Slashgeo

A few weeks ago GIS Monitor published an interesting article about the state of GRASS GIS, including comments from Markus Neteler, who is one of the directors of the new Open Source Geospatial Foundation and major GRASS developer. From the article: "The new built-in GRASS GUI, developed within the past six months, is expanding the software's user base. Many more users than in the past, Neteler told me, are saying "I am new to GIS and I want to use GRASS." However, he acknowledges that it will take "many months" for the new GUI to become well known in the larger GIS community. [...] What is the single biggest current development in GRASS? It is porting it to Windows as a native application, says Neteler. Many users, he points out, are not interested in switching to Linux. "We expect to release the first official Windows version by the start of next year," he told me."

The GRASS GIS team and the OSGeo announced the first combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume [pdf, 5.3Mb]. From the newsletter: "It is my pleasure to introduce the future expansion of GRASS-News. The next edition will be morphed into a broader Open Source Geospatial Newsletter covering projects from the OSGeo Foundation and beyond. The aim is to bring relevant news and articles to a larger audience by widening the focus and changing the name." The newsletter is 34 pages long.

markusN writes "GRASS 6.2.2 is a new stable release which fixes several bugs discovered in the 6.2.1 source code. This release is solely for stability purposes and adds no new features. The default Graphical User Interface has been further stabilised, and the LIDAR processing tools and Linear Reference System support significantly improved. GRASS 6.2.2 also includes a number of new message translations, and updates for the help pages." More on the official page.

The OSGeo mailing list links to a new articles on open source GIS from the GIS Development magazine, including articles on Quantum GIS and deegree. From the "Open Source Tools for GIS Professionals" article: "Open Source Software (OSS) has been maturing over the last years into robust, well-supported tools whose code base grows exponentially. Open Source GIS is no exception to this trend and it is now able to address the needs of GIS professionals worldwide. [...] Building on existing OSS operating systems, database, web services and software development technologies, today we find well-established OSS systems focused on geospatial applications. These systems range from spatially enabled databases like PostGIS, data analysis environments like GRASS, web server technologies (MapServer, GeoServer, Deegree) and client-building tools (MapBuilder, MapBender) to professional desktop GIS tools like gvSIG. Due to their emphasis on interoperability, these OSS tools have strong support for OGC standards, including web geoservices." See the open source community topic to learn more about previous stories on the subject.

The AGISRS list has an interesting thread on remote sensing software used for basic RS training. In the discussion, UNESCO's Bilko and Purdue's MultiSpec were on the spot. From Bilko's page: "Bilko is a complete system for learning and teaching remote sensing image analysis skills. Current lessons teach the application of remote sensing to oceanography and coastal management, but Bilko routines may be applied to the analysis of any image in an appropriate format, and include a wide range of standard image processing functions." From MultiSpec's page: "It results from an on-going multiyear research effort which is intended to define robust and fundamentally based technology for analyzing multispectral and hyperspectral image data, and to transfer this technology to the user community in as rapid a manner as possible." gvSIG and Sextante, ILWIS and SPRING were also mentioned, there are other free and open source remote sensing software, such as GRASS GIS, OSSIM and RAT, but they're not focused training newcomers. Our Education topic will reveal a few other tools for the classroom.

The OSGeo announced the graduation of Autodesk's FDO, GDAL and GRASS GIS from their incubation process. From the announcement: "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." Related stories included below.

The OSGeo-Discuss mailing list informs us of a new open source satellite imagery processing software named Optiks. The official website. From the article: "Opticks is used by scientists and analysts within the Department of Defense Intelligence Community to analyze remote sensing data and produce actionable intelligence. Opticks supports Imagery, Motion Imagery, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing data." From the OSGeo post: "A couple of observations: 1. The Contributors Agreement (click on the Contributors Agreement link on the left side of the page) is likely rather intimidating for the average open source contributor. 2. It doesn't use GDAL (although it does have OSSIM as a dependency)." This reminds me of the RATS software, recently discussed, and GRASS GIS comes to mind (though GRASS doesn't do hyperspectral?).

The GRASS GIS mailing list informs us the book "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach" has released a third edition. The table of contents: "Contents: 1 Open Source software and GIS; 2 GIS concepts; 3 Getting started with GRASS; 4 GRASS data models and data exchange; 5 Working with raster data; 6 Working with vector data; 7 Graphical output and visualization; 8 Image processing; 9 Notes on GRASS programming; 10 Using GRASS with other Open Source tools; Appendix; References; Index." See below for other GRASS GIS related stories.

AnyGeo reports : "I was just sniffing around the uDig site to see what was new and noticed that a big chuck of the code from the Jgrass team has been released under LGPL license. Recall that uDig is both a GeoSpatial application and a platform through which developers can create new, derived applications. uDig is a core element in an internet aware Geographic Information System. For more details see http://udig.refractions.net and also this uDig FOSS4G page loaded with info"