Osgeo Journal Is a Publication of the Osgeo Foundation
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Volume 1, April 2007 Editorial Call For Articles You can help by providing articles or papers for pub- by Tyler Mitchell lication. The next edition of this newsletter will have articles that cover several other open source projects in various topics: Dear GRASS and other open source users, • OSGeo-related news items • ... continues on next page ... It is my pleasure to introduce the future expan- • GIS sion of GRASS-News. The next edition will be morphed into a broader Open Source Geospatial • Remote Sensing Newsletter covering projects from the OSGeo Foun- • Web-based mapping and GIS dation and beyond. The aim is to bring relevant news and articles to a larger audience by widening the fo- • Geostatistics / spatial statistics cus and changing the name. • Geospatial data access GRASS-News has always covered more than just • and more... GRASS. It has also shown itself to be a high quality production that we can be proud of reading or even Do you have layout and design skills? You can help printing to share with friends. With the potential of by applying your skills to make OSGeo-News even reaching a larger audience, as well as maintain a sin- better. Translators into different languages are also gle high quality newsletter, the editors have decided needed. You can help by volunteering as: to re-brand it as an OSGeo-News production. I have always been encouraged by the content, layout and • Editor ideas represented by the GRASS-News volumes and hope to see it continue. • Layout Designer Contents of this volume: Introducing openModeller ............ 14 QLandkarte .................... 18 Editorial ...................... 1 MapGuide Open Source in the San Francisco OSGeo Celebrates 1st Anniversary ....... 2 Urban Forest Project .............. 21 North Carolina's OSGEO affiliated Open Using the R— GRASS interface ......... 22 Source GIS user group holds first meeting at Tikiwiki a GeoCMS ................ 25 the 2007 NC GIS Conference ......... 4 Processing geospatial operations via Internet Activity Report of OSGeo-India at Map World on remote servers – PyWPS .......... 28 Forum 2007 ................... 5 Producing Press-Ready Maps with GRASS Ottavo Meeting degli utenti italiani di GRASS and GMT .................... 32 & GFOSS ..................... 7 Spatial Relationships In GIS - An Introduction 38 A short introduction to Mapbender ....... 8 Evaluation of the OGC Web Processing Service deegree – Building Blocks for Spatial Data In- for Use in a Client-Side GIS .......... 40 frastructures ................... 11 Developer Updates - 2007 Q1 .......... 47 • Reviewer • Translator Tyler Mitchell • etc. Please take a moment to thank the editorial staff and Tyler Mitchell contributors of GRASS-News who have made a great Executive Director newsletter. I am encouraged to see their interest in OSGeo making the publication applicable to even more peo- http: // osgeo. org ple. I look forward to seeing the next edition. tmitchell AT osgeo.org OSGeo Celebrates 1st Anniversary • Project Incubation - monitoring and guiding projects through the incubation process by Tyler Mitchell • Promotion and Visibility - developing promo- February 4th, 2007 was the first anniversary of OS- tional material, coordinating OSGeo presence Geo. One year ago 25 people met face-to-face, at conferences, creating press releases and many more via phone and IRC, to discuss • Conference planning - helping organise the an- the possibility of starting an umbrella organisa- nual OSGeo FOSS4G conference event tion. These participants represented over 13 different open source projects. The foundational purpose of • Fundraising - raising funds to cover day-to- the organisation was to help promote and continue day costs of the foundation and its projects to develop open source tools in the geospatial sphere. Since that time, much has happened and momentum • Public Geospatial Data - working towards around OSGeo continues to develop. Here are only a making more data publicly available and few highlights from that first year. building tools for finding it • Education/Curriculum development - work- Members Added ing towards a set of teaching tools for bringing open source into the academic mapping and The initial 25 charter members were expanded to a GIS environment full 45 voting members after a public nomination process. These are the members who are responsi- ble for voting in the Board. Regular members were Projects Joining also invited to join at no cost and without any formal process. The development of a membership manage- The primary goal of OSGeo is to help further develop ment application is currently underway, which will and promote particular software projects. An initial allow members to formally sign up. set