GFOSS - Free Software GIS at your fingertips

50.000th commit to GRASS GIS SVN!

2011-12-31T14:46:00.001+01:00

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

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

2011-12-01T15:12:00.001+01:00

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: http://eros.usgs.gov/#/Find_Data/Products_and_Data_Available/GMTED2010

GRASS GIS processing steps: see here

Video: GRASS GIS development visualization from 1999 to 2011

2011-11-11T16:22:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

Creating 3D buildings from OpenStreetMap data

2011-10-23T00:33:00.000+02:00

It is fairly easy to create 3D buildings from OpenStreetMap (OSM) maps, essentially by extruding the 2D footprint polygons to 3D.

For the procedure using OSGeo software, see

http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Extrude_2D_polygons_to_3D

GRASS 6.4.2RC1 released

2011-10-23T00:29:00.000+02:00

A first release candidate of GRASS 6.4.2 is now available.

Source code:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.2RC1.tar.gz

winGRASS binaries:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/binary/mswindows/native/

To get the RC1 source code from SVN:
svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20111010_grass_6_4_2RC1/

An announcement has been drafted at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.2RC1-News

Key improvements of the GRASS 6.4.2 release include enhanced portability for MS-Windows (native support), major fixes for the new wxPython based portable graphical interface, and new functionality (new network tools, zonal support for univariate statistics, image processing improvements, GRASS Python Library extensions, an embedded interactive Python Shell, an experimental Graphical Modeler, and new Cartographic Composer front-end to ps.map).

Release candidate management at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass6Planning

Please join us in testing this release candidate for the final release.

Thanks to all contributors!

GRASS GIS 6.4.1 released

2011-04-14T23:52:00.000+02:00

GRASS GIS 6.4.1 released
12 April 2011
http://grass.osgeo.org

We are pleased to announce that the new stable version GRASS 6.4.1 has been released. This release fixes some bugs discovered in the GRASS 6.4.0 source code and a few new features (over 560 updates to the source code with respect to 6.4.0 have been added). As a stable release 6.4 will enjoy long-term support.

GRASS 6.4 brings a number of exciting enhancements to the GIS. Our new wxPython graphical user interface (wxGUI) is debuted, Python is now a fully supported scripting language, and for the first time since its inception with a port from the VAX 11/780 in 1983, GRASS runs natively also on a non-UNIX based platform: MS-Windows.

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, in the open, and is given away for free. The source code is also freely available, allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, addition of new features, and faster patching of bugs.

Full story at http://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass641.html

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) providing powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines in a single integrated software suite. GRASS 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 has now been translated into twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats.

GRASSCommunity Sprint: 20-25 May 2011, Prague, Czech Republic

2011-02-26T23:05:00.000+01:00

A "GRASS Community Sprint" will take place in May in Prague, Czech Republic directly following the upcoming Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2011 conference. This GRASS Community Sprint is a great occasion for you to support the development by actively contributing to the source code, the 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:

Friday, May 20, 2011 (day of arrival) - Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Friday is day of arrival - first meeting in the evening (after the conference) to define the agenda
Saturday to Tuesday full day
Wednesday is the last day

Of course you may join or leave the community sprint whenever you want.

Venue:

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

For more detailed information, please visit
http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2011

Happy birthday, OSGeo!

2011-02-03T20:50:00.000+01:00

OSGeo turns 5! Happy birthday...

Time flies - already five years passed after the "Chicago weekend" on 4th February 2006 when the Free and Open Source GIS umbrella foundation, today known as OSGeo Foundation was designed and established. Indeed, it was an intensive weekend when a group of GIS project leaders and likeminded people gathered to address the need of joining various communities into a new ecosystem.

As of now, more than 15,000 unique subscribers read and discuss in more than 150 mailing lists and other cyber-media. OSGeo has become the central place for collaborative development of open geospatial technologies, public data and educational material.

Looking forward to the next 5 years of activity!

Cool Science 2.0 Web tools

2011-01-18T21:15:00.001+01:00

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 http://gis.cri.fmach.it/cool-science-2-0-tools/

2011-01-04T14:44:00.000+01:00

A first release candidate of GRASS 6.4.1 is now available.

Source code:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.1RC1.tar.gz

Windows Binaries:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/binary/mswindows/native/WinGRASS-6.4.1RC1-1-Setup.exe

More binaries will become available shortly.

To get the RC1 source code from SVN:
svn checkout http://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20110103_grass_6_4_1RC1

An announcement has been drafted at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.1RC1-News

All RC news will be merged into the final announcement later.

Since the 6.4.0 release in September 2010 almost 390 source code
modifications have been made to the 6.4.x release branch. Key
improvements of the GRASS 6.4.1 release include enhanced
portability for MS-Windows (native support), fixes for the new
wxPython based portable graphical interface, and new functionality.

Release candidate management at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass6Planning

Please join us in testing this release candidate for the final release.

Thanks to all contributors!

New QGIS 1.6.0 'Copiapó' release

2010-11-28T11:43:00.000+01:00

The QGIS Development Team is very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 1.6.0, the next in their development release series.

Binary and source code packages are available at:

http://download.qgis.org

The release announcement and changelog is available here:

http://blog.qgis.org/node/146

Along with the release of QGIS 1.6.0, the QGIS Community Team is hard at work on an updated QGIS Users' Guide version 1.6. The guide will be available in the near future - they will post announcements when it is available.

QGIS is a completely volunteer driven project, and is the work of a dedicated team of developers, documenters and supporters. The team extends their thanks and gratitude to the many, many hours which people have contributed to make this release happen.

If you would like to make a donation or sponsor the project, please visit http://www.qgis.org/en/sponsorship.html . Of course, QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to do so.

OSGeo Japan Chapter receives "Japanese OSS Encouragement Award"

2010-10-16T11:05:00.000+02:00

IPA (IT promotion agency Japan), a government agency, has announced that the OSGeo Japan Chapter will be awarded “Japanese Open Source Software Encouragement Award” on 28th October 2010.

IPA (IT promotion agency Japan) has earlier funded the internationalization of GRASS GIS and Mapserver and it is just that they have been fast it recognizing the good work done by OSGeo and the Japan Local Chapter.

The Japan chapter was established in late 2006 and the local community has been growing steadily and dedicating effort to promoting FOSS4G.

Press release by IPA (in Japanese)
http://www.ipa.go.jp/about/press/20101015_2.html

About the award
IPA grants “Japanese OSS Contributor Award” to a developer who has established and has been managing the development project which has the nfluence, to a superior developer who takes an active role in the global projects and to a contributor to spread the Open Source Software. Also IPA grants “Japanese Open Source Software Encouragement Award” to the individual or the group which has a remarkable activity to develop and/or spread OSS.

About IPA
http://www.ipa.go.jp/english/about/index.html

OSGeo Journal Vol. 6 published

2010-10-03T21:30:00.001+02:00

The latest OSGeo Journal has been published:

OSGeo Journal Volume 6 - All Articles	PDF
	59 pages

Table of Contents

From the Editor...	PDF
Tyler Mitchell	1

Volunteer Recognition (Volume 6)	PDF
Landon Blake	2

News

News	PDF
Scott Mitchell	4

Events

CASCADOSS International Symposium and International Information Workshop. Events’ report.	PDF
Rafal Wawer, Monika Rusztecka, Erika Orlitowa, Adam Podolcsak, Therese Steenberghen, Therese Steenberghen	7

Summer Training Courses on FOSS4G 2007-2009	PDF
Rafal Wawer, Jos Van Orshoven, Jos Van Orshoven	4

Topical Studies

Why Every Open Source Software Project Needs A Good Dictator	PDF
Landon Blake	2

Programming Tutorials

GPGPU with GDAL - Basics of GPGPU interfacing	PDF
Yann Chemin	3

Case Studies

gvSIG is a viable robust alternative to commercially available GIS packages	PDF
Simon Christopher Cropper	3

Project Spotlight

GRASS Image Processing Environment. Application to evapotranspiration Direct Readout	PDF
Yann Chemin, Thomas Alexandridis, Ines Cherif	5

SEXTANTE, a free platform for geospatial analysis	PDF
Victor Olaya	8

Research Papers

Usability Trumps Features: User needs and the redesign of a web-based GIS to support community environmental monitoring	PDF
Martin Joseph Bunch, Micheal David MacLennon

Helena Mitasova Receives Sol Katz Award 2010

2010-09-11T11:21:00.000+02:00

Prof. Helena Mitasova was honored with the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software 2010 during the closing plenary of the FOSS4G 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Helena has contributed a variety of methods, algorithms, documentation and tutorials amongst other efforts to the FOSS4G community. Her outstanding contributions date back to 1990 when she started to develop new analytical modules for GRASS GIS. Since then she served on many committees within OSGeo, she is coauthor of the first Open Source GIS book; she published over 50 scientific and academic publications linked to FOSS4G and contributed a rich OSGeo GIS dataset to the community which has become a standard for software testing and teaching. Helena's video acceptance is available here.

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.

