Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan Receives Sol Katz Award

Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan was honored today with the 2012 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the inaugural session of the FOSS4G-India 2012 conference in Hyderabad, India. The award was presented by Ravi Kumar and Vundavallu Aruna Kumar, Member of Parliament. Venka received a memento on behalf of the OSGeo-India Chapter. Venka’s dedication to FOSS4G and his community work around the world, promoting open source geospatial, is second to none. He has been involved in OSGeo since the foundation was formed in 2006, and we are lucky to have such a strong global voice in him. The OSGeo foundation wishes to thank Venka for his wonderful dedication.

Background

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software is awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm. The hope is that the award will both acknowledge the work of community members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for years to come.

Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities. In the early 80’s, Sol assisted in the development of a public domain GIS package called MOSS (Map Overlay and Statistical System). This software was arguably the first open source GIS software in the world. Sol would later go on to release and maintain PC MOSS. He was also one of the first involved in public data translator utilities. Utilities that he developed for converting DEMs and reading SDTS files were contributed back to the geospatial community, and are still available today. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large. Sol Katz’s collection of GIS utilities at the BLM is still available at ftp://ftp.blm.gov/pub/gis/. Sadly, after fighting Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for almost a decade, Sol died April 23, 1999 in bed. His legacy will always live on in the GFOSS world.

Recipients

2012: Venkatesh Raghavan
2011: Martin Davis
2010: Helena Mitasova
2009: Daniel Morissette
2008: Paul Ramsey
2007: Steve Lime
2006: Markus Neteler
2005: Frank Warmerdam

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Nice new winGRASS 7 with R-integration

In winGRASS 7 (download standalone installer) the Windows batchfiles for use with R (https://code.google.com/p/batchfiles/) are now integrated for a smooth GRASS-R-coupling in MS-Windows. For the usage see here:
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/R_statistics#Usage_III

Note that this integration is available for Linux users for a long time, however, finally also the winGRASS user can enjoy this integration!

Thanks to Helmut Kudrnovsky from the GRASS GIS team and to the Windows batchfiles for use with R team.

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Big bug bashing for GRASS 6!

In order to prepare the upcoming GRASS GIS 6.4.3 release, a major bugtracker cleanup has been done for GRASS 6 over the past few days. More than open 370 trac tickets (back to GRASS 6.4.0) were revisited, updated or closed: the GRASS GIS bugsquashing team submitted over 140 code changes, and subsequently 88 tickets could be closed in these few days. The few remaining critical tickets are being worked on, leading to a new stable GRASS GIS 6.4.3 release to be expected soon.

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New OSGeo charter members!

A big WELCOME to the new  OSGeo charter members!

  • Barend Kobben           Netherlands
  • Angelos Tzotsos         Greece
  • Anita Graser               Austria
  • Victor Olaya                Spain
  • Pedro-Juan Ferrer       Spain
  • Andrea Aimee             Italy
  • Jean-Roc Morreale      France
  • Serena Coetzee          South Africa
  • Michael Smith            USA
  • Karel Charvat             Czech Republic
  • Jan Jezek                    Czech Republic
  • Vasile Craciunescu     Romania
  • Thomas Bonfort          France
  • Mauricio Miranda       Argentina
  • Peter Löwe                  Germany
  • Massimiliano Cannata    Italy
  • P.K.Sinha                     India
  • Brian Hamlin               USA
  • Ragi Yaser Burhum     Peru
  • Dimitris Kotzinos       Greece
  • César Medina             Chile
  • Doug Newcomb          USA

Great to see the improving global coverage…

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GRASS GIS Community Sprint 2012 – 23-28 May 2012, Prague, Czech Republic

The next “GRASS GIS Community Sprint” will take place from May 23 to May 28, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic directly following the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2012 conference.

This GRASS Community Sprint is a great occasion for you to support the development by actively contributing to the source code, manuals or likewise. It is a get together for GRASS project members and supporters to make decisions and tackle larger problems. For this meeting, we welcome people committed to improving the GRASS GIS project. This includes developers, documenters, bug reporters, translators and others.

