Call for Participation for FOSDEM 2021 geospatial devroom
Submission Deadline: 26.12.2020
FOSDEM is the largest free and open source developers meeting in Europe, with 8000+ participants. It normally takes place in Brussels (Belgium).
FOSDEM 2021 will be an online event. We will have a geospatial devroom again. The geospatial devroom will be on Saturday, 6 February 2021. In 2021 it will be our opportunity to bring our global community to FOSDEM.
The geospatial devroom is the place to talk about the state of the art of open, geo-related data, free and open source geospatial software and its ecosystem. This includes standards and tools, e.g. spatial databases, online mapping tools, geospatial services, used for collecting, storing, delivering, analysing, and visualizing geodata.
We are looking for you to be part of the geospatial devroom. The geospatial devroom aims to host talks about geospatial topics, GIS, and geodata projects, standards and open data.
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2020-12-23 18:29:102023-10-22 18:59:03OSGeo at FOSDEM 2021 (Online) – Call for Participation for the geospatial devroom
GRASS GIS is an open source geoinformation system which is developed by a globally distributed team of developers. Besides the source code developers also message translators, people who write documentation, those who report bugs and wishes and more are involved.
Early days… from pre-Internet to CVS and SVN
While GRASS GIS is under development since 1982 (no typo!) it has been put into a centralized source code management system in December 1999. Why so late? Because the World Wide Web (WWW) became available in the 1990s along with tools like browsers and such, followed by the development of distributed source code management tools. We moved on 29th Dec 1999 (think Y2K bug) the entire code into our instance of CVS (Concurrent Versioning System). With OSGeo being founded in 2006, we migrated the CVS repository to SVN (Subversion for the source code management) and trac (bug and wish tracker) on 8 Dec 2007. See here for historic details on our various bug trackers.
Time to move on: git
Now, after more than 10 years using SVN/trac time had come to move on and join the large group of projects managing their source code in git (see also our related Wiki page on migration). Git comes with numerous advantages, yet we needed to decide which hosting platform to use. Options where github.com, gitlab.com, gitlab or gitea on OSGeo infrastructure, or other platforms. Through a survey we found out that the preference among contributors is GitHub. While not being open source itself it offers several advantages: it is widely known (good to get new developers interested and involved), numerous OSGeo projects are hosted there under the GitHub “OSGeo organization“.
If all fails (say, one day GitHub no longer being a reasonable choice) the import of our project from GitHub to GitLab is always possible. Indeed, we meanwhile mirror our code on OSGeo’s gitea server.
file timestamps (which I tried to preserve for decades :-) have been used to reconstruct the source code history (e.g., releasebranch_3_2)
junk files removed (plenty of leftover old binary files, files consisting of a special char only etc)
having this grass-legacy repo available in parallel to the main grass repo which contains the recent source code we have a continuous source code coverage from 1987 to today in git.
size is about 250MB
What’s missing
the 4.3 source code doesn’t have distinct timestamps. Someone must have once packaged without mtime preservation… a pity. Perhaps a volunteer may fix that by carrying over the timestamps from GRASS GIS 4.2 in case the md5sum of a file is identical (or so).