See also: http://www.osgeo.org/solkatz

GRASS GIS 6.4.0 released

2010-09-08T12:31:00.002+02:00

The GRASS Development Team announces

GRASS GIS 6.4.0 released 3 September 2010

We are pleased to announce the release of GRASS GIS 6.4.0, the first in the new line of 6.4 stable releases. As a stable release 6.4 will enjoy long-term support. The next release (6.4.1) will introduce a few new features which are still undergoing final testing, but after that all further 6.4 releases will be bugfix-only. Due to our highly conservative stabilization policy this is the first official version of GRASS to introduce new features since October 2006 and supersedes the previous stable line of GRASS 6.2. As such the floodgates are open and there are many new features to explore and many new structural improvements to be found in the software. GRASS 6.4 brings a number of exciting enhancements to the GIS. Our new wxPython graphical user interface (wxGUI) is debuted, Python is now a fully supported scripting language, and for the first time since its inception with a port from the VAX 11/780 in 1983, GRASS will now run natively on a non-UNIX based platform: MS-Windows! In addition to bringing the software to a host of new users, the ability to run GRASS on any common computer platform furthers our goal of open access to the software. We hope you will enjoy the ability to use this program on the systems that are most convenient to you and your work.
Due to the freshness of WinGrass there may still be a few rough edges yet to discover, but after more than a year of dedicated testing and quality-assurance review we are very pleased with the results. Users can be confident to use this version for their day to day work, indeed due to the open development model many already do. Existing UNIX and Mac users will be happy to know that these new features do not disrupt the base GIS which remains as solid as ever and fully backwards compatible with earlier GRASS 6.0 and 6.2 releases. The venerable Tcl/Tk GUIs are also still available if you prefer to use them.
The GRASS software including over 400 built-in analysis modules and 100 community supplied add-on modules and toolboxes can be downloaded for free from the main GRASS website at http://grass.osgeo.org, or from many local mirrors worldwide. In addition to the extensive documentation which comes with the software, our Wiki help system contains a wealth of user supplied tips and tricks, tutorials, and guides.
Since 6.4 entered the testing phase work has begun on GRASS 7 and is progressing rapidly, including many new wxGUI improvements and tools which we hope to bring over for the upcoming 6.4.1 release.

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) providing powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines in a single integrated software suite. GRASS 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 has now been translated into twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. GRASS is a founding member of The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), a non-profit legal entity which has enjoyed extraordinary growth. We expect that this formal infrastructure will guarantee that the GRASS community will be well supported and vibrant far into the future.
GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open-source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Users are encouraged to study, customize, extend, improve, and (if necessary) diagnose and repair the inner workings of any part of the program. We believe that scientific progress depends on the reproducibility of results, which in turn depends on the unhindered ability of the user to know, evaluate, double-check, and learn from all algorithms and methodologies used in the process of their work.

Screenshots

Screenshots of GRASS in action

Platforms supported by GRASS

GNU/Linux, Mac OS X/Darwin, Microsoft Windows (native using MinGW or with full UNIX support via Cygwin), Sun Solaris (SPARC/Intel), Silicon Graphics Irix, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, AIX, the BSD family, iPAQ/Linux and other UNIX compliant platforms. GRASS runs on both 32 and 64 bit systems with large data file (>2GB) support for most key modules.

Software download/CDROM

The new source code is available now and binary packages for major operating systems will be published shortly.
For details on GRASS software capabilities please refer to: http://grass.osgeo.org/intro/general.php, and the Wiki collaborative help system.

What's new in GRASS 6.4.0

(selected improvements from the nearly 9,000 updates to the source code)

Source code quality/libraries:
- Many internal adjustments needed for native MS-Windows support, for example safely handling spaces in file names.
- Programmer's Manual: continued Doxygen integration and automated generation into PDF and HTML formats. Publicly available for download and perusal.
- Improved policies for code submission specified in the SUBMITTING files for documentation, Python, Tcl/Tk, and shell scripts
- New Python scripting language library containing many helper functions
- All modules: --quiet and --verbose message modes
- All modules: --script flag generates boilerplate for shell scripts with parser and GUI support
- Batch mode for launching GRASS for non-interactive processing tasks
- DBMI: SQL parser extended (support for DROP COLUMN, ASC/DESC keyword in ORDER BY clause, etc.)
- Partial differential equations library with OpenMP multi-processor support
- Major clean-up of the display architecture (libraries and drivers): the drivers no longer maintain a palette; all colors are now specified directly as R/G/B values
- The "default" datum transformation parameters are now first in the list instead of last
- Ability to create new locations using EPSG codes with the g.proj module
- Message translation (i18N): many new translated messages, new languages including Vietnamese and Arabic
- Documentation/man pages: various fixes and improvements (more examples added, including graphics, improved style, new introductory pages)
- Documentation: various terminology issues fixed and terms unified
- Symbols: A number of new icons, support for symbol rotation
Graphical User Interface (GUI):
- g.gui: New frontend command to launch GUI sessions
- wxPython GUI:
  - Complete GUI rewrite in Python/wxWidgets
- gis.m Tcl/Tk GUI:
  - GIS manager extended with mouse placement of text and scale bars and menu updates
  - Updated Tcl/Tk profile and georectification GUI tools
  - New interactive command console with output window
  - New interfaces for interactive raster reclassification, raster recoding, custom raster color rules, and vector reclassification
  - New animation tool to display raster map series as an animation
- Improved startup screen and interface, including searchable EPSG codes list and better custom datum support
- NVIZ: Major revamp of interface; output directly to MPEG or other FFmpeg supported formats
- QGIS integration: GRASS toolbox extended, available from Quantum GIS
Drivers:
- DBF driver: extended column type support
- HTMLMAP display driver: NEW - Prepares clickable HTML image map templates (port from GRASS 5)
- PostScript display driver: NEW - Renders display directly into a PostScript or Encapsulated PostScript file
- Cairo display driver: NEW - Renders display directly into a number of image formats using the Cairo rendering engine
New and major updates for modules and scripts since GRASS 6.2.3:
- db.dropcol: NEW - Drops a column from selected attribute table
- db.droptable: NEW - Drops an attribute table
- db.in.ogr: NEW - Imports attribute tables in various formats
- db.login: Support for interactive password entry (invisible passwords)
- db.out.ogr: NEW - Exports attribute tables into various formats
- d.barscale: North arrow for lat/lon locations
- d.out.file: Expanded to use the Cairo and PostScript display drivers to allow export to ps, eps, svg, and pdf formats
- d.path: Support for use from GUI and non-interactive mode
- d.rast.edit: Rewritten in Tcl/Tk
- d.shadedmap: NEW - Drapes a semi-transparent raster over a shaded relief map
- d.text, d.font: Updated to accept TrueType fonts and maintain a database of system fonts
- g.dirseps: NEW - Internal utility for converting directory characters (MS-Windows)
- g.extension: NEW - Utility for downloading and installing Add-on modules
- g.findetc: NEW - Internal utility for locating support files
- g.gui: NEW - Launches a GRASS graphical user interface (GUI) session
- g.message: NEW - Internal utility for printing quiet and verbose messages in scripts
- g.mkfontcap: NEW - Internal utility for generating a list of available system fonts
- g.mremove: Support for use from GUI
- i.atcorr: NEW - Performs atmospheric correction using the 6S algorithm
- i.landsat.rgb: Vast speed improvement
- ps.map: Various improvements including new map border control, rotated and scaled symbols, and allowing geogrid from lat/lon locations
- r3.gwflow: NEW - Models transient, confined groundwater flow in three dimensions
- r3.stats: NEW - Generates volume statistics for raster3d maps
- r3.univar: NEW - Calculates univariate statistics from the cells of a 3D raster map
- ~~r.bilinear~~: This module has been replaced by r.resamp.interp
- r.category: NEW - Manages raster map category values and labels (replaces r.cats)
- r.colors: Support for equalized histogram, reversed, logarithmically scaled, rules-from-file, and more
- r.gwflow: NEW - Models transient, confined groundwater flow in two dimensions
- r.in.wms: Various fixes and more robust when dealing with flaky WMS servers
- r.in.xyz: Support for extended statistics
- r.le suite: Various fixes and modernization
- r.li suite: NEW - Advanced toolset for multiscale analysis of landscape structure.
  Including single and multi-processor enabled modules: r.li.cwed, r.li.dominance, r.li.edgedensity, r.li.mpa, r.li.mps, r.li.padcv, r.li.padrange, r.li.padsd, r.li.patchdensity, r.li.patchnum, r.li.richness, r.li.setup, r.li.shannon, r.li.shape, and r.li.simpson
- r.mfilter.fp: NEW - Raster map custom matrix filter (floating point version)
- r.out.gdal: New C implementation replaces shell script version, region sensitive with color export ability
- r.out.xyz: NEW - Exports a raster map to a text file as x,y,z values based on cell centers
- r.profile: Report data outside the current region as invalid
- r.proj: Replaced with an improved version
- r.resamp.interp: NEW - Resamples raster map layers to a finer grid using interpolation
- r.resamp.stats: NEW - Resamples raster map layers to a coarser grid using aggregation
- r.support: Enhanced control of meta-data
- r.support.stats: NEW - Support module which updates raster map statistics
- r.univar: Support for extended statistics
- r.watershed: Vast speed improvement
- r.what.color: NEW - Queries colors for a raster map layer
- v.db.dropcol: NEW - Drops a column from the attribute table connected to a given vector map
- v.db.join: NEW - Allows to join a table to a vector map table
- v.db.renamecol: NEW - Renames a column in the attribute table connected to a given vector map
- v.db.univar: NEW - Calculates univariate statistics on selected table column for a vector map
- v.digit (Tcl/Tk): Rewritten for use without X11
- v.digit (wxPython): NEW - All new vector map digitizer rewritten in wxPython
- v.edit: NEW - Edits a vector map, allows adding, deleting and modifying selected vector features
- v.generalize: NEW - Generalization of vector features using a number of smoothing techniques
- v.in.db: More efficient implementation of the where= option
- v.in.wfs: NEW - Import GetFeatures from WFS format
- v.net.visibility: NEW - Visibility graph construction
- v.out.svg: NEW - Exports a vector map to SVG format
- v.proj: Better handling of z coordinates in 3-D vectors
- v.support: NEW - Updates vector map metadata
- v.surf.idw, v.surf.bspline, and v.surf.rst: Work with massive datasets imported without topology (e.g. LIDAR)
- v.to.3d: NEW - Performs transformation of 2D vector features to 3D

A more detailed description of changes can be found in the previous announcements of the GRASS 6.3 development preview release and the GRASS 6.4.0 release candidate series.
For a comprehensive list of changes see the 6.4 ChangeLog file.
For a complete list of commands available in GRASS 6.4.0 see the online manuals and the GRASS 6.4 module list.

