Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Projects Mailing List
On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 09:27:37AM -0300, George R. C. Silva wrote: Em sexta-feira, 23 de setembro de 2011 03:34:05, Tyler Mitchell escreveu: On 2011-09-22, at 11:31 PM, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas wrote: El 23/09/11 00:22, Sunburned Surveyor escribió: This is what I meant: (proje...@lists.osgeo.org) I don't have my heart set on a projects mailing list, but I thought it was a good idea. How do the software project contacts feel? I'm not a project lead, but I do have a super ultra secret alias already set up that I've used in the past for spamming project steering committee leads. So if you do end up with the project contacts list, let me know and I'll dump my list as a set of invites for you. Tyler ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss I'm considering a simple software that would keep track of: A) projects and their status (last updates, in what stage is inside OsGEO, etc); B) OsGEO members (?); C) project team members and primary roles You're talking about a different thing than Landon was suggesting. If you'd like to participate in the existing effort to track OSGeo membership, that's a reasonable thing to discuss, but I really think it's out of scope for this thread. Landon, We recently discussed needing such a thing on the board list as well, so that we could invite projects to participate in discussions which actively affect them. I worry about allowing any user to spam all of our project leads with one email, but barring any significant objections, I think this is worth having and discouraging people from using inappropriately (socially, not technically.) -- Chris Of course, this has a lot more featuers than we need and it's a SaaS, but it is a way to illustrate my point: http://highrisehq.com/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Street Map WMS Servers in EPSG:4326
On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 12:37:51PM +0200, Alvaro Zabala wrote:
Hi,
sorry for the possible cross posting.
I've been looking for an Open Street Map's data WMS Server which work in
EPSG:4326 projection to visualize with Open Layers, but almost all google's
references I've found link to a server seems to be down:
Yeah, keeping that up to date was more pain than it's worth. I recommend
not using 4326 :)
-- Chris
geocache = new OpenLayers.Layer.WMS( OSM,
[
http://t1.hypercube.telascience.org/tiles?;,
http://t2.hypercube.telascience.org/tiles?;,
http://t3.hypercube.telascience.org/tiles?;,
http://t4.hypercube.telascience.org/tiles?;
],
{layers: 'osm-4326', format: 'image/png' } );
Main open street map tile servers work with EPSG:900916
Do you know any open street map web map service (tiled or not) which work in
EPSG:4326?
Thanks in advance, and best regards.
Alvaro Zabala
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--
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] open-source project site construction
On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 03:08:44PM +0100, Paolo Cavallini wrote: Il giorno mar, 08/03/2011 alle 13.51 +0100, Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas ha scritto: I agree this is a nonsense, but as I said, many people are suffering those restrictions so as they are applied to many services and sites (not only for developers, also for something as normal as getting a java virtual machine, for example) I would encourage to avoid using them. SEXTANTE for example moved from Google Code to OSOR.eu forge because of this. Just to make it clear: can people from, say, Cuba, download packages from OSGEO servers? A few years back we had reports they could not. All the best. There are no restrictions on any OSGeo services that intentionally prevent access from any location. At one point, some OSGeo projects were hosted on SourceForge, which enforced these restrictions, but they were never in place on servers maintained by OSGeo. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Comparison of Mobile GIS applications
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 08:56:14AM -0600, Bob Basques wrote: All, Just resurrecting this thread. It's been 6 months. I've done a couple of little projects with the N900 which are detailed here: http://pwultra5.ci.stpaul.mn.us/OPERA/ Question to Chris S., do you have any other insights into the directions that the N900 device (or others like it) might be taking in the future (that you can mention? :c) The N900 platform is dead. MeeGo will continue to exist as an open source development platform, but you're not going to see it on any mass-produced phones in the near future, based on public statements from Nokia. (I'd expect numbers similar to the N900; you may see them, but it'll be a toy, not a commonplace.) I'm setting up some netbooks next for the two projects listed above, using essentially the same software stack as used for the N900, which it is somewhat amazing when you think about it. Maemo and MeeGo are definitely interesting platforms, though I don't know if they're more exciting than other Netbook distros, since I haven't used many of them. I would still like to revisit the Mobile controls issues for OpenLayers and GeoMoose at some point, but focusing on flexibility with software stack at the moment. There's an OpenLayers sprint for Mobile taking place next week in