Trac issue migration
A series of links had to be updated. Martin Landa invested days and days on that (thanks!!). He used the related GDAL efforts as a basis (Even Rouault: thanks!). As the date for the trac migration we selected 2007-12-09 (r25479) as it was the first SVN commit (after the years in CVS). The migration of trac bugs to github (i.e. transfer of trac ticket content) required several steps:
Link updates in the ticket texts:
links to other tickets (now to be pointed to full trac URL). Note that there were many styles of referring in the commit log message which had to be parsed accordingly
links to trac wiki (now to be pointed to full trac URL)
links source code in SVN (now to be pointed to full trac URL)
images and attachments (now to be pointed to full trac URL)
Transferring:
“operating system” trac label into the github issue text itself (following the new issue reporting template)
converting milestones/tickets/comments/labels
converting trac usernames to Github usernames
setting assignees if possible, set new “grass-svn2git” an assignee otherwise
slowing down transfer to match the 60 requests per second API limit rate at github
Fun with user name mapping
Given GRASS GIS’ history of 35+ years we had to invest major effort in identifying and mapping user names throughout the decades (see also bug tracker history). The following circumstances could be identified:
user present in CVS but not in SVN
user present in SVN but not in CVS
user present in both with identical name
user present in both with different name (well, in our initial CVS days in 1999 we often naivly picked our surnames like “martin”, “helena”, “markus”, “michael” … cute yet no scaling very much over the years!) as some were changed in the CVS to SVN migration in 2007, leading to
colliding user names
some users already having a github account (with mostly different name again)
We came up with several lookup tables, aiming at catching all variants. Just a “few” hours to dig in old source code files and in emails for finding all the missing email addresses…
Labels for issues
We cleaned up the trac component of the bug reports, coming up with the following categories which have to be visually grouped by color since the label list is just sorted alphabetically in github/gitlab:
Issue category:
bug
enhancement
Issue solution (other than fixing and closing it normally):
In order to avoid users being flooded by emails due to the parsing of user contributions which normally triggers an email from github) we reached out to GitHub support in order to temporarily disable these notifications until all source code and selected issues were migrated.
The issue conversion rate was 4 min per trac bug to be converted and uploaded to github. Fairly slow but likely due to the API rate limit imposed and the fact that the migration script above generates a lot of API requests rather than combined ones..
Note to future projects to be migrated: use the new gihub import API (unfortunately we got to know about its existence too late in our migration process).
Here out timings which occurred during the GRASS GIS project migration from SVN to github:
grass repo: XX hours (all GRASS GIS 7.x code)
grass-legacy repo: XX hours (all GRASS GIS 3.x-6.x code)
NNN issues: XX hours – forthcoming.
New issue reporting template
In order to guide the user when reporting new issues, we will develop a small template – forthcoming.
Email notifications: issues to grass-dev and commits to grass-commit
We changed the settings from SVN post-hook to Github commit notifications and they flow in smoothly into the grass-commit mailing list. Join it to follow the development.
Overall, after now several months of using our new workflow we can state that things work fine.
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2019-12-01 12:03:542023-10-22 18:58:58Remarks on SVN-trac to GitHub migration
We are pleased to announce the GRASS GIS 7.4.2 release
What’s new in a nutshell
After a bit more than four months of development the new update release GRASS GIS 7.4.2 is available. It provides more than 50 stability fixes and improvements compared to the previous stable version 7.4.1. An overview of the new features in the 7.4 release series is available at New Features in GRASS GIS 7.4.
Efforts have concentrated on making the user experience even better, providing many small, but useful additional functionalities to modules and further improving the graphical user interface. Segmentation now support extremely large raster maps. Dockerfile and Windows support received updates. Also the manual was improved. For a detailed overview, see the list of new features. As a stable release series, 7.4.x enjoys long-term support.
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
Today marks 35 years of GRASS GIS development – with frequent releases the project keeps pushing the limits in terms of geospatial data processing quality and performance.
GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) software suite used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics and map production, spatial modeling, and 3D visualization. Since the major GRASS GIS 7 version, it also comes with a feature rich engine for space-time cubes useful for time series processing of Landsat and Copernicus Sentinel satellite data and more. GRASS GIS can be either used as a desktop application or as a backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R. Furthermore, it is frequently used on HPC and cloud infrastructures for massive parallelized data processing.