We are always looking for testers, code developers, and technical writers to help us maintain and accelerate the development cycle. The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) in the open by volunteers the world over. GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the professional world in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis, in the open, and is given away for free. Emphasis is placed on interoperability and unlimited access to data as well as on software flexibility and evolution rate.
Release history:

GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC1 released 23 Dec 2008
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC2 released 12 Jan 2009
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC3 released 26 Jan 2009
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC4 released 12 Apr 2009
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC5 released 9 Jun 2009
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC6 released 20 Mar 2010
GRASS GIS 6.4.0RC7 released 27 Aug 2010
GRASS GIS 6.4.0 released 3 September 2010 (see also technical announcement)

Short version

GRASS Development Team

EU: 3.3 million to continue projects on open source and reusable data

2010-07-30T20:47:00.000+02:00

The European Commission is planning to spend 3.344 million Euro until 2016 to continue the services provided by its projects - such as OSOR.eu and Semic.eu - on open source and on electronic data exchange.

Read more here.

ZOO Kernel 1.0 Release - the open source OGC Web Services platform

2010-04-14T23:10:00.000+02:00

Nicolas Bozon and Gérald Fenoy have just announced the ZOO Kernel 1.0 release (MIT/X-11 style license). This release offers the ZOO API (also under MIT) and some sample ZOO services.

From the Web site at http://www.zoo-project.org/

ZOO is an on-going OWS (OGC Web Services) open source platform project. It provides a WPS compliant developer-friendly framework to create and chain OGC compliant webservices. The ZOO OWS platform is made of three parts:

ZOO Kernel : A powerful and extensible server-side C Kernel which makes it possible creating, managing and chaining geoprocessing operations.
ZOO Web Client: A Javascript webmapping API build on top of OpenLayers designed to communicate with the ZOO Kernel inputs/outputs.
ZOO Desktop Client: A Mozilla XULRunner based GIS desktop application able to execute WPS queries with both local and remote data.

Download of the ZOO Source code:
http://zoo-project.org/trac/wiki/Download
http://zoo-project.org/trac/browser/trunk

Some basic ZOO Documentation is already available on ZOO Kernel installation and ZOO services deployment on the website. Growing detailed documentation is available at:
http://zoo-project.org/trac/wiki/ZooDocumentation

ZOO also has a Twitter now!
http://twitter.com/ZOO_Project

OSGeo book shelf

2010-02-13T12:53:00.002+01:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=songsforkids-20&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;o=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;p=8&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;l=bpl&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;asins=3642094252&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;fc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;IS2=1&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt1=_blank&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;m=amazon&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bc1=000000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;f=ifr" style="padding-top: 5px; width: 131px; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" align="left" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

OSGeo.jp presents Japanese translation of GRASS GIS book

2010-02-13T12:31:00.012+01:00

Recently, OSGeo.jp has presented the Japanese translation of the 3rd edition of the GRASS GIS book. It was a pleasant evening in Tokyo with lots of people attending ("Present and Future of GRASS user community in Japan").
Before reaching the place, we checked in a nearby book store if the book was available: Indeed - found in the book shelf!

A great effort of Tetsuji Uemura to translate 400 pages... the new book is not expensive at all, around 35 Euro. So, please buy it :)

FOSS4G 2010 Call for Abstract

2010-02-02T07:06:00.001+01:00

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.

http://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:

http://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

City of Munich administration switches to OpenDocument Format

2010-01-05T19:44:00.004+01:00

In Munich, Germany, the OpenDocument Format (ODF) has become the main document exchange standard, along with the PDF format for non-editable files. This is a milestone in the ongoing migration project to Open Source (LiMux project) and a major improvement for the long-term interoperability. In 2012, 80% of the totally 14,000 computers in in the administration will be migrated to Linux.

Also the German Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) are migrating to Open Source.

Read more here.

Very cool FOSS4G tools dependency map

2009-11-16T23:06:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-29T20:54:00.002+02:00

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

2009-08-18T10:16:00.005+02:00

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

2009-08-15T13:16:00.007+02:00

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...

Acknowledgments: ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.

New Native winGRASS Release (6.4.0 candidate)

2009-07-30T22:54:00.002+02:00

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

2009-07-15T21:17:00.000+02:00

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

2009-05-03T18:11:00.002+02:00

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

Open Source Activity Map

2009-04-23T13:29:00.001+02:00

Open source software hotspots by country around the world: Open Source Activity Map

Tons of material at OSGeo Educational Content Inventory

2009-04-20T21:23:00.003+02:00

Please browse the OSGeo Educational Content Inventory: It now lists 31 records of online courses, tutorials and training material in various languages!

2009-04-13T00:02:00.000+02:00

A fourth release candidate of GRASS 6.4.0 is now available.

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

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

An announcement has been drafted at
http://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
http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_6.4_Feature_Plan

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

GRASS Project seeks Google Summer of Code students!

2009-03-29T18:11:00.002+02:00

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 http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_SoC_Ideas_2009 - and don't hesitate to contact us! The student application deadline is April 3rd 2009.

Ecological indicators extracted from satellite data: High performance computing with GRASS GIS

2009-03-15T12:15:00.001+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Ecological indicators extracted from satellite data: high performance computing with GRASS GIS

View more presentations from markusN.

The upcoming GRASS GIS 6.4.0 release

2009-03-15T12:14:00.001+01:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The upcoming GRASS GIS 6.4.0 release

View more presentations from markusN.

Four days of the Toronto Code Sprint 2009

2009-03-11T14:32:00.005+01:00

The Toronto Code Sprint 2009 - pure productivity:

Day 1: Paul, Chris, Mark
Day 2: Paul, Chris
Day 3: Paul
Day 4: Paul

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

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

Youtube video about GRASS GIS Network Analysis

2009-02-23T22:48:00.001+01:00

Go here for an introductory video and tutorial about Network Analysis (Subnets within a vector network) in GRASS GIS. Data included!

Top ten myths for Open Source in Geospatial

2009-01-25T16:14:00.006+01:00

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:
http://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 (
http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=158&f=2284&t=251001 ,
http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=158&f=2290&t=253698 ,
http://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...

winGRASS 6.4.0RC2 now available!

2009-01-23T12:37:00.004+01:00

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:
http://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:

Mailing list: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/osgeo4w-dev
Bugs/wishes: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/report

GRASS related issues:

Mailing list: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-windows
or http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user
Bugs/wishes: http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/report

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.

GRASS GIS 6.4.0 RC2 released

2009-01-13T00:27:00.001+01:00

A second release candidate of GRASS 6.4.0 is now available:

http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.0RC2.tar.gz

To get the RC2 source code from SVN:
svn checkout http://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20090112_grass_6_4_0RC2

An announcement has been drafted at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.0RC2-News

All 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
http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_6.4_Feature_Plan

Please test, test, test...

Thanks to all contributors!

Markus

GRASS 6.4.0 RC1 released

2008-12-23T22:23:00.001+01:00

A first release candidate of GRASS 6.4.0 is now available:

http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
-> grass-6.4.0RC1.tar.gz

To get the RC1 source code from SVN:
  svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20081223_grass_6_4_0RC1 grass64_rc1

An initial announcement has been drafted at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.4.0RC1-News

Key fixes include improved portability for MS-Windows (native support),
hundreds of fixes, wxPython based portable graphical interface and much
new functionality.

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

Please test, test, test...

Thanks to all contributors!

Markus

GRASS 6.4.0 release branch created

2008-12-19T22:30:00.000+01:00

Today the GRASS 6.4.0 release branch has been created-
Please check it out and test it (now) before we tag RC1:

svn co https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/branches/releasebranch_6_4

Long awaited :D

MapServer Graduates OSGeo Incubation

2008-12-16T19:52:00.001+01:00

OSGeo is pleased to announce that the MapServer project has graduated from the incubation process and is now a full fledged OSGeo project with Steve Lime appointed as project representative (Vice President, MapServer).

MapServer is a web map server for building spatially enabled web applications. MapServer excels at rendering spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) for the Web, supporting a wide variety of geospatial input formats, and Web output formats. MapServer supports a pure CGI mode, as well as developing server applications in languages such as Python, Perl, Java and C#.

http://mapserver.osgeo.org/

Graduating incubation includes requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance and license verification and general good project operation. Graduating incubation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users of the project added confidence in the viability and safety of the project (see http://www.osgeo.org/incubator).