Lausanne. If you have things you've thought of, you should share them on the mailing lists to help support the effort. -- Chris Thanks bobb Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 03:25:45PM -0500, Bob Basques wrote: Milo, You mentioned MEEGO in your post, I just ordered a N900 to do some testing for GIS related stuff on the N900. What types of functionalities are you focusing your efforts on for MEEGO? Note that the current development platform for the N900 (and likely for the next 6 months at least) is still Maemo. The two platforms will likely not differ greatly; a lot of the UI functionality is already SDK-level in Maemo, and apps themselves likely won't change much other than packaging. In either case, it's mostly just a Very Small Linux Box. -- Chris, proud owner of an N900 bobb miblon mob...@dogodigi.net wrote: I have been using navit and osm2go on moblin. There is a debian build for osm2go which is targeted at maemo, I managed to get it up on moblin and will try to get it running on meego. If you are interested in me filling the blanks for these 2 apps on your feature list, let me know. Kind regards, Milo van der Linden Miguel Montesinos wrote: Hello to all, I'm preparing a presentation for the FOSS4G, with title Comparison of Mobile GIS applications. I know some, but I think that the best way to make an objective analysis is to offer the chance for anyone to collaborate, in order to define common feature lists as well as perfomance or usability check lists. Is anyone developing or using a mobile geospatial application interested? Regards, - Miguel Montesinos CTO PRODEVELOP, S.L. mmontesinos [at] prodevelop [dot] es www.prodevelop.es ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Montreal Code Sprint 2011
On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:48:21AM -0400, Connors, Bernie (SNB) wrote: If you are linking data to locations on a map it is a GIS. One of the best descriptions of GIS I have heard is: GIS is a two-way conversation between a map and a database or something like that. Just because your software cannot not perform advanced analysis like GRASS or ESRI does not mean it is not a GIS. Agreed. If you're doing analysis or evaluation of anything -- even if the analyzer is a human being, not a piece of software -- by using a map as a piece of the decision, then that's GIS. Anyone who insists that it's not GIS unless it can do bilateral convex hull buffers is living in the past :) -- Chris Bernie. -- Bernie Connors, P.Eng Service New Brunswick (506) 444-2077 45°56'25.21N, 66°38'53.65W www.snb.ca/geonb/http://www.snb.ca/geonb/ From: discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Arnie Shore Sent: Tuesday, 2010-11-23 11:38 To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Montreal Code Sprint 2011 Hello all. I've been asked to present my current project at a conference devoted to GIS in a Crisis. While my project, open source computer-aided-dispatch, meets the 'crisis' element handily, whether or not it's 'GIS' is another question; it's built on GMaps. I'm well aware of the large body of GIS work being done as this group uses that term, and I don't want to offend any GIS'ers in the audience (or here) by implying that my project is indeed a GIS instance. Accordingly, in my presentation's title or elsewhere, I'm thinking of using something like ... GIS[?] ... and explaining that usage. Reactions/suggestions appreciated. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Usage of 'FOSS4G' in webpages?
On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 10:19:33AM +1100, Simon Cropper wrote: Hi, Can someone please explain if the FOSS4G acronym can be used to identify 'free and open source geographical information systems/tools used to view, edit, manipulate and map geospatial data' and whether I can use it to help define/name some educational material I am creating? Something along the line of 'FOSS4G Handbook' or 'FOSS4G Guide'; or is the FOSS4G acronym now to intrinsically linked to OSGeo? Socially speaking, I think that to anyone in the OSGeo community, it's not only linked to OSGeo, but actually to the conference itself; a FOSS4G Guide would be a conference guide to me, not a software guide. I don't have technical information on trademark, etc. but I think that it is really unlikely that using the term FOSS4G in the OSGeo space would have the effect you're hoping for. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
this? Is there already a system like this in place? (If so, I have just revealed my great ignorance to everyone on this mailing list.) I'm interested in setting something up that could be maintained by a group of geospatial professionals, and not by any one company. I'm not sure how this system I describe would tie in with geonames. My first reaction when I stumbled on geonames is I couldn't find a unique and human understandable URL for a place. Still, I'm interested in microformats and place names, and I'd like to see a system like this that was open and non-proprietary. Let me know what you think. The Sunburned Surveyor Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Representing Places With Intelligent URLs
