Slashgeo

The import cartography blog tells us PrimaGIS 0.5 and ZCO (Cartographic Objects for Zope) 0.7 are now available. From the gispython.org website: "This is the home for several web mapping and GIS projects based on PROJ.4, GEOS, GDAL/OGR, MapServer, and the etree XML interface. Our goal is a new coherent and modular core for geospatial programming with Python."

The OSGeo-Discuss mailing list links to a short survey of geospatial databases such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2 UDB and PostGIS. From the accompanying article: "For example, subjects like ‘spatial indexing’, ‘optimising approaches’, ‘spatial joining algorithms’ and ‘topology management’ may relate to very sophisticated approaches not easily condensed and described in a survey matrix box. In my first Product Survey on RDBMS in 2002 I observed that spatial-data management was traditionally supported within GIS environments. Integration with other datasets has to be organised within such environments with the aid of complementary architectures. As more and more support for spatial-data management becomes available in RDBMS, direct integration with other datasets may be organised in an increasingly flexible way. This allows for fast data access, easy product development, avoidance of duplication of spatial data etc." See numerous related articles below.

Anonymous Voxel writes "I have written small tutorial in Spanish on the use of OGR, Python and Matplotlib to plot maps from a number of data sources."

The Lin.ear th.inking blog ran an entry last month on spherical indexing schemes for PostGIS. Thought not exhaustive, the entry is still interesting and reminds us how spatial indexes are important to efficiently analyze huge spatial databases. From the entry: "Handling geodetic data in a correct and efficient way presents quite a few challenges. A major one is: how can geodetic geometry be spatially indexed? Conventional spatial indexes (such as 2D R-trees) all rely on geometry being embedded in a planar space. They don't handle data which can "wrap around", as can occur in a spherical space." See below for other (rare) stories related to spatial indexes.

The Lin.ear th.inking blog is enthusiastic about the book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" by Hanan Samet on spatial indexing: "He's published a series of highly useful books on spatial indexing methods, which are certainly the most comprehensive and detailed in this field. [...] It could also be called Everything you wanted to know about Spatial Indexes (but were afraid to code). Recommended reading for spatial geeks, especially if you're looking for some reading to tide you over during your next year off."

The PostGIS/Refractions web site announces: "The 1.3.2 release of PostGIS is now available". This release includes bug fixes and some minor feature enhancements, such as improvements in the TIGER geocoder, fix for better OS/X support, fix to WKB parser to do simple validity checks, etc.

I'm happy to read the OSGeo's open source Quantum GIS (QGIS) 0.9.1 was officially released a week ago. From the announcement: "This is primarily a bug fix release and includes the following key changes: 70 Bugs closed, Added locale tab to options dialog so that locale can be overridden, Cleanups and additions to GRASS tools, Python Plugin Installer for installing plugins from the PyQGIS repository, Documentation updates, Improvements for building under MSVC." I copied some of the previous stories on QGIS below.

To my surprise, I failed to find an official announcement for the release of GEOS 3.0.0. For more details, look in December and January archives of the GEOS-Devel mailing list. Last November, GEOS entered OSGeo incubation. A reminder from the website: "GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source) is a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite (JTS)." And the JTS itself is "[...] an [open source] API providing spatial object model and fundamental geometric functions."