GDAL/OGR 1.6.0 Released

2008-12-10T21:46:00.001+01:00

The GDAL/OGR project team is pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.6.0. This release represents 11 months of new feature development since the GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 release, as well as many bug fixes. The release source code is available as described at:

http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadSource

The new release includes the following feature highlights, with detailed information on changes at:

http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/Release/1.6.0-News

New Raster Drivers:

BLX Magellan Topo Driver (New)
EIR Erdas Imagine Raw Driver (New)
Oracle GeoRaster Driver (New)
GRIB Driver (now part of standard distribution)
LCP (FARSITE) Driver (New)
Terralib driver (New)

New Vector Drivers:

Geoconcept Export Driver (New)
INGRES RDBMS Driver (New)
XPlane/Flightgear Driver (New)

General:

RFC 20: Preliminary support for alternate axis orientations in SRS.
On the fly access to data in .zip and .gz compressed files.
RFC 22: Support for reading from, and warping with RPC (Rational Polynomial Coefficients) from various formats.
Gaussian and Mode resampling added for overview generation.
Added raster to vector (polygon) conversion utility.
Added raster proximity utility.
Added raster sieve filtering utility.
Added -expand rgb/rgba ability to gdal_translate
Added cutline / blend support to gdalwarp.
Added -segmentize option to ogr2ogr to break long line segments.
RFC 23: Preliminary support for character set transcoding (in OGR for now).
RFC 21: OGR SQL supports type casting and field name aliasing

Building a cluster for GRASS GIS and other software from the OSGeo stack

2008-11-30T21:31:00.000+01:00

Lucky to have (access to) a cluster? Here some notes on how to do geospatial number crunching on it.

Preparing the disks
We decided to use the ext3 file system. An initial problem was the formatting of the RAID5 disk set since it exceeded the file system specifications. Then, setting the ext3 block size to 4k instead of 1k we could format it.

Storage: a home for GIS data
The disks are available via NFS to all nodes (blades in our case). All raw/original data sets and the GRASS database are sitting in an NFS exported directory which I even link on my laptop to easily add/access/modify stuff.

Front-end machine and blades configuration
The cluster is a (currently) 56CPU blades system, we'll expand to 128 CPUs later this year (16 blades with 2 procs a 4 core and 16GB RAM per blade). Additionally, we have a front-end machine to run the job manager and to link in further disks, all via NFS.
The blades are configured diskless, i.e. that once started, they receive their operating system from the front end machine via network (10GB/s ethernet). Like this, we have a single directory on the front end which contains all software, this is then propagated to all blades. Very convenient. We use Scientific Linux (the LiveDVD copied onto the disk, there is a special directory to store your modifications which are then merged in on the fly once you boot the blades, pretty cool concept). The job software is (SUN) Grid Engine, also free software. Job control with GRASS I have described here:

http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Parallel_GRASS_jobs
-> Grid Engine

GRASS: Avoiding replicated import of large data files through virtual linking
New in GRASS 6.4 is that you can just register a geodata file on the fly with r.external. Altogether I have 1.4TB of new GIS data from our province, naturally I didn't want to by a new disk array just for my provincial GRASS location! Here r.external comes handy to minimize the "import" to a few bytes. As expected, it leverages GDAL to get data into GRASS, the overhead is minimal.

Power consumption
Power consumption is measured, too: The entire system consumes around 2000W (each blade less than 200W), so it's going into the direction of "green" computing (there is no such thing!). If we had a solar panel at least...

Outcome
All in all a very nice solution. I made a stress test and removed all internal switches and shut down the blades while I was processing 8000 MODIS satellite maps. Everything survived and the Grid engine job manager collected the crashed jobs and restarted them without complaining. All resulting maps are collected in the target GRASS mapset and could be even exported to common GIS formats, if needed.
If you want to run Web Processing Services (e.g., pyWPS), you can likewise send each session to a node, giving you enormous possibilities for your customers.

From OSGeo-Announce: New German, Spanish and Québécois OSGeo Local Chapters Approved

2008-11-24T00:21:00.000+01:00

The OSGeo ticker reports:

The OSGeo board has formally approved three new local chapters. OSGeo local chapters provide a venue to support local users and developers, as well as a mechanism to further OSGeo's mission and goals in a linguistic, or geographic area.

FOSSGIS e.V. has been approved as a local chapter for the german speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland with Dr. Georg Lösel as representative. FOSSGIS e.V. has existed since the year 2000 at which time is was incorporated as GRASS-Anwender-Vereinigung (GAV). It was recently renamed FOSSGIS e.V. FOSSGIS e.V is responsible for maintaining the FreeGIS Portal. Since 2006 it has held the FOSSGIS conference promoting FOSS4G software, with 500 participants in 2008. FOSSGIS e.V. also plays an important role in supporting a FOSS4G role in other tradeshows such as InterGeo and AGIT.

http://www.fossgis.de

The OSGeo Spanish Local Chapter has been approved for spanish speaking areas of all continents with Pedro-Juan Ferrer Matoses as representative. Since it's formation in 2007 the chapter has established a members list, and elected a board of directors. Key activities include work on the Free GIS Book, Spanish Localization and events including Jornadas de SIG Libre and the Jornadas gvSIG.

http://es.osgeo.org

The Comité de direction du Chapitre québécois de l'OSGeo has been approved for the region of Québec (Canada) with Daniel Morissette as representative. This chapter seeks to provide a channel for communication, exchange and cooperation to facilitate the development of the Québec community around OSGeo products and Open Source Geospatial topics in general. With a primary focus on local community development, it also plans to cooperate with the Francophone Chapter on French translations, and with other nearby chapters on some events. The chapter has approximately 90 members, and has formed a steering committee.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Chapitre_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois

OGR vector data tips and tricks

2008-06-28T14:31:00.006+02:00

Get vector map extent
You can easily grep the map extent of a vector map (bounding box):
ogrinfo /cdrom/ITALY_GC.SHP ITALY_GC | grep Extent
Extent: (9.299460, 43.787362) - (13.911350, 47.070188)

Merge of two SHAPE files
Merge of two SHAPE files 'file1.shp' and 'file2.shp' into a new file 'file_merged.shp' is performed like this:
ogr2ogr file_merged.shp file1.shp
ogr2ogr -update -append file_merged.shp file2.shp -nln file_merged file2

The second command is opening file_merged.shp in update mode, and trying to find existing layers and append the features being copied. The -nln option sets the name of the layer to be copied to.

Vector map reprojection
We reproject from the source projection (as defined in .prj file) to WGS84/LL:
ogr2ogr vmap0rd_ll.shp -t_srs "EPSG:4326" vmap0rd.shp

If the .prj file is missing, you can use the 'epsg_tr.py' utility to create it if you know the EPSG code:
epsg_tr.py -wkt 4326 > cities.prj

Reproject to current GRASS location projection:
ogr2ogr -t_srs "`g.proj -wf`" polbnda_italy_GB_ovest.shp polbnda_italy_LL.shp

Cut out a piece of a vector map
Use spatial query extents: -spat xmin ymin xmax ymax (W S E N)
ogr2ogr ARC_BZ.shp -spat 10 45 13 47 ARC.shp

Get VMAP0 metadata info
ogrinfo -ro gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr
ogrinfo -ro gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr | grep bnd
ogrinfo -ro gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr 'polbnda@bnd(*)_area'
ogrinfo -ro gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia 'roadl@trans(*)_line'

MAP0: Extract spatial subregion, reproject from NAD83 to WGS84
# coordinate order: W S E N
ogr2ogr -spat 19.95035 -26.94755 29.42989 -17.72624 -t_srs 'EPSG:4326' \
polbnda_botswana.shp gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr \
'polbnda@bnd(*)_area'

OGR and SQL
Sample 'where' statements (use -sql for PostgreSQL driver):
# -where 'fac_id in (195,196)'
# -where 'fac_id = 195'
ogrinfo -ro -where 'fac_id in (195,196)' \
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr 'polbnda@bnd(*)_area'

Find out the Countries VMAP0 coding
ogdi_info -u gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr \
-l 'polbnda@bnd(*)_area' -f area | grep Botswana
or read the VMAP0 Military specs, page 75pp

Extract Botswana, reproject on the fly from NAD83 to WGS84, store as SHAPE:
ogr2ogr -t_srs "EPSG:4326" -where "na2 = 'BC'" polbnda_botswana.shp \
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0soa/vmaplv0/soamafr 'polbnda@bnd(*)_area'

Extract Germany, reproject on the fly from NAD83 to WGS84, store as SHAPE:
ogr2ogr -t_srs "EPSG:4326" -where "na2 = 'GM'" polbnda_germany.shp
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia 'polbnda@bnd(*)_area'
ogrinfo -summary polbnda_germany.shp polbnda_germany | grep Extent
# Extent: (5.865639, 47.275776) - (15.039889, 55.055637)
# W S E N

VMAP0 Contour lines for Germany:
ogr2ogr -t_srs "EPSG:4326" -spat 5.865639 47.275776 15.039889 55.055637 \
contour_lines.shp \
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia 'contourl@elev(*)_line'