Brief history
In 1982, under the direction of Bill Goran at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), two GIS development efforts were undertaken. First, Lloyd Van Warren, a University of Illinois engineering student, began development on a new computer program that allowed analysis of mapped data. Second, Jim Westervelt (CERL) developed a GIS package called “LAGRID – the Landscape Architecture Gridcell analysis system” as his master’s thesis. Thirty five years ago, on 29 July 1983, the user manual for this new system titled “GIS Version 1 Reference Manual” was first published by J. Westervelt and M. O’Shea. With the technical guidance of Michael Shapiro (CERL), the software continued its development at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Illinois; and after further expansion version 1.0 was released in 1985 under the name Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS). The GRASS GIS community was established the same year with the first annual user meeting and the launch of GRASSnet, one of the internet’s early mailing lists. The user community expanded to a larger audience in 1991 with the “Grasshopper” mailing list and the introduction of the World Wide Web. The users’ and programmers’ mailing lists archives for these early years are still available online.
In the mid 1990s the development transferred from USA/CERL to The Open GRASS Consortium (a group who would later generalize to become today’s Open Geospatial Consortium — the OGC). The project coordination eventually shifted to the international development team made up of governmental and academic researchers and university scientists. Reflecting this shift to a project run by the users, for the users, in 1999 GRASS GIS was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). A detailed history of GRASS GIS can be found at https://grass.osgeo.org/history/.
Where to next?
The development on GRASS GIS continues with more energy and interest than ever. Parallel to the long-term maintenance of the GRASS 7.4 stable series, effort is well underway on the new upcoming cutting-edge 7.6 release, which will bring many new features, enhancements, and cleanups. As in the past, the GRASS GIS community is open to any contribution, be it in the form of programming, documentation, testing, and financial sponsorship. Please contact us!
About GRASS GIS
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2018-07-29 19:16:022024-11-18 13:37:04Celebrating 35 years of GRASS GIS!
In order to simplify the installation of the latest PDAL release (Point Data Abstraction Library, https://www.pdal.io/, version 1.6.0) on Fedora, I have created an updated set of RPM packages now including vertical datums and grids (.gtx files from here).
The installation is as simple as this (the repository is located at Fedora’s COPR):
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2017-11-03 11:39:462023-10-22 18:58:47PDAL 1.6.0 packaged for Fedora including vertical datums and grids
After three months of development the new update release GRASS GIS 7.2.2 is available. It provides more than 120 stability fixes and manual improvements compared to release version 7.2.1. An overview of new features in the 7.2 release series is available at New Features in GRASS GIS 7.2.
About GRASS GIS 7: Its graphical user interface supports the user to make complex GIS operations as simple as possible. The updated Python interface to the C library permits users to create new GRASS GIS-Python modules in a simple way while yet obtaining powerful and fast modules. Furthermore, the libraries were again significantly improved for speed and efficiency, along with support for huge files. A lot of effort has been invested to standardize parameter and flag names. Finally, GRASS GIS 7 comes with a series of new modules to analyse raster and vector data, along with a full temporal framework. For a detailed overview, see the list of new features. As a stable release series, 7.2.x enjoys long-term support.
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
We are pleased to announce the stable release of GRASS GIS 7.2.0
What’s new in a nutshell
After almost two years of development the new stable major release GRASS GIS 7.2.0 is available. It provides more than 1950 stability fixes and manual improvements compared to the former stable release version 7.0.5. The new version includes a series of new modules to analyse raster and vector data along with new temporal algebra functionality.More than 50 new addons are also available. A summary of the new features is available at New Features in GRASS GIS 7.2.
About GRASS GIS 7: Its graphical user interface supports the user to make complex GIS operations as simple as possible. The updated Python interface to the C library permits users to create new GRASS GIS-Python modules in a simple way while yet obtaining powerful and fast modules. Furthermore, the libraries were again significantly improved for speed and efficiency, along with support for huge files. A lot of effort has been invested to standardize parameter and flag names. Finally, GRASS GIS 7 comes with a series of new modules to analyse raster and vector data, along with a full temporal framework. For a detailed overview, see the list of new features. As a stable release series, 7.2.x enjoys long-term support.