of projects joined the incubation process at the be- ginning and since then a couple have graduated and a few more have joined. Even more are waiting for Committees Established approval to join the process. Projects can be loosely categorised into the following groupings. Several committees are overseeing day-to-day work and special projects: Web Mapping Software • A Board of Directors was created early on and • Mapbender (graduated) expanded to include 9 representatives from around the world. The Board has been very ac- • Community MapBuilder (graduated) tive in setting direction, policies and helping in general. • MapGuide Open Source • Website and Systems Administration commit- • MapServer tees - focused on website content and infras- tructure maintenance and development • OpenLayers Desktop Applications Here are a few other events that OSGeo has had speakers or exhibition presence at in 2006 or early • GRASS GIS 2007: • OSSIM • Autodesk University Geospatial Libraries • GIS-IDEAS • GDAL/OGR • Intergeo • GeoTools • LinuxTag Metadata Catalog Software • Map World Forum • GeoNetwork Opensource • OSCON • Where 2.0 Joined in 2007 • FDO Newsletter • Quantum GIS (QGIS) OSGeo is joining with the famous GRASS GIS Together these projects represent a massive Newsletter to produce a new version that is target- amount of development effort and cover a wide ted at a wider audience. A joint GRASS/OSGeo spectrum of core geospatial technologies. All Newsletter was produced in 2006. Further OSGeo projects are being actively developed and have vi- newsletters are planned for 2007. brant user communities behind them. Executive Director Hired Local Chapter Development In November I was hired by the board as the Execu- OSGeo’s goals and mission have garnered interest tive Director for OSGeo. The goal of the position is to from many particular countries, regions and lan- help facilitate day-to-day administrative operations, guage groups. Early on it was decided that there increase communication and serve as a formal con- should be a way for these groups to associate with tact for those who need to talk to the organisation. OSGeo, hence the creation of Local Chapters. Having this position has allowed us to get a handle To date there are 4 approved local chapters in: on various administrative functions and provided a China, India, Japan and Ottawa (Canada). consistent point of contact for the community, public, Many additional local chapters are hoping to sponsors and media. form and at various stages of development, includ- ing: Australian, Brazilian, New Mexico (USA) re- gions and French, German, Italian languages. Additional Developments • Several new sponsors - In addition to contin- Promotion / Events uing Sustaining Sponsor Autodesk, new As- sociate Sponsors include Lizardtech and 1Spa- OSGeo has been represented at several events in the tial. The GDAL/OGR project also has several past year. Some with several thousands of partic- project sponsors. ipants. The purpose of having OSGeo presence at events is to build awareness for the OSGeo projects. • A logo was selected for the organisation, based Speakers and those managing an OSGeo booth help on submissions and voting from the commu- describe case studies or show demonstrations of ap- nity. Some modifications of the original were plications. Brochures for each project have been recently completed to make the logo more us- made available and are distributed. able for various printing and media purposes. The primary international conference that OSGeo A brand guidebook is also being developed. members were involved in is FOSS4G. The confer- ence was a great success and very encouraging. This Planning for the FOSS4G 2007 event is already well underway. • A cafepress.com store was started • Internet infrastructure services were upgraded couple things to watch for: at the end of 2006, allowing for more control over mailing lists and code repositories as well • Formation of more local chapters as implementing a content management sys- tem for the website • More software projects joining OSGeo • OSGeo has been featured in various news web sites and mentioned at several conferences and • How to participate in international and local in magazine articles events • More great features added and bugs squished The Horizon for Year 2 • Increased promotional opportunities I will leave the outlook for 2007 to another post, but it’s looking to be even busier than 2006. Here are a • FOSS4G in Victoria, BC, Canada North Carolina's OSGEO affiliated Open Source GIS user group holds first meeting at the 2007 NC GIS Conference • Welcome - Julia Harrell, GIS Coordinator, NC Department of Environment and Natural Re- by Julie Harrell sources (NC DENR) Bi-annually, North Carolina GIS professionals hold a statewide GIS conference to showcase their many • Short