VMAP0 elevation spots (points) for Germany:
ogr2ogr -t_srs "EPSG:4326" -spat 5.865639 47.275776 15.039889 55.055637 \
elevation_spots.shp \
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia 'elevp@elev(*)_point'

VMAP0 lakes of Trentino province in Italy
ogr2ogr -t_srs "EPSG:4326" -where "na2 = 'IT'" \
-spat 10.340029 45.261888 10.98727 45.98993 \
lakes_italy.shp \
gltp:/vrf/grass0/warmerdam/v0eur/vmaplv0/eurnasia 'inwatera@hydro(*)_area'

Connect OGR and PostgreSQL/PostGIS
ogrinfo PG:'host=grass.itc.it user=postgres dbname=ogc_simple'
ogr2ogr out.shape PG:'host=grass.itc.it user=postgres dbname=ogc_simple' lake_geom

GRASS 6 and OGR
Convert GRASS 6 vector map to SHAPE (needs GDAL-OGR-GRASS plugin):
# -nln is "new layer name" for the result:
ogr2ogr archsites.shp grassdata/spearfish60/PERMANENT/vector/archsites/head 1 \
-nln archsites

Using WKT files with ogr2ogr
The definition is in ESRI WKT format. If you save it to a text file called out.wkt you can do the following in a translation to reproject input latlong points to this coordinate system:
ogr2ogr -s_srs WGS84 -t_srs ESRI::out.wkt out_dir indatasource

Most comand line options for GDAL/OGR tools that accept a coordinate system will allow you to give the name of a file containing WKT. And if you prefix the filename with ESRI:: the library will interprete the WKT as being ESRI WKT and convert to "standard" format accordingly. The -s_srs switch is assigning a source coordinate system to your input data (in case it didn't have this properly defined already), and the -t_srs is defining a target coordinate system to reproject to.

TIGER files in OGR
# linear features:
ogr2ogr tiger_lines.shp tgr46081.rt1 CompleteChain

# area features:
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages
tigerpoly.py tgr46081.rt1 tiger_area.shp

OGR CSV driver: easily indicate column types
You can now write a little csv help file to indicate the columns types to OGR. It works as follow :
Suppose you have a foobar.csv file that looks like this:
"ID","X","Y","AREA","NAME"
"1","1023.5","243.56","675","FOOBAR"
...

Now write a foobar.csvt file like this one:
"Integer","Real","Real","Integer","String"
The driver will then use the types you specified for the csv columns. The types recognized are Integer, Real and String, DateTime, and Date.

Convert KML to CSV (WKT)
First find layers:
ogrinfo -so myfile.kml

Then convert KML to CSV:
ogr2ogr -f CSV out.csv myfile.kml -sql "select *,OGR_GEOM_WKT from myfilelayer"
cat out.csv

Or use the cool online converter: http://geoconverter.hsr.ch

GDAL raster data tips and tricks

2008-06-28T13:57:00.005+02:00

Reading GRASS data through GDAL/OGR support

Example 1: We write out a GRASS raster map to GeoTIFF -- this format
includes the coordinates within the file's metadata:

gdal_translate -of Gtiff /usr/local/share/grassdata/spearfish/PERMANENT/cellhd/soils soilmap.tif

ogr2ogr roadsmap.shp /usr/local/share/grassdata/spearfish/PERMANENT/vector/roads/head

Fast image display with tiling
If you want fast access you might want to try converting e.g. a BIL files to a tiled TIFF, and build overviews. You can build overviews for BIL too, but it can't be directly tiled:

# add -co "PROFILE=BASELINE" for TIF/TFW
gdal_translate source_bil global30.tif -co "TILED=YES" -co "TFW=YES" -co "PROFILE=BASELINE"
gdaladdo global30.tif 2 4 8 16

GDAL performance problem?
GDAL_CACHEMAX is normally a number of megabytes (default is 10 or so). So something like:
gdal_translate -of GTIFF -co TILED=YES --config GDAL_CACHEMAX 120 madison_1f_01.jpg madison_1f_01.tif
would use a 120MB cache.

GDAL and 1 bit maps
With a trick you can get those:
gdal_merge.py -co NBITS=1 -o dst.tif src.tif

Generate 8 bit maps for Mapserver
gdal_translate -scale in.tif out.tif
Note: As of MapServer 4.4 support has been added for classifying non-8bit raster inputs

Greyscale conversion
A "proper" conversion would involve a colorspace transformation on the RGB image into IHS or something like that, and then taking the intensity. GRASS can do things like that.

Generate an OGC WKT (SRS)
In WKT the ellipsoid is described by two parameters: the semi-major axis and the inverse flattening. For a sphere the flattening is 0 and so the inverse flattening is infinity.

# in the GDAL source code:
cd apps
make testepsg
./testepsg '+proj=lcc +lat_1=35 +lat_2=65 +lat_0=52 +lon_0=10 +x_0=4000000 +y_0=2800000 +ellps=GRS80 +units=m'
Validate Succeeds.
WKT[+proj=lcc +lat_1=35 +lat_2=65 +lat_0=52 +lon_0=10 +x_0=4000000 +y_0=2800000 +ellps=GRS80 +units=m] =
PROJCS["unnamed",
GEOGCS["GRS 1980(IUGG, 1980)",
DATUM["unknown",
SPHEROID["GRS80",6378137,298.257222101]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],
UNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433]],
PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic_2SP"],
PARAMETER["standard_parallel_1",35],
PARAMETER["standard_parallel_2",65],
PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",52],
PARAMETER["central_meridian",10],
PARAMETER["false_easting",4000000],
PARAMETER["false_northing",2800000],
UNIT["Meter",1]]

Simplified WKT[+proj=lcc +lat_1=35 +lat_2=65 +lat_0=52 +lon_0=10 +x_0=4000000 +y_0=2800000 +ellps=GRS80 +units=m] =
PROJCS["unnamed",
GEOGCS["GRS 1980(IUGG, 1980)",
DATUM["unknown",
[..]

Extracting spatial subset (subregion)
W N E S
gdal_translate -of GTiff -projwin 636861 5152686 745617 5054047.5 \
p192r28_5t19920809_nn1.tif test1_utm.tif

Fixing broken projection/datum info for raster data
gdal_translate -of HFA -a_srs epsg:32735 /cdrom/173072lsat.img \
173072lsat_fixed.img

# or, using a WKT file
gdal_translate -of HFA -a_srs file.prj /cdrom/173072lsat.img \
173072lsat_fixed.img

Merge various import maps, re-project on the fly and extract spatial subset according to current GRASS region
eval `g.region -g`
gdalwarp -te $w $s $e $n *.TIF \
srtm_cgiar3_italy_north_LL.tif

Export to (limited) TIFF readers such as ArcView, or ImageMagick
Many tools have trouble reading multi-band TIFFs with "band interleaving", the GDAL output default. Best is to use the INTERLEAVE=PIXEL creation option. Just add to the gdal_translate command line:
-co INTERLEAVE=PIXEL

Inserting metadata (metadata tags)
gdal_translate -outsize 37.5% 37.5% \
-mo TIFFTAG_XRESOLUTION=300 -mo TIFFTAG_YRESOLUTION=300 \
in.tif out.tif

Raster map reprojection (warping)
gdalwarp -t_srs '+init=epsg:26591 +towgs84=-225,-65,9' test1.tif \
test1_gb.tif

Raster map reprojection (warping) maintaining NULL values (sea etc):

gdalwarp -r bilinear -tr 1000 1000 \
-srcnodata "-32768" -dstnodata "-32768" \
-wo "INIT_DEST=-32768" \
-t_srs epsg:32632 italy_LL.tif italy_UTM32.tif

Reprojecting external map to current GRASS location externally
gdalwarp -t_srs "`g.proj -wf`" aster.tif aster_tmerc.tif

Cut out region of interest with gdalwarp (in target coords)
Add to command line (insert values instead of letters of course:
#damn order, differs from -projwin!!
-te W S E N

Merging many small adjacent DEMs into one big map (A)
This needs GDAL compiled with Python and numpy installed:
# if not installed in standard site-packages directory
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages
gdal_merge.py -v -o spearfishdem.tif -n "-32768" d*.tif

Merging many small adjacent DEMs into one big map (B)
Even easier, just use gdalwarp:
gdalwarp C_1mX1m/dtm*.tif big.tif
Or just a few tiles:
gdalwarp C_1mX1m/dtm0010[4-5]* big_selection.tif

Merge various map/bands into a RGB composite
gdal_merge.py -of HFA -separate band1.img band2.img band3.img -o out.img

GDAL gdalwarp interpolation comments
Which method -rn, rb, -rc or -rcs should one use for DEM and which for data like e.g. Landsat TM reprojecting?

-tps: Enable use of thin plate spline transformer based on available GCPs.
-rn: Use nearest neighbour resampling (default, fastest algorithm, worst interpolation quality).
-rb: Use bilinear resampling.
-rc: Use cubic resampling.
-rcs: Use cubic spline resampling (slowest algorithm).

FrankW suggests:
I would suggest -rb for DEMs, and one of the cubic kernels for landsat data. Of course, there are various factors that you should take into account. Using -rb (bilinear) for the DEM will perform local averaging of the nearby pixel values in the source. This give reasonable results without introducing any risky "overshoot" effects you might see with cubic that could be disturbing for analysis or visualization in a DEM. The cubic should in theory do better at preserving edges and general visual crispness than using bilinar or nearest neighbour. However, if you are wanting to do analysis with the landsat (such as multispectral classification) I would suggest just using -rn (nearest neighbour) so as to avoid causing odd effects to the spectral values.
Nobody can't tell you what method should be used in your case. Generally speaking, in the case of upsampling spline and cubic interpolators are more suitable (-rcs and -rc). In the case of downsampling and the same resolution it is completely up to you what method looks better. Just try them all and select the one which is most appropriate for you.

