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.

The import cartography and EarthBrowser blogs have been discussing GeoJSON lately. Probably the best starting point is Direction Mag's excellent recent article on GeoJSON, a peak to Wikipedia JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) article can be useful. From the DM article: "One emerging geospatial technology standard that bears monitoring, GeoJSON (pronounced jee-oh-jay-son, sometimes with emphasis on the last syllable), may result in a viable software messaging language (e.g. a computer software system to computer software system messaging language) that can be simultaneously more compact than XML and more readable by a human. Compactness increases in importance when considering the large amount of geospatial data that must be shared in some system integrations. (Insistence that languages for computer-to-computer communication should be "human readable" is a pervasive theme for many IT standards bodies, and that likely says more about software developers' reluctance to release control than it does the necessity that the information actually ever be readable.) "

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 GDAL mailing list announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.3. Here's the bugfix list and new features. GDAL is quite mature, being used by ESRI, Google, most open source geospatial software and many more. From the official site: "GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. [...] The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data." Copied below is a link to the previous story on comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. Update: 11/02 18:14 GMT by S : Wouhou! A colleague just made me realize the GDAL WMS driver is included in this release, and with little efforts, we made it work. This is great news and a new easy way to add WMS support for projects which uses GDAL/OGR. However, I don't know yet to which extent the driver can be considered mature or not.

The GDAL mailing list informs us the widely used GDAL/OGR 1.4.4 has been released: "This is a bug fix release in the 1.4.x stable release series and adds no significant new features. This release replaces the GDAL/OGR 1.4.3 release which has been retracted by the project as it included an unexpected ABI (Application Binary Interface) change from the earlier 1.4.x releases." Here's the detailed changes.

The OSGeo-Announce mailing list informs us the open source GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 has been released. Considering the almost ubiquitous use of GDAL in open source and proprietary software, this is doubtlessly great news, especially with the numerous new drivers included for 1.5.0. Mateusz Loskot provides a few statistics: "more than 420 tickets closed on the Trac, implemented 17 new GDAL drivers for raster formats, and 4 new OGR drivers for vectors, implemented 4 (5 counting RFC 16) RFC documents, added 5 new command line utilities, plus, big number of features and improvements in SWIG bindings for scripting languages." In related news, Proj.4 4.6.0 has also been released.