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FOSS4G 2010 Call for Abstract

FOSS4G 2010 Press Release #4

We are pleased to announce the Call for Abstract for the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) 2010 conference, being held September 6-9, in beautiful Barcelona, Spain.

Held annually, FOSS4G is the premier conference for the open source geospatial community, providing a full-immersion experience in established and leading edge geospatial technologies for developers, users, and people new to open source geospatial.

https://2010.foss4g.org

FOSS4G 2010 presentations are 25 minute talks, with 5 minute question and answer sessions at the end. Presentations cover the use or development of open source geospatial software. Anyone can can submit a presentation proposal and take part in the conference as a presenter.

Some topics of interest for this year are:

  • Case Studies: Relate the experiences of you and your organization using open source geospatial. Where do things work well? Poorly? What problems did you solve, and at what cost? What do you recommend for others? Why?
  • Benchmarks: Comparisons between pieces of geospatial software. How do features compare? Speed? Ease of use? What do you recommend for others?
  • Visualization: Tell about your tips and tricks for effective visualization. How do you present information in a compelling way? 3D? Cartographic tricks? Labelling and naming ideas? Graphs and hybrid map/data combinations?
  • Development: What are the new developments in your open source geospatial software product? How does it work, how do people use it, what are the technical issues you are running into?
  • Hacks and Mashing: Have you put together something novel or cool this year? What did you stick together, how did it work, show us your gizmo!
  • Collaboration: What techniques are you using to improve collaboration between organizations and between individuals. Public geodata, collaborative data collection, data sharing, open standards, de facto standards, and more!

If you have an open source geospatial story to tell, we want to hear it!

For more information, see the FOSS4G site:

https://2010.foss4g.org/presentations.php

The deadline for abstract submissions is April 1, 2010. Submit early, submit often!

Academic Track

The FOSS4G 2010 academic track aims to bringing together researchers, developers, users and practitioners carrying out research and development in the geospatial and the free and open source fields and willing to share original and recent research developments and experiences.

The academic track will act as an inventory of current research topics, but the major goal is to promote cooperative research between OSGeo developers and the academia. The academic track is the right forum to highlight the most important research challenges and trends in the domain, and let them became the basis for an informal OSGeo research agenda. It will foster interdisciplinary discussions in all aspects of the geospatial and free and open source domains. It will be organized in a way to promote networking between the participants, to initiate and favour discussions regarding cutting-edge technologies in the field, to exchange research ideas and to promote international collaboration.

Submission guidelines

All submissions to the academic track must be original unpublished work written in English. Papers should not exceed the 6000 words limit. Formatting guidelines will be available soon. Submitted papers will be thoroughly reviewed by three members of the international scientific committee and refereed for their quality, originality and relevance.

Submission deadline (full paper for the academic track) – May, 31th, 2010

Upcoming milestones

  • 15 Jan 2010, Call for Workshops/Tutorials opens
  • 30 Jan 2010, Call for Workshops/Tutorials closes
  • 1 Feb 2010, Call for Abstracts opens
  • 16 Feb 2010, Notification of acceptance for workshops/tutorials
  • 22 Feb 2010, Registration for workshop and tutorials opens
  • 1 Apr 2010, Abstract submission deadline
  • 1 May 2010, Presenters notified of acceptance for talks
  • 15 Jun 2010, Author/Early registration deadline
  • 15 Jul 2010 Full article submission deadline
  • Aug 2010, Completed program available
  • 6-7 Sep 2010, FOSS4G Workshops
  • 7-9 Sep 2010, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
  • 10 Sep 2010, FOSS4G Code Sprint

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New PROJ 4.7.0 library available

Frank Warmerdam, project lead, has announced the immediate release of the PROJ 4.7.0 Cartographic Projections library. The new version is available from:

https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.7.0.tar.gz
https://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.7.0.zip

Important is the regeneration of the “nad/epsg” init file with EPSG 7.1 database which now includes support for the Google Mercator (EPSG:3857). Furthermore, a substantial acceleration in some application environments is gained through a new cache implementation and and various thread safety improvements could be implemented.

PROJ 4 is used in many GIS applications including GDAL, GRASS GIS, QGIS, PostGIS, Mapserver, OSGeo4W and others.

The project pages are at:
https://proj.osgeo.org/

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OSGeo Annual Report for 2008 online

The 2008 OSGeo Annual Report is now complete and online available! It is filled with reports from across the OSGeo world: software projects, local chapters, sponsors and more produced by 49 different contributors and project teams.