Geocoding with 'gdal_translate'
FrankW suggests:
As far as I know there is not on-screen method for doing this, but it certainly isn't too difficult with a little bit of semi-manual work. Open two OpenEV views, one with the unreferenced image, one with the geo-reference base you want to use. Move your cursor over the non-referenced one (let's call it image1), record (read: write down!) the pixel x,y values. Then look at the same location in image2. Write down the geocoordinate for the pixel. You should have four numbers for each location you want to pin the image to. And so on and so on. Then use gdal_translate to translate image1.tif to image1_georefd.tif but adding the -GCP parameter for each set of coordinates. Like so...

gdal_translate -gcp 1 1 500000 5000000 \
-gcp 200 400 550000 5250000 image1.tif \
image1_geo.tif

Reading HDF ASTER
gdalinfo pg-PR1B0000-2002031402_100_001

To select a channel and warp to UTM (or whatever is inside):
gdalwarp HDF4_SDS:ASTER_L1B:"pg-PR1B0000-2002031402_100_001":2 aster_2.tif
gdalinfo aster_2.tif

GDAL/OGR 1.5.2 released

2008-06-06T19:57:00.000+02:00

A new bugfix release of GDAL/OGR (now at V1.5.2) was released today. This stable branch bug fix release fixes 37 issues in various drivers.

Impressive GRASS GIS Web site statistics

2008-06-04T22:25:00.005+02:00

Just to update you on the GRASS Web statistics development, here the grass.osgeo.org statistics (remember, we have MANY mirror sites):

Month Unique Number Pages Hits Bandwidth
visitors of
visits
Jan 2008 39223 74088 291166 715946 101.23 GB
Feb 2008 38984 74043 218314 623770 107.09 GB
Mar 2008 40674 73389 223666 621816 107.04 GB
Apr 2008 5490 15702 135134 403726 220.87 GB
May 2008 20613 104556 912263 2242942 1442.31 GB

(this includes of course search engine traffic)

It appears that many visitors came back in May who downloaded the long awaited GRASS 6.3.0 release from 23 Apr 2008.

Some outstanding hits for May (views, only grass.osgeo.org):
10095 /grass63/binary/mswindows/native/
3271 /grass63/binary/mswindows/native/WinGRASS-6.3.0-Setup.exe

This points out of obvious need for a portable, in this case also MS-Windows compliant GIS which GRASS 6.3.0 now is! Fetch native winGRASS with installer or GRASS for MacOSX or GRASS for Linux or ...

d.vect: support for z height (geometry) colors added

2008-05-24T00:26:00.000+02:00

After getting mad with Lidar points colorizing which till now
required a DB table with GRASSRGB attributes, I have
modified d.vect to support colors directly from z height (geometry).
Works for 3D points, lines (eg, 3D contours) and 3D polygons
(eg delaunay triangles):

# Spearfish:
g.region rast=elevation.10m
r.random elevation.10m n=5000 vector=random3d -d
d.mon x0
# display as black points
d.vect random3d
# display 3D points colorized according to z height
d.vect -z random3d zcol=gyr

# 3D contour lines
r.contour elevation.10m out=contour20m step=20
d.vect -z contour20m zcol=gyr

# generate 3D triangles
v.delaunay random3d out=random3d_del
# display 3D polygons colorized according to z height
d.vect -z random3d_del type=area zcol=gyr

Enjoy,
Markus

Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)

2008-04-26T16:47:00.000+02:00

Another nice recent OSGeo discussion: Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?

Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library

2008-04-26T16:45:00.000+02:00

GRASS, QGIS and others are in the need of their own map printing tools for high quality output but these projects should not start from scratch. There is a wealth of underlying code already in Mapserver, Mapguide etc which could be re-used in the terms of their respective licenses and certainly of programming language compatibility. A joint OSGeo Cartographic Library comes to mind.

See also the ongoing related discussion!

GRASS GIS releases version 6.3.0

2008-04-24T18:05:00.002+02:00

GRASS GIS releases version 6.3.0
23 April 2008
http://grass.osgeo.org

GRASS 6.3.0 is a "technology preview" release, the first beta on the path to GRASS 6.4-stable, and also marks the start of work on GRASS 7. As such GRASS 6.3.0 is not intended to be a stable release with ongoing support, but after five months of quality-assurance review users can be confident to use this version for their day to day work, indeed due to the open development model many already do.

This release brings hundreds of new module features, supported data formats, and language translations, as well as a number of exciting enhancements to the GIS. A prototype of the new wxPython user interface is debuted, and for the the first since its inception with a port from the VAX 11/780 in 1983, GRASS will run on a non-UNIX based platform: MS-Windows. This is currently still in an experimental state and we hope that widespread testing of 6.3.0 will mean the 6.4 release of WinGRASS will be fully functional and robust. Existing users will be happy to know that these new features do not disrupt the base GIS which remains as solid as ever and fully backwards compatible with earlier GRASS 6.0 and GRASS 6.2 releases.

Several infrastructure changes accompany this release with the project becoming a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). This includes a new home for the website, the Wiki help system, source code repository, community add-on module repository, integrated bug tracking system, and formal membership for the project in a non-profit legal entity. We hope that these changes will guarantee that the GRASS community will be well supported and vibrant well into the future.

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for spatial modeling, visualization of both raster and vector data, geospatial data management and analysis, processing of satellite and aerial imagery, and production of sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS combines powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software package.

The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) by volunteers the world over. GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the professional world in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis, in the open, and is given away for free. Emphasis is placed on interoperability and unlimited access to data as well as on software flexibility and evolution rate. The source code is freely available allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, addition of new features, and fast bug fixing.

GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

Software download at http://grass.osgeo.org/download/ and numerous mirror sites.

Full story at http://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass630.html

Feature Comparison of Open Source Desktop GIS Software

2008-03-20T16:53:00.000+01:00

A very detailed and interesting comparison of FOSS GIS for desktop has been compiled by Stefan Steiniger:

http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/

Incontro per la promozione del Software Libero nelle Pubbliche Amministrazioni

2008-02-27T09:27:00.000+01:00

27 Febbraio 2008

Trento Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via S. Croce, 77

La Fondazione Bruno Kessler è lieta di annunciare l’incontro: ''SI PUÒ FARE - Software Libero nelle Pubbliche Amministrazioni” , organizzato nell'ambito del progetto E-society della Provincia Autonoma di Trento, in collaborazione con il consorzio dei Comuni Trentini.

Siete invitati a portare il contributo della vostra presenza alla giornata, che metterà a confronto esperti internazionali con i temi dell’operare quotidiano della Pubblica Amministrazione, delle imprese e del mondo della formazione.

Saranno affrontate questioni relative ai formati dei dati, alle licenze d'uso, ai concetti di standard, interoperabilità e accessibilità, anche in relazione alla formulazione di bandi pubblici di fornitura. Ampio spazio sara` dedicato all'illustrazione e alla discussione di iniziative e progetti a carattere locale.

Programma
9:00 Apertura dei lavori

Introduzione del Presidente della Fondazione Bruno Kessler, ANDREA ZANOTTI
Saluto del Presidente del Consorzio dei Comuni Trentini, RENZO ANDERLE

9:15 Interventi

Progetto E-Society: Linee guida in materia di interoperabilità dei sistemi informatici e di Software Open Source, GIANLUCA SALVATORI, Assessore Ricerca e Innovazione Provincia autonoma di Trento.
Questionario Interoperabilità, ARIANNA DEMOZZI, Ufficio Statistica, Provincia Autonoma di Trento.
La questione dei formati aperti e gli standard, HUGO LEITER, Consorzio dei Comuni della Provincia autonoma di Bolzano.

10:45 Pausa caffè --- dimostrazioni
11:15 Interventi

Caso di studio: L'Ospedale Classificato di San Pancrazio, MICHELE LANZA
Caso di Studio: Comune di Trento, ROBERTO RESOLI e GIACOMO FIORONI
Licenze d'uso e acquisizione di Software Libero, MARCO CIURCINA, Studio Legale.it
Caso di Studio: Comune di Predazzo, ALBERTO FELICETTI

13:00 Pausa Pranzo
14:30 Interventi

Caso di studio: Comune di Riva del Garda, GIACOMO CENINI
Software Libero e Pubblica Amministrazione, CRISTHOPHER GABRIEL, Truelite, Srl.
Strumenti Open Source per l'interoperabilità fra pubbliche amministrazioni: un'esperienza nell'ambito socio sanitario, MARCO PISTORE , Fondazione Bruno Kessler.