Timing and Duration:

May 23, 2012 (day of arrival) – May 28, 2012 (day of departure)

Venue:

Department of Mapping and Cartography Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague

For more detailed information, please visit
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2012

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GRASS GIS 6.4.2 released

GRASS GIS 6.4.2 released
19 February 2012
https://grass.osgeo.org

We are pleased to announce the release of a new stable version of GRASS GIS. This release fixes bugs discovered in version 6.4.1 of the program and adds a number of new features. This release includes over 760 updates to the source code since 6.4.1. As a stable release series, the 6.4 line will enjoy long-term support and incremental enhancements while preserving backwards-compatibility with the entire GRASS 6 line.

The new wxPython graphical user interface (wxGUI) has been updated with many new features and tools. Python is now a fully supported scripting language, including an updated Python toolkit to simplify the authoring of personal scripts, support for NumPy based array calculations, and a Python application interface for the GRASS C libraries. Additionally, MS-Windows support continues to mature.  GRASS 6.4.2 debuts ten new modules, a new GUI cartographic composer tool, a new GUI object-oriented modeling environment, and improved infrastructure for installing community supplied add-on modules.

Read the full story at
https://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass642.html

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) and geospatial analysis toolkit. For nearly three decades, GRASS has provided powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines in a single integrated software suite. GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling of raster and vector data, visualization, the management and analysis of geospatial information, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and publication-quality hardcopy maps. GRASS has now been translated into twenty languages and supports an extensive array of data formats. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the academic and professional worlds in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis. Its code and spatial processing algorithms are open and transparent, and the software is distributed free of charge. The source code is also freely available, allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, the addition of new features, and faster identification and patching of bugs.

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50.000th commit to GRASS GIS SVN!

The 50.000th svn commit comes from Martin Landa!

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 2:07 PM, <svn_grass@osgeo.org> wrote:
> Author: martinl
> Date: 2011-12-31 05:07:24 -0800 (Sat, 31 Dec 2011)
> New Revision: 50000
>
> Modified:
>   grass/trunk/gui/wxpython/dbmgr/manager.py

… congratulations and
Happy New Year!

Markus

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New data set: Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010

USGS has published a new nice data set called the “Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010” (GMTED2010). It is offered at three different resolutions (approximately 1,000, 500, and 250 meters).

Example (MEA = mean dataset) Trento – Garda Lake – Verona area (Northern Italy):

The 250m product looks quite smooth -a nice new DEM product…

Data download: https://eros.usgs.gov/#/Find_Data/Products_and_Data_Available/GMTED2010

GRASS GIS processing steps: see here

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Video: GRASS GIS development visualization from 1999 to 2011

Watch how the community based GRASS GIS software development works! You can see how the individual contributors modify and expand the source code.

GRASS GIS 6.4 development visualization from 1999 to 2011 with Gource

The corresponding timeline is available at https://grass.osgeo.org/devel/grasshist.html

Download the high resolution version from https://grass.fsv.cvut.cz/video/

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Cool Science 2.0 Web tools

Working in research or likewise? The ongoing Web evolution is bringing us new tools to reduce annoying work to minimum. Enjoy our link collection for saving quite some time when having to exchange documents, information or draft new documents quickly together from scratch…

Topics covered:

  • Tired of sending proposal or article drafts per email?
  • Writing proposals or tutorials online together (1): set up a Wiki
  • Doh – cannot I combine both and have a Wiki in my Dropbox public folder?
  • Writing proposals or tutorials online together (2): Realtime editing
  • Unable to remember these strange Etherpad/Titanpad links?
  • How to send large attachments without killing your partner’s inbox?
  • Need for phone conference but no headset available or desired?
  • Need to schedule meetings in different timezones?
  • Some bibliography to manage?
  • Got the document only as PDF but need Word/OpenOffice editable text version?
  • Cool Firefox browser addons for the scientific production and travelling researchers
  • Using PostgreSQL database and want to connect OpenOffice Base to it?
  • Need coordinates of addresses?

Enjoy at https://gis.cri.fmach.it/cool-science-2-0-tools/

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