On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 05:18:47PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote: All attempts to construct simple ontologies end up reinventing RDF .. ? That was actually my first thought when I saw this: Hey look, someone else reinventing RDFa! :) Seriously, I say this with a bit of knowledge; I mean, after all, I sort of work on making places searchable on maps. For a company with a pretty big set of data about the hierarchy of the world. It's a lot fuzzier than you think :) Also, Landon, I do highly recommend looking into RDF -- specifically, RDFa -- because I think it's heading in a very similar direction to what you're describing, without the need for some all-world-hierarchy to tie it to, which might actually help you get a bit further. -- Chris On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: How about the fact that although some counties contain cities, some cities exist over the border between multiple counties, and other counties are *contained* by cities? (Queens, Manhattan, etc.) How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysart_et_al,_Ontario? Any effort to turn the real world into a standard hierarchy will fail, because the world is Fuzzier than you realize. -- Chris ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G2010: Good, Bad and the Ugly
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 06:38:22PM +0900, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote: Hi All, Back to work after four weeks on the road with the ZOO-Team. Enjoyed being at FOSS4G2010. As usual there many good things, few bad things at least one ugly incident (for the ZOO-Team). About the good things, i will not spend too much time as it is obvious to all. Just to mention that it was wonderful to meet many of you folks and learn new things. Few bad things that I will elaborate more below; a) Difficulty in meet people since we were all spread out and there was not much info about common meeting points Not really sure what you mean about this. I mean, we were all in the conference center; the OSGeo Booth was a reasonably easy to find meeting space, etc. On each evening, I successfully gathered a crowd of 20+ for dinner, thanks to having a number of ways to pre-assign spots to meet up, and so on. b) No Practical Guide To the town? To the conference? Perhaps this existed somewhere else; what would a practical guide contain? c) No ice-breaker I think that with 800 attendees, it gets really hard to host an ice breaker event practically. Even in Lausanne, the icebreaker event was pretty hard to actually meet people; imagining it with 2-3 times as many people seems impossible. e) Lunch at least on the first day was a sea of people and great difficulty in getting to the food. Choose to grab a sandwich nearby coffee shop I think a lot of this comes down to unfortunate assumptions about the size of the conference. The Organizing committee can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that much of the conference was designed around the idea of 500 attendees; food, wireless, etc. were initially targeted for that. With the conference ending up at almost 900, some of the things that are limited by physical resources ended up being a bit ... tighter than expected :) f) Having poster session in lunch-time and having authors being present in front of their posters to answer questions. Why is this a bad thing? g) Was not particularly amused by keynote speaker putting out his cap and a great guy running to the stage to put coins. Must think of better gimmicks to get money flowing into OSGeo. I don't think that's a bad thing about the conference. I also think that it tells an important story about OSGeo that most people don't seem to be getting: we need sponsors if people want this organization to survive in its current state. We need organizations who want to support the organization (and the great conference it helps make happen), we need support. h) AGM should be planned well in advance. The idea of canceling Local Chapter Reports and Committee reports was not a good one These two statements are unrelated. Local Chapter and committee reports are no longer practical to do in a situation where we have all attendees participating. Unless you limit them to 1 minute per (most people want something more like 5), it's 2 hours just to do local chapters, another hour for committes, and another 2 hours for projects. I discussed with some people the idea of having an What's what in OSGeo 'track' -- during breaks, lunches, or possibly alongside presentations -- that would let local chapters and projects present. This would give groups a longer time to talk about what they were doing, and would give people who are interested in what local chapters are doing a 'default' place to go during these times. Neither of these solutions is ideal, but short of turning the AGM into an all day event, i don't think it's practical to include local chapter reports in the AGM. i) Some kind of OSGeo-Nostalgia talk with ex-board director was missing I don't really understand what you mean here. j) seated tables at Gala Dinner. Would have been better like a buffet with people able to mingle. Enh. I personally liked this, but I can understand either wya. I think you'll get some each way no matter what you do. k) Could not see many students. More explanation here; did you mean that students were unable to attend? That you couldn't tell who the students were? That you didn't feel there was ample oppourtunity to meet up with students? Something else? Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] WMS and layer stacking.
