Between the Poles

Autodesk Signs Agreement To Acquire 3D Geo GMBH

Autodesk announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of the 3D Geo GmbH.

3D Geo is a leading provider of geo visualization and software to create, analyze, manage and distribute large-scale geospatial information. Based in Potsdam, Germany, the company is a fast growing business that is best known for its dynamic virtual 3D maps and city models.

Province of Ontario Protects 50% of Boreal Forest

The Premier of Ontario has announced  that the Province has committed to protect 50% of the Province's intact northern boreal forest, amounting to 225,000 square kilometers, or 43% of the land mass of Ontario. This region of Ontario absorbs approximately 12.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually.  The northern boreal forest covers about 35% of Canada's total land mass.

How to Get CS-Map Coordinate System Software Source

I have received a number of queries asking when and where the CS-Map source code will be available.  It is available now and you can find it at CS-MAP source tree.

To download the source the following URL is usable with a Subversion client:

CS-Map Source download

There is an example of how to do this at:

Usage Example

SQL Server 2008 Spatial and FDO

Microsoft has announced the Release to Manufacturing of SQL Server 2008.  From a geospatial perspective the most important aspect of SQL Server 2008 is spatial data types and spatial indexing.  At this point, all the major relational database management systems (RDBMS) are geospatially-enabled, including Informix, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, and PostgreSQL (with PostGIS), and I believe that Ingres is in the works.

FDO Provider for SQl Server 2008

FDO is an open source API allowing desktop and web-based applications to read from and write to a wide variety of geospatial datastores.  The FDO Data Provider for SQL Server 2008 has been available since February, 2008. 

Autodesk Contributes Mentor Software CS-Map Coordinate System Software to the Open Source Community

Software Donations

Autodesk has announced another major software donation to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) . The source code for the CS-Map coordinate system technology acquired from Mentor Software has been donated to the open source community and Autodesk is working to make it part of an official OSGeo Foundation project for coordinate reference systems. This is Autodesk’s third major contribution to the open source community, after the Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology and MapGuide Open Source donations.

CS-Map Coordinate System Technology

CS-Map is a coordinate system and map projection library for geographic coordinate conversion.  More than 3,000 map projections and coordinate systems are currently supported. Because it's now open source, contributors from the the open source community will now be able to customize and add to the existing projections.

Autodesk acquired CS-Map through its acquisition of Mentor Software technology in September 2007. CS-Map is currently embedded in most of Autodesk's geospatial products.

OSGEO

The OSGeo hosts 15 open source geospatial projects. Since OSGEO's founding in 2006, more than 200 developers have contributed to OSGEO projects, and it includes a base of more than 6 million lines of code, representing more than 1 000 person years of effort.

MapGuide Maestro

The MapGuide Open Source project also announced the addition of MapGuide Maestro, which is a free map authoring tool for MapGuide Open Source.

Formation of the Open Web Foundation

Last week at OSCON, David Recordon gave a presentation in which he announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation appears to be modeled on the Apache Software Foundation, with the objective of  "building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

"The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks."

"As we work out the fine details of the foundation, we invite and encourage individuals to come and join the discussion. To ask questions please visit our Q&A page. You are also invited to join the community and discuss ideas and specifications you would like to see developed within the foundation."

Google Encouraging Governments to Make Geospatial Data Available on Google Earth: Government of BC First In Canada

According to a Vancouver Sun article , British Columbia Agriculture and Lands Minister Stan Hagen announced that GeoBC will provide access to the province’s geographic database on Google so that you can access this database either at the GeoBC web site or from Google Earth.  GeoBC intends to have 200 themes posted by Autumn and 600 themes by early 2009.  Apparently British Columbia is the the first government in Canada to make its data available on Google. 

Making government geospatial data available via Google Earth is a major initiative of Google's.  I chatted with Michael Jones, chief technologist of Google Earth, at a recent government event in Sacramento, and he is encouraging all governments to make their geospatial data available via Google Earth including not just natural and cultural resource data, but property parcel files (cadastres).

Microsoft Becomes Apache Sponsor

The world really is changing.  According to a report in InformationWeek Microsoft has become a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation .  Microsoft is also planning to make more of its own code available to the open source community including protocols in the Communications Protocol Program.  These are going to put under the Open Specification Promise by which Microsoft guarantees freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft.

Also apparently Microsoft is contributing an ADOdb patch which enables support for SQL Server through a new 'native driver for PHP' built by the MS SQL Server team.

Directions Magazine Podcast on the FDO API: Asset Intelligence and Visualization – The Convergence of CAD and GIS

Directions Magazine has just released a Podcast on the FDO API which includes commentary from David Kingsbury, Pete Southwood, and myself on how FDO, which is open source and available on the FDO OSGEO Web site, helps local governments, utilities, and telecommunications firms to enable a single point of truth, eliminate as-built backlogs, reduce paper flow, and streamline the flow of engineering design information.

GeoWeb:National Critical Infrastructure Data Models, Convergence, and Open Source GIS Servers

Some sessions that some of my colleagues and I are involved with at GeoWeb Wednesday are

Wed 10:45 National Critical Infrastructure Data Models: Implications for Local Government and Utilities
Panel: Paula Rojas, CGDI Content Coordinator, GeoConnections / GéoConnexions; Ed Riegelmann, VP, Global Director, Enterprise Spatial Solutions, CH2M HILL; Carsten Roensdorf, Principal Data Consultant, Ordnance Survey; James Fee, GIS Developer, RSP Architects.; and Clemens Portele, Consultant and Analyst, Interactive Instrumentsb
Moderator: Geoff Zeiss

Federal Governments in the US and Canada are developing data models for the exchange of data about critical infrastructure for emergency planning, security, and first response. Outside of government, organizations such as LandXML.org, Open Geospatial Consortium, International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), Multispeak.org, and IEC have adopted domain specific open standards for data exchange such as LandXML, GML, IFC, Multispeak, and CIM, that are widely implemented by local governments, industry, and utilities. This panel will discuss the proposed government data models, how they related to open standards, and their implications for local government.

Wed 14:45 Convergence Management: Thriving in an Era of Global Climate Change, Aging Infrastructure, and Shrinking Workforce
Geoff Zeiss

Compared to the low cost airline industry, the banking industry, and the automobile manufacturing industry, where IT has dramatically reduced costs by streamlining operations, in some sectors IT has hardly begun to scratch the surface.  But there are signs that external factors such as shrinking workforce, sustainability, and aging infrastructure are forcing a change.  A fundamental problem in organizations responsible for maintaining network infrastructure is that the flow of essential infrastructure data is inhibited by islands of information, inefficient paper-based information flow, and redundant data and processes.  Typical symptoms are as-built backlogs which can extend to years, paper-based business processes that inhibit data quality, and declining productivity.  Convergence offers solutions that can dramatically improve information flow and business processes by reducing paper flow, eliminating redundant data, and enabling the collective intelligence.

Wed 17:10 A Look at Three Open Source GIS Servers: GeoServer, MapGuide, and MapServer
Panel: Robert Bray, Engineer, Autodesk; Justin Deoliveira, Engineer, The Open Planning Project; and Paul Ramsey, Engineer, Clever Elephant
Moderator: Michael Gerlek, Software Architect, LizardTech, Inc.

Free and Open Source software continues to be a key part of today’s GIS infrastructures, and servers are perhaps the most prominent part of such an open spatial data infrastructure. This presentation will introduce GeoServer, one of the major open source servers available today. The presentation will cover the server’s particular strengths, its support for OGC interfaces and other interop/compatibility features, the depth and strength of its user base and developer base, and more.