.us with your name and projects you are interested in so I can add you to the list. Looking forward to hanging out with folks interested in PostgreSQL and PostGIS development.

District Hall is a gorgeous community space. Check out the District Hall View http://bit.ly/2f61J8c

This is a quick release to make the awesome new layer transparency sliders in the previous release not break down when used on a map that doesn't actually have external base layers (OSM, Bing, etc)

Project Home Page
Download
mapguide-react-layout on npm

In this post you can find a link compilation of “Learn GIS for free” course. A complete course to map your data with open source GIS: explore GIS tools, learn concepts and terminology of spatial analysis, learn how to analyze data, symbolize data and make your own maps, how to work with projections, vectorial and raster data, etc.

The course is recommended to everyone who hasn’t worked on GIS and want to introduce to this type of technologies, as well as users that have knowledge about it already and want to increase it.

The course is made on gvSIG 2.1 version, and currently the last version is gvSIG 2.3.1 (we are working on the new 2.4 version already). We recommend you to use the last version published because it will have all the functionalities of the previous versions… and several improvements too.

gvSIG Desktop is completely free to download, use and share.

It’s usual to have doubts when you follow the course. If you want to solve them you can use the users mailing list, available at this link: http://www.gvsig.com/en/community/mailing-lists

To follow the course you need:

• gvSIG Desktop, that you can download here: http://www.gvsig.com/en/products/gvsig-desktop/downloads
• Data used in the “vectorial GIS” exercises, available from http://downloads.gvsig.org/download/documents/learning/gvsig-courses/cartography/Learn_GIS_Data.zip
• Data used in the “raster GIS” exercises, available from: http://downloads.gvsig.org/download/documents/learning/gvsig-courses/cartography/Raster_data.zip

Link compilation:

• Module 1: Introduction to GIS
• Module 2: Working with Views
• Module 3: Working with Tables
• Module 4: Working with Maps
• Module 5: Creating and Editing vectorial layers
• Module 6: Geoprocessing
• Module 7: Raster GIS. Working with Raster Data
• Module 8: Vegetation index and unsupervised classification
• Module 9: Raster reclassification and raster calculator
• Module 10: Digital Elevation Model analysis
• Extra Module: GPS and mobile GIS

Filed under: english, Geopaparazzi, gvSIG Desktop, training Tagged: course, free, gis, open source, tutorial, video

Filed under: english, gvSIG Desktop, testing Tagged: gvSIG 2.4, toolbars, usability