It comes as a print-ready PDF that can be downloaded from:
https://www.osgeo.org/annual_report_2008

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Fourth release candidate of GRASS 6.4.0 now available

A fourth release candidate of GRASS 6.4.0 is now available.

Source code:
https://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
https://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.0RC4.tar.gz

To get the RC4 source code from SVN:
svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20090412_grass_6_4_0RC4

An announcement has been drafted at
https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.0RC4-News
(all RC news will be merged into the final announcement later)

Key improvements of the GRASS 6.4.0 release include enhanced portability for MS-Windows (native support), hundreds of fixes, the new wxPython based portable graphical interface and much new functionality.

Release candidate management at
https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_6.4_Feature_Plan

We hope to get out binary packages over the next days.

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GRASS Project seeks Google Summer of Code students!

Want to earn some money? Participate in a long-term Open Source GIS project? Contribute your brilliant ideas? Please check out our ideas collection at https://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_SoC_Ideas_2009 – and don’t hesitate to contact us! The student application deadline is April 3rd 2009.

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Four days of the Toronto Code Sprint 2009

The Toronto Code Sprint 2009 – pure productivity:

… with great benefits for Mapserver, PostGIS, GDAL, GeoTools, …

Paul nicely summarizes the Toronto Code Sprint Lessons as well as CampToCamp.

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Top ten myths for Open Source in Geospatial

An interesting email thread is ongoing about Top ten myths which try to harm the reputation of Open Source GIS efforts. Michael P. Gerlek edits a Wiki page collecting the top ~10 myths and misperceptions:
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Myths

Especially striking the Eduardo Kanegae‘s comment:

In 2008 I worked on a project all based on ESRI 9.2 family. At that
point I didn´t know much of ESRI products and had only worked with
foss products. Now I feel more confortable to give an opinion for
that:

# myth monopoly : every only remember the (supposed) 30% esri market
share. Remember there´s also very nice commercial products like Safe
FME, CadCorp, ManiFold, PCI, ERDAS, ENVI and others ( and sometimes
most of these are embed on ESRI packs - eg.: raster support on AG
family )

# sustainability : while every major release of ESRI will force you to
re-develop your customizations, FOSS products keep release more
compatible. Example: a MapServer 3.x developer will use the same
principles and concepts on MapServer 5.x version. But, an ArcIMS
developer had to change its base when upgrading to ArcGIS Server 9.1,
recode for adapting to ArcGIS Server 9.2 API´s and now all this
concepts will change again with 9.3 version.

# maintenance : foss product will run more closer to open standards (
eg.: OGC´s ). So, you change foss parts without re-coding your entire
solution. The cost of training a new human resource on
insert/update/delete geo-feature using ArcObjects/ArcSDE is so much
higher when compared to OGC-SFS, per example.

# support : while on FOSS communities you can have a reply on minutes,
on 'esri forum' you can your topic open for months (
https://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=158&f=2284&t=251001 ,
https://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=158&f=2290&t=253698 ,
https://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=93&f=985&t=270205&g=1 ) and NEVER
get a solution. In my sample, we discover a bug on ArcSDE/ArcMap
9.2sp4 but this will certainly NEVER be fixed because sp6 didn´t fixed
and ESRI will probably only look for 9.3 developments for now and on.
Because non-US customers CAN´T contact ESRI directly, we can only keep
suffering with poor local support.

best regards,
--
Eduardo Kanegae

Not much to add at this point…

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winGRASS 6.4.0RC2 now available!

The new winGRASS 6.4.0RC2 is now available! It has been packaged into the OSGeo4W installer which also provides QGIS, Mapserver, GDAL and other goodies.

OSGeo4W has two modes – express and advanced:

  • “Express” gives you a short list of suggested packages to select from which have been widely tested.
  • “Advanced” gives a long detailed list of packages and subpackages including development versions and so forth. For the moment GRASS is available in the “advanced” install. After a period of testing it may be moved to the “express” section.

OSGeo4W Installer download:
https://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/osgeo4w-setup.exe
Please download it and test. The wizard will guide you through the installation process.

Find GRASS in
Advanced -> … -> Select Packages
All -> Desktop -> grass & tcltk: ActiveTcl wxpython (just click to select) -> Next …

Feedback is appreciated in two “channels”:

OSGeo4W installer related issues:

GRASS related issues:

Update 24-Jan-2009: The package was fixed to support the new wxpython graphical user interface.

BTW: The OSGeo4W team is seeking a new GRASS package maintainer, we hope to find a candidate soon – please speak up.

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