Very cool FOSS4G tools dependency map

Eduardo Patto Kanegae made a very nice FOSS4G tools dependency map. Enjoy it here: http://www.webmapit.com.br/wiki/index.php/FOSS4G_tools_-_dependency_map

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:

http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.7.0.tar.gz
http://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:
http://proj.osgeo.org/

Landsat free data downloads

In a recent USGS press release I found:

``Although the USGS does not have detailed records since the mission's inception in 1972, there is good evidence that more data have been distributed in the last 6 months than in the entire first 36 years of the Landsat missions combined.''

Amazing, no? Don't have to say more when blinking at EU data sources...

Thermal map of Valsugana near Trento, Italy
(30 July 2003, ~ 9:30)

ASTER GDEM 30m quality assessment

The recent publication of the ASTER GDEM (30m) is a great step towards a worldwide high resolution elevation model. I have done some test in the Southern Alps around Trento which is among the most complex terrains in Europe. The scope was to calculate a difference map to the local high resolution DEM.

The steps

1. Mosaicking and reprojection to UTM32/WGS84 of ASTER GDEM tiles of the area (using gdalwarp).
2. Import of the ASTER GDEM map into GRASS (r.in.gdal)
3. Creation of a difference map to the provincial DEM (r.mapcalc, r.colors)
4. Histogram and univariate statistics (d.histogram, r.univar)

The results
(click for higher resolution or download slides as PDF):







Comments

The hydrological pattern appears to coincide with the provincial rivers map. It can be seen that lakes weren't masked during the ASTER DEM preparation, howver, these could be identified for many areas in the world with OpenStreetMap layers.
Despite spikes (including unexpected craters), the overall quality appears to be acceptable for this first version of ASTER GDEM - the standard deviation is 18m for the test area with outliers predominantely found in the areas of complex terrain rather than in the valley floors. A shift of -2.3m is also observed (reprojection artifact?).
It will be worth to check if SRTM data (90m) could help to identify and remove the spikes from the DEM. More hopefully in the near future...

New Native winGRASS Release (6.4.0 candidate)

A new version of the native WinGrass installer (note, not OSGeo4W or Cygwin) has been posted on the GRASS download page.

This release is based on GRASS 6.4.0svn (r38537) and fixes some problems with the Location Wizard among other things.

Download here: http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/binary/mswindows/native/WinGRASS-6.4.0SVN-r38537-1-Setup.exe

For known issues check:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/binary/mswindows/native/#Known_Issues

Please test and report any problems. Thanks to Colin Nielsen for packaging.

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:
http://www.osgeo.org/annual_report_2008

OpenStreetMap and OpenLayers used by White House

OpenStreetMap data is used as the basemap for http://www.whitehouse.gov/change/ with the map rendered with OpenLayers. Great achievement!