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2017-01-15 19:01:082024-11-18 13:39:22New major release: GRASS GIS 7.2.0 available
We are pleased to announce that the 50th ICA-OSGeo Lab has been established at the GIS and Remote Sensing Unit (Piattaforma GIS & Remote Sensing, PGIS), Research and Innovation Centre (CRI), Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM), Italy. CRI is a multifaceted research organization established in 2008 under the umbrella of FEM, a private research foundation funded by the government of Autonomous Province of Trento. CRI focuses on studies and innovations in the fields of agriculture, nutrition, and environment, with the aim to generate new sharing knowledge and to contribute to economic growth, social development and the overall improvement of quality of life.
The mission of the PGIS unit is to develop and provide multi-scale approaches for the description of 2-, 3- and 4-dimensional biological systems and processes. Core activities of the unit include acquisition, processing and validation of geo-physical, ecological and spatial datasets collected within various research projects and monitoring activities, along with advanced scientific analysis and data management. These studies involve multi-decadal change analysis of various ecological and physical parameters from continental to landscape level using satellite imagery and other climatic layers. The lab focuses on the geostatistical analysis of such information layers, the creation and processing of indicators, and the production of ecological, landscape genetics, eco-epidemiological and physiological models. The team pursues actively the development of innovative methods and their implementation in a GIS framework including the time series analysis of proximal and remote sensing data.
The GIS and Remote Sensing Unit (PGIS) members strongly support the peer reviewed approach of Free and Open Source software development which is perfectly in line with academic research. PGIS contributes extensively to the open source software development in geospatial (main contributors to GRASS GIS), often collaborating with various other developers and researchers around the globe. In the new ICA-OSGeo lab at FEM international PhD students, university students and trainees are present.
PGIS is focused on knowledge dissemination of open source tools through a series of courses designed for specific user requirement (schools, universities, research institutes), blogs, workshops and conferences. Their recent publication in Trends in Ecology and Evolution underlines the need on using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for completely open science. Dr. Markus Neteler, who is leading the group since its formation, has two decades of experience in developing and promoting open source GIS software. Being founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org, USA), he served on its board of directors from 2006-2011. Luca Delucchi, focal point and responsible person for the new ICA-OSGeo Lab is member of the board of directors of the Associazione Italiana per l’Informazione Geografica Libera (GFOSS.it, the Italian Local Chapter of OSGeo). He contributes to several Free and Open Source software and open data projects as developer and trainer.
Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2006 whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open source geospatial technologies and data.
International Cartographic Association (ICA) is the world authoritative body for cartography and GIScience. See also the new ICA-OSGeo Labs website.
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2013-10-23 16:06:302023-11-20 10:17:3950th ICA-OSGeo Lab established at Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM)
Dal 10 al 11 Ottobre 2013 si terrà a Bologna presso i laboratori della Scuola di Ingegneria e Architettura (V.le del Risorgimento, 2), e le sale conferenze della Regione Emilia-Romagna (V.le della Fiera, 8), la sesta conferenza italiana sul software geografico e sui dati geografici liberi (GFOSS DAY 2013).
Lo scopo principale della conferenza è quello di coinvolgere imprese, enti pubblici, scuole, università , centri di ricerca, sviluppatori, cittadini, operatori del settore ed appassionati dei temi del software libero geografico e degli open data.
Sarà inoltre possibile seguire in diretta streaming il convegno.
Registrati:
https://www.gfoss.it/drupal/gfossday2013/registrazione
La partecipazione alla conferenza è libera e gratuita ma è richiesta una registrazione (meglio anticipata) per consentire una migliore organizzazione dell’evento e garantire la stampa di badge e attestati. L’accesso ai workshop è garantito fino al raggiungimento numero massimo di partecipanti.
https://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.png00Markushttps://neteler.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wg_neteler_logo.pngMarkus2013-09-26 00:04:462023-10-22 18:46:34GFOSS DAY 2013 a Bologna: 10-11 Ottobre 2013
Call for Participation for FOSDEM 2021 geospatial devroom
After a bit more than four months of development the new update release GRASS GIS 7.4.2 is available. It provides more than 50 stability fixes and improvements compared to the previous stable version 7.4.1. An overview of the new features in the 7.4 release series is available at 
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