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 04:33:04PM +0200, P Kishor wrote: On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Ian Turton ijtur...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 2:59 PM, Bob Basques bob.basq...@ci.stpaul.mn.us wrote: All, does anyone know if there is a layer hierarchy setting in the WMS service, which layers are on top of which layers (Z value=)? There is an opaque hint in the capabilities document that suggests that the layer should be a base layer. Other than that the layers are just drawn in the order the client requests them and there is no implied ordering from the capabilities file. For example GeoServer returns the layers in alphabetical order by namespace then layer name. I was quite under the belief that the layers were requested, delivered and drawn in the order they appeared in the map.addLayers([array]) invocation. You're discussing an implementation (OpenLayers), with multiple requests to the WMS server being stacked in the client. This discussion is about the WMS API. WMS draws layers from bottom to top, from the beginning of the list in the 'layers' param to the end. layers=foo,bar,baz will put foo first, then bar, then baz. -- Chris Ian -- Ian Turton ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu --- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science === ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Best GIS with below listed requirements
On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 10:09:45PM -0700, mayank_agarwal wrote: Thank you Everyone. And sorry for not being clear, actually i want a GIS which is web based as many clients would be acting on it at the same time, we being on server side, as a desktop GIS does not has this feature. So I would like for suggestions on that, Geomajas is a good option, but still open for suggestions. In general, there are a couple things you can do. 1. For a full WebGIS solution, it seems like Geomajas is the primary option. It comes set up with GIS functionality out of the box, and many people seem to be using it this way successfully. 2. If what you're most interested in is a UI for managing a bunch of GIS data, what you may be interested in may actually be something like Mapbender, which is a geospatial data portal. 3. If you want to 'roll your own' -- for example, if you only need a limited set of functionality -- then OpenLayers+GeoExt+MapFish provide a set of reasonable tools to work with to create your own. There are a number of service providers -- like OpenGeo, Camptocamp -- who can provide development services support to help you implement a solution in this vein. Another option that I know less about is GeoMoose. A third option I also know less about is MapGuide's 'Fusion' toolkit. GeoMoose is generally tied relatively closely to MapServer, I believe, though I could be wrong on that. MapGuide Fusion is tied relatively closely to MapGuide; at one point there was some work on extending it to also talk to MapServer, though I don't know how far that went. OpenGeo may also have some aspect of the GeoServer toolkit that fulfills this need, but nothing comes to mind off the top of my head. I believe something like OpenGeo's GeoNode is actually a 'competitor' of sorts to something like Mapbender, a combination of catalog services and tools to manage and browse them. If I have misspoken about any of the projects described here, please let me know. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Staistical analysis support needed
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 03:49:46AM -0700, mayank_agarwal wrote: Hello everyone, Finally I have decided to use Open Layers on client side in conjunction with J2EE Technologies, GeoServer as a web map server and, POST GIS as Spatial Database. Now integrating all of these I want to do Statistical data analysis on the spatio-temporal data using- 1. Moran's I 2. Geary's C 3. Kriging 4. Local Moran's I 5. Spatial Scan Statistic 6. Geographic weighted regression Does anyone has any idea on how to proceed further using these combination? Is there any other client side library that I can use for this? My guess is that there are two ways that you might explore to do this. 1. Any time someone says 'statistics', my first thought is 'R'; I don't know any of the things you're talking about here, but if these are statistical methods of some sort, R seems like a valid place to start looking. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rgdal/index.html rgdal will let you read OGR data sources (like PostGIS databases) into a spatial vector object, and interact with them from there. 2. I know that at least some of these mechanisms (like Kriging) are implemented in GRASS, and I would bet that this is your second best option. GRASS is a bit intimidating to a first time user (though I guess not much more so than R :)), but a very powerful geographic data analysis tool. Best of luck, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Staistical analysis support needed
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 06:45:38AM -0700, mayank_agarwal wrote: Hello Christopher, Sorry for that, I didnt mean to be so harsh on GRASS, but as R can be bridged with JAVA using JRI library, that's why I prefer R, and then it is simpler in using, and I agree that both will have there pros and cons, no doubt. Never the less thanks for helping me so much and iI am sorry if I hurt you. Not me personally :) I just like to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting projects; especially ones I don't work on :) -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Where to discuss TMS?
On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 02:42:22AM +0200, Mateusz Loskot wrote: Folks, Is there a dedicated ml for Tile Map Service spec? Or, Is http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards appropriate place to ask questions about TMS? For TMS, the spec, the standards list is fine. For TMS, in the form of implementation of the standard, the new tiling list (lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/tiling) is probably best. For vending machines on every corner, I recommend Japan. For big, person sized trash cans on every corner, I recommend Barcelona. Best of luck. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] is TileCache alive ?