16:00 Pausa caffè --- dimostrazioni
16:30 Interventi

Caso di studio: Comune di Storo, STEFANO BERTUZZI e GIOVANNI BERTI
Caso di studio: Software Libero e didattica, VINCENZO D'ANDREA, Università di Trento.
La comunità trentina del Software Libero: Linux Trent, DIAOLIN (Giuliano Natali).
CENTROS -- il Centro di Competenza per il Software Open Source
BRUNO CAPRILE, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

17:30 Chiusura dei lavori

Alla giornata parteciperanno, con loro dimostrativi, le seguenti imprese:
AXIA Studio -- http://www.axiastudio.it
MPA Solutions -- http://www.mpasol.it
OpenContent -- http://www.opencontent.it
OPEN IT -- http://www.openit.it
Posit SC-- http://www.posit.it
Wildix -- http://www.wildix.com
Organizzazione : Cristina Moretto, moretto@fbk.eu --Tel. +39 0461 314520 Fax +39 0461 314591
Ulteriori informazioni sull'incontro http://centros.fbk.eu

2008-02-19T22:27:00.000+01:00

A fifth release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 is now available:

Source code download:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass63/source/grass-6.3.0RC5.tar.gz

An initial announcement has been drafted at
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/6.3.0RC5-News

Key fixes include improved portability for MS-Windows (native support), several module fixes, and especially the introduction of a new, Python based portable graphical user interface which includes a new vector digitizer.

About GRASS GIS:
Commonly referred to as GRASS, this is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. GRASS is official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Web site: http://grass.osgeo.org/

New official OSGeo projects: GDAL, GRASS GIS and FDO

2008-02-08T21:40:00.000+01:00

Today, at the OSGeo board meeting the graduation of the GDAL, GRASS GIS and FDO projects from incubation was approved. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects. All OSGeo projects are undergoing an incubation process to ensure that projects that are able to become official part of OSGeo. The criteria are:

have a successfully operating open and collaborative development community
have clear intellectual properties oversight of the code base of the project
adopt the OSGeo principles and operating principles.

Projects are mentored through the incubation process, eventually the incubation committee is verifying if the project is ready for full status. The OSGeo Board of Directors accepts or rejects a project's graduation from the incubator. Upon graduation, a member of the project's PMC is selected to report to the foundation board periodically on project status.

FOSS4G Proceedings Now Available - OSGeo Journal Volume 3

2007-12-29T18:50:00.000+01:00

Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director of OSGeo reports:

The OSGeo Journal team is pleased to announce the availability of Volume 3. This volume of the Journal is dedicated to publishing the proceedings from the FOSS4G 2007 conference held in September. 14 different papers, representing over 35 authors were contributed. They cover a wide range of Integration, Development, Topical Interest and Case Study material.

You can access the Journal as a print-ready PDF or as individual PDF articles from:
http://www.osgeo.org/journal/volume3

Our next volume will be delayed until the first quarter of 2008. If you are interested in submitting articles, please add your name to:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Journal_Volume_4

Enjoy the articles and best wishes for the New Year!

GRASS GIS releases version 6.2.3

2007-11-29T18:32:00.000+01:00

27 November 2007
http://grass.osgeo.org

The development team is happy to announce that a new bugfix version of GRASS GIS has been released today. This release fixes a number of bugs discovered in the 6.2.2 source code. It is primarily for stability purposes and adds minimal new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations and updates for the help pages and projection database.

Highlights include further maturation of the GRASS 6 GUI, vector, and database code. Some improvements have been backported from the GRASS 6.3 development branch where new development continues at a strong pace of approximately one code commit every hour, including major work on an all new cross-platform wxPython GUI and a native MS Windows port (from 6.3.0 onwards).

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) combining powerful raster, vector, remote sensing and and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software suite. GRASS 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 4D presentation graphics and hardcopy maps.

GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open-source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

GRASS is a proposed founding project of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation. In support of the movement towards consolidation in the open source geospatial software world, GRASS is tightly integrated with the latest GDAL/OGR libraries. This enables access to an extensive range of raster and vector formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features. GRASS also makes use of the highly regarded PROJ.4 software library with support for most known map projections and the easy definition of new and rare map projections via custom parameterization. Strong links are maintained with the QuantumGIS and R Statistics projects with integrated GRASS toolkits available for both.

Software download at http://grass.osgeo.org/download/ and numerous
mirror sites.

Full story at http://grass.osgeo.org/announces/announce_grass623.html

New GRASS Book published: Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach

2007-11-25T17:07:00.000+01:00

The new edition of Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach is now available! With this third edition, we enter the new era of GRASS 6, the first release that includes substantial new code developed by the International GRASS Development Team. The dramatic growth in open source software libraries has made GRASS 6 development more efficient, and has enhanced GRASS interoperability with a wide range of open source and proprietary geospatial tools. The book is based on GRASS 6.3.

Thoroughly updated with material related to GRASS6, the third edition includes new sections on attribute database management and SQL support, vector networks analysis, lidar data processing and new graphical user interfaces. All chapters are updated with numerous practical examples using the first release of a comprehensive, state-of-the-art geospatial data set. This new OSGeo Educational data set along with additional material can be downloaded from http://www.grassbook.org/

GRASS GIS 6.3.0RC2 released

2007-11-20T12:51:00.000+01:00

A second release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 is now available:

http://grass.itc.it/grass63/source/grass-6.3.0RC2.tar.gz

An initial announcement has been drafted at
http://grass.itc.it/announces/announce_grass630.html
(state April 2007, further fixes need to be merged in from
http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_6.3_Feature_Plan
RC1 and RC2)

Key fixes include improved portability for MS-Windows (native support), hundreds of fixes, TclTk based portable graphical interface and much new functionality.

Release candidate management at
http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_6.3_Feature_Plan

Please test, test, test...

Thanks to all contributors!

Markus

winGRASS 6.3.0RC1 and QGIS 0.9.0 now available

2007-10-28T10:28:00.000+01:00

A MS-Windows native binary of the current 6.3.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available at:
http://geog-pc40.ulb.ac.be/grass/wingrass/wingrass63RC1.zip
Read the README for installation, known issues and other information. This version no longer requires a n installation of Cygwin.

The QGIS team announces the release of QGIS 0.9.0 (the package for MS-Windows contains GRASS 6.3.0RC1). The QGIS team offers also packages for Linux and MacOSX.

First release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 now available

2007-10-24T00:40:00.000+02:00

A first release candidate of GRASS 6.3.0 is now available:

http://grass.itc.it/grass63/source/
-> grass-6.3.0RC1.tar.gz

An initial announcement has been drafted at
http://grass.itc.it/announces/announce_grass630.html
(state April 2007, further fixes need to be merged in)

Key fixes include improved portability for MS-Windows
(native support), hundreds of fixes, TclTk based
portable graphical interface and much new functionality.

Release candidate management at
http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/wiki/GRASS_6.3_Feature_Plan

Please test, test, test...

GRASS GIS: Vector network analysis significantly easier now

2007-08-03T17:45:00.000+02:00

Also getting mad to connect your vector points to the graph? Stuff like "node is unreachable"? Same thing here, till last week. In GRASS 6.3 (still CVS), the v.net tool was extended to easily connect nodes to a graph. Just specify the vector network map and the nodes map along with a distance threshold to only connect in a reasonable way.

Screenshot examples for GRASS vector networking can be seen here: travelling salesman analysis, Steiner Trees, and Iso-distances. Enjoy.

Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project

2007-04-23T21:36:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I'll give a talk at University of Trento about the question why free software development works. Focus will be on GRASS, a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, spatial modeling, and visualization. The project has an outstanding history as it was originally started a military project, but in the public domain. With the advent of Internet and related network based development tools a community was formed. Nowadays, both users and developers are spread over the globe and manage to develop this software with low administrational overhead and a good communication culture. This seminar reviews the technical and social aspects of this Free GIS project.

You can get the seminar slides here.

OSGeo Celebrates 1st Anniversary

2007-02-12T22:15:00.001+01:00

Tyler Mitchell, OSGeo's Executive Director, illustrates in a recent posting the many highlights from the first year of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Read more at http://www.osgeo.org/tyler/

OSGeo Celebrates 1st Anniversary

2007-02-12T22:15:00.000+01:00

Tyler Mitchell, OSGeo's Executive Director, illustrates in a recent posting the many highlights from the first year of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Read more at http://www.osgeo.org/tyler/

First combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume published

2006-12-20T22:14:00.000+01:00

The GRASS-News editors and OSGeo Promotion and Visibility Committee announce the first combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume. You can find the full pdf (5.3 MB) as well as PDFs of individual articles on the GRASS webpage:
http://grass.itc.it/newsletter/index.php
or directly via:
http://www.osgeo.org/content/news/news_archive/GRASS_OSGeo_News_vol4.pdf

A first edition of OSGeo-News will be published in 2007 with interesting articles covering various topics of OpenSource projects. Please visit http://www.osgeo.org in the next couple of weeks to find more detailed information how to submit articles.

GRASS GIS releases version 6.2.1

2006-12-12T22:38:00.000+01:00

GRASS 6.2.1 is a new stable release which fixes several bugs discovered in the 6.2.0 source code. This release is solely for stability purposes and adds no new features. Besides bug fixes it also includes a number of new message translations, updates for the help pages, and will better handle errors caused by missing or incorrectly installed support software. It also introduces a new 3D raster module which was left out of the last release due to time constraints.

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for spatial modeling, visualization of both raster and vector data, geospatial data management and analysis, processing of satellite and aerial imagery, and production of sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS combines powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software package.

The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) by volunteers the world over. GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the professional world in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis, in the open, and is given away for free. Emphasis is placed on interoperability and unlimited access to data as well as on software flexibility and evolution rate. The source code is freely available allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, addition of new features, and fast bug fixing.

GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

Software download at http://grass.itc.it/download/ and numerous mirror sites.

Full story at http://grass.itc.it/announces/announce_grass621.html

FWTools 1.1.0 for Linux and Win32 published

2006-11-25T16:20:00.000+01:00

Frank Warmerdam has published the new FWTools 1.1.0 binaries for linux and win32. FWTools includes OpenEV, GDAL, MapServer, PROJ.4 and OGDI as well as some supporting components. Basic changes are in the Linux version which now includes the addition of PostgreSQL support in OGR, and SOS Server support in MapServer. This release also includes the new, experimental, PDS (Planetary Data) format support. Download from:

http://www.gdal.org/dl/fwtools/FWTools110.exe
http://www.gdal.org/dl/fwtools/FWTools-linux-1.1.0.tar.gz

European Soil Databases "freely" available as vector maps now

2006-11-25T15:55:00.000+01:00

To my surprise I found an announcement from last week, that the "European Soil Databases" (ESDB) are freely available to the public. In the light of the new INSPIRE directive, the combination of freely & public for European data will apparently remain rare. Of course we are talking free beer/lunch here since "The data are made available for research purposes only and not for any other activity [...] The permission to use ... under no circumstances are these data passed to third parties." and so forth. I feel that our taxpayers money was used to prepare these data.

How to obtain the "European Soil Databases"? You have to send a MS-Word (!) document to them to register. This file opens with a little layout mess in OpenOffice. When will they switch to open document formats (read: ASCII for this purpose or HTML form)? But we should not complain too much of course. Just submitted, let's wait for the non-free (in the sense of freedom) data now...

Tip of the day: getting Excel/Access into PostgreSQL

2006-11-14T21:48:00.000+01:00

Do you also dislike it to manually convert Excel tables into PostgreSQL? Not having real fun in exporting to CSV, then manually writing the SQL header and importing the stuff in PG? After messing around with tools like csv2sql.pl, xbase2pg and other stuff, I found this great article today:

Bringing data into OpenOffice 2.0's database by Solveig Haugland

It explains how to get data out of one database, such as Access, into an OpenOffice database table. Using for example the PostgreSQL driver, the data will then be directly stored there. Essentially you open the Excel (or whatever) table with OpenOffice-Calc, select and copy the full table or a subset to the clipboard, and simply paste it into OpenOffice-Base with the right mouse button. A wizard pops up which let's you define the type of each column and a primary key. Save & done. Can't be easier!

Find a more detailed page on how to connect OpenOffice-Base to various DBMS here.

PyWPS 1.0.0 released: GRASS goes Web

2006-11-09T19:17:00.000+01:00

Today PyWPS 1.0.0 has been released by Jachym Cepicky. PyWPS (Python Web Processing Service) implements the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) standard in Python programming language. It has been written with native support for GRASS GIS which allows for accessing GRASS modules via Web. Processes can be run asynchronously. By default, GRASS GIS is supported, other tools (R, GDAL/OGR, PROJ.4, ...) can be configured, too.

A first demo application can be seen here: WUIW - a PyWPS AJAX Web Interface.

New QGIS Native Windows package with GRASS GIS Support

2006-11-09T19:09:00.000+01:00

Tim Sutton reports that he has packaged QGIS as native Windows version bundled with GRASS GIS. Details are available in his blog, and the package with installer can be downloaded.

GRASS GIS 6.2.0 released 31 Oct 2006

2006-10-31T21:46:00.000+01:00

http://grass.itc.it

This new stable release adds hundreds of new features, support for the latest GIS data formats, and includes new translations for many languages.

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for spatial modeling, visualization of both raster and vector data, geospatial data management and analysis, processing of satellite and aerial imagery, and production of sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS combines powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software package.

The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) by volunteers the world over. GRASS differs from many other GIS software packages used in the professional world in that it is developed and distributed by users for users, mostly on a volunteer basis, in the open, and is given away for free. Emphasis is placed on interoperability and unlimited access to data as well as on software flexibility and evolution rate. The source code is freely available allowing for immediate customization, examination of the underlying algorithms, addition of new features, and fast bug fixing.

GRASS is used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

The software can be downloaded from http://grass.itc.it/download/ , http://grass.ibiblio.org/download/ and numerous mirror sites.

Thanks to all developers, testers and (new) users!

GRASS GIS News RSS feed available

2006-10-31T12:15:00.000+01:00

Finally also the GRASS GIS Web site comes with RSS feed (http://grass.itc.it/rss.xml). All in preparation of the 6.2.0 release to be expected in hopefully a couple of hours...

GRASS GIS 6.2.0RC3 published

2006-10-24T00:50:00.000+02:00

The hopefully final release candidate GRASS GIS 6.2.0RC3 has been published. The following fixes have been done:

r.le.setup fixes (Glynn, Hamish)
default color map range (bug #5212) (Glynn)
fix v.digit/toolbox.tcl for tcl8.3 (Hamish)
update to EPSG 6.11.1 (Markus)
close GRASS after creating new location from file (Markus)
Fine tune intro text when launching GRASS in text mode (Paul)
gis.m zooming in mapcanvas.tcl (Michael)
missing Polish EPSG codes (Frank, Maciej)
initial Arabic translation (A. Masoud)

See also the GRASS Wiki Roadmap. This release candidate should be very close (or even almost identical) to the final release of GRASS 6.2.0.

Thanks to all contributors - coders and testers!

OSGeo.org Hires an Executive Director

2006-10-19T18:08:00.000+02:00

Frank Warmerdam, president of OSGeo.org announces that OSGeo has succeeded in hiring Tyler Mitchell as a full time executive director from November 2006 onwards. The full press release gives some background. There have been lengthy discussions if an Executive Director is needed and desired for a community driven foundation, but in the end it was decided that a hired "Ed" is essential as driving force - to get stuff done. Tyler will give organizational support for the quickly growing OSGeo community and act as "to-go" person and contact point. The idea is to give support to the various committees and act as shortcut between the various subcommunities as constituted by the OSGeo software, education and public geodata projects. Of course he will also play a major role in promoting the ideas and concepts of OSGeo around the globe. A detailed job description was prepared and approved by the board based on further reflections.

Welcome, Tyler!

QGIS with experimental WFS support

2006-10-03T23:17:00.000+02:00

How nice: the development version of QGIS (in SVN) now comes with WFS support as Marco Hugentobler informs us. And it even works! Let's see if the new plugin still gets included into the upcoming 0.8 binary release. Since QGIS 0.8 Preview 2 is already available, it will only reach the next release. But thanks to the GFOSS development model we can use it anyway...

FOSS4G conference series growth

2006-09-30T23:35:00.000+02:00

The recent FOSS4G2006 conference at Lausanne, Switzerland was a great success. It was amazing to see how many people showed up and how many creative ideas they presented there. From Jody's blog I took some of the next figures, but obviously the conference merge of this year had a longer story. The Lausanne conference was a come together of MUM, GRASS, EOGEO, Java and more folks with their various community conferences. Here a more complete version:

2002	150 people	GRASS Users conference, Trento, Italy (Proceedings)
2003	90 people	MapServer User Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings?)
2004	150+ people	FOSS4G: GRASS Users Conference, Bangkok, Thailand (Proceedings)
2004	200+ people	MapServer User Meeting and Open Source GIS Conference, Ottawa, Canada (Proceedings)
2005	300+ people	MUM3 - Open Source Geospatial Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings)
2006	500+ people	Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland (Proceedings)

2007 you ask? We'll see, OSGeo.org will publish the call for hosting the conference soon. Some ideas are already floating around. Having 500+ people is nice, maybe we should not aim at 1000+ ...

Public geodata to reach 6500 verified signatures

2006-09-27T22:49:00.000+02:00

Impressive: the European petition on public geodata will reach 6500 verified signatures the next days! In total, more than 8000 signatures were already collected... BTW: Did YOU sign?

GRASS 6.2.0RC1 is out

2006-09-27T16:40:00.000+02:00

GRASS 6.2.0RC1 was released yesterday (http://grass.itc.it/grass62/source/).
We are getting very close to the next stable version. This release improves upon the previous stable
version of GRASS by adding hundreds of new features as well as support for the latest GIS data formats. More soon!

New GRASS-Python Interface starts to work

2006-09-23T21:05:00.000+02:00

After an extra round of hacking, the new SWIG based new GRASS 6.3 Python interface starts work within a GRASS session. We can now call GRASS C functionality in Python scripts. Via libera for GRASS as GIS backbone for other software packages!

[Special thanks to Alessandro Frigeri for the nice logo]

Soviet Military Topographic Map Sets?

2006-09-23T14:29:00.001+02:00

I get the impression that the Web sites where Soviet Military Topographic Map Sets are collected, slowly disappear from the web. I wonder, if OSGeo.org could give these really nice maps a new home. I found some remaining material on the web:

Map coverage (latest?):
* http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060523215417/http://library.ucsc.edu/maps/ucsmg/soviet.jpg

Some links:

Soviet Topographic Map Symbols
* http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/pdf/soviet.pdf

A good question is of course the copyright...

Sol Katz Award

2006-09-15T13:27:00.000+02:00

How cool - I got the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS)!

GRASS meets Povray

2006-08-23T20:45:00.000+02:00

What you can do with GRASS and Povray... Italian Alps seen by Landsat.