Slashgeo

Anonymous Voxel writes "The open source webmapping server GeoServer 1.5.3 has been released. According to GeosServer Blog [...] This version represents the culmination of a ton of hard work to make GeoServer more compatible with the new formats gaining great popularity in the rapidly expanding geo world. Foremost among the improvements is a number of advances in our support for Google Earth. KML, the format understood by Google Earth, has been available from GeoServer for awhile. But our implementation wasn’t flexible enough to make good looking maps and to take advantage of the advanced features of the format. That has all changed, with better default styling, custom placemarks from templates, support for ‘Super-Overlays’ and Time, and automatic generation of legend information. There is also experimental support for referencing an existing cache of tiles to use in a Super-Overlay. The ability to style one’s 2d map and get the same output in Google Earth has also improved dramatically, as it now picks up proper scale elements." The rest of the announcement below.

Several recent entries have discussed the newly available demo of WPServer, a web processing server which allow geoprocessing over an Internet connexion. Here's the must-read followup entry: "Want your shapefiles on a map? Use FeatureServer. Want to buffer each of the points in your FeatureServer-served data? Serialize them, and pass them up to WPServer, then display the data that comes back. Want to mix in KML data, to see the intersections? Add a KML layer to OpenLayers, and use WPServer to do the intersections. Crap. I think what OpenLayers can do now might actually be something people would refer to as GIS." Spatially Adjusted discuss this demo and is impressed. Random Nodes also shares his thoughts on this web-based GIS solution. import cartography even claim this open source approach may beat ArcGIS Server directly, this tells you how important the matter is. See also the two previous stories on WPS in the related stories below. Related, there's the release of PyWPS 2.0.

The wonderful GDAL/OGR now has a new addition, Mateusz Loskot developed a GeoJSON driver for OGR. To refresh our minds, GeoJSON was introduced last month. From the blog entry: "The GeoJSON format fits very well the same niches as GML, like geospatial data interchange over network. Currently, GeoJSON is supported as output format of services implemented by FeatureServer, GeoServer and CartoWeb. [...] The OGR GeoJSON driver provides implementation of functions transforming GeoJSON encoded data to objects of OGR Simple Features model: Datasource, Layer, Feature, Geometry." With the new GDAL/OGR 1.4.3 now including WMS support, one can wonder what GDAL/OGR will not be able to do in the future! ;-)