On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 09:06:42AM -0400, John Callahan wrote: I was also just looking into tile caching options and had exactly the same question. It looks like the latest version (2.10) was released back in Jan 2009, and the readme is dated Dec 2007. It would also need to update the use of mod_python, which I read development had stopped a while ago. I'm not sure why the fact that the software hasn't been released since 18 months ago makes it dead. There have not been any bugs reported that neccesitate a new release, so far as I'm aware. (If you're aware of one, you can feel free to bring it to the mailing list.) WSGI support was available since 1.4 or so, so if you'd like to use mod_wsgi with TileCache, you can. I still use mod_python, and no one has offered a significant patch to the documentation to improve the documentation for various mechanisms. While TileCache may be a somewhat idle project, it's far from dead: I am actively maintaining the community resources, and handling questions to the mailing list in the same way that I always have. TileCache is simple, and easy to set up. It is used to serve literally millions of tiles every day by at least dozens of deployments (my guess is that it's more like hundreds). It doesn't solve every problem for every user, but it provides a simple framework and has been extended and abused for many many things, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Publications on FOSS4G tools in web services
On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 09:08:51AM +0200, Rafal Wawer wrote: Dear All, I am trying to do some advertising within consortium for FOSS web service as good platform for the project we prepare. I have been asked about a publication describing application of FOSS4G web tools in building network services. Comparisons with proprietary tools are most welcome. In previous webpage of MapServer there was a kind of application gallery with over 200 cases... I could not fin it on www.mapserver.org. Did it dissapear completely? Also, http://gallery.osgeo.org/ may be useful. Thank's a lot for your kind help. Best regards: Raf Dr. Rafal Wawer Department of Soil Science Erosion COntrol and Land Protection The Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation - State Research Institute ul. Czartoryskich 8 24-10 Pulawy Poland www.erozja.ung.pulawy.pl ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] displaying complex GML in web-based enviroment ?
On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:06:59AM -0600, Stefan Steiniger wrote: not sure - but I know deegree was always quite up to date with the standards. but if it does 3.1.1? http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/deegree3/HowToWorkWithGML the text in the page mentions version 3.1 This doesn't look like a 'web based environment'? I thought deegree was a desktop app. I expect OpenLayers is probably the closest thing, but handling 'complex GML 3.1.1 features' sounds like you're working with a custom handler of some kind; isn't the whole point of 'complex features' that they are combining app-specific data/formatting, etc. into the GML? Or perhaps 'complex' means something different in this case? -- Chris stefan Raj Singh schrieb: I would love to know this too! --- Raj On Jun 15, at 10:00 AM, andrea giacomelli wrote: Hi - I received a request from a team who is not (yet) on the discussion list -- ...We are looking for free/open source package which can display complex GML 3.1.1 features in a web based environment, and supports both WFS and WMS -- TIA for any feedback Andrea ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Getting a .kmz into GIS
Hi Ezra, looking inside the kmz file, http://www.cstars.miami.edu/media/20100613_Envisat_PM.kmz It appears that the image is actually a PNG file. The kml file references this as a groundOverlay with bounds: for example: On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 02:53:24PM -0400, Raj Singh wrote: Looks to me like the PNGs referenced in the KML are 2 logos and a small image preview icon. The actual image file seems to be called 20100614151937_Envisat_VV.tif, but I can't figure out the full web URL. That's because it doesn't have one. (At least, not one that the KML uses.) the name tag is just a descriptive element; the actual 'icon' (image) is the small_scaled.png file included in the KMZ file, Tim was right. -- Chris north32.4216794699724/north south23.59737906433506/south east-84.32169599536186/east west-90.33200805674051/west Using this information it should be possible to view it in most GIS systems, or at least to convert it to a GeoTIFF using GDAL perhaps. Hope this helps! Tim On 14 June 2010 14:16, Ezra Boyd ebo...@tigers.lsu.edu wrote: Hi Everyone, I need help in importing or converting a .kmz file so that I can view it in my GIS. I work for a small environmental NGO in coastal Louisiana, and we are currently assisting emergency responders tackling BP's oil spill. One of my tasks is surveillance of oil streamers and globules as they approach the coast. To help with this, I am using radar satellite imagery obtained from CSTARS (https://www.cstars.miami.edu/.) The website provides downloadable .kmz files. When I open these files in an GeoBrowser, I can view a georeferenced .tif image. However, I have not figured out how to get geotiff into my GIS, where I can overlay winds, currents, tides, and waves to project likely movement of observed oil globules. I have tried exporting the image in Google Earth, Nasa Worldwind and ArcGIS Explorer. I have also tried opening the .kmz in a half dozen or so GIS viewers. I have also tried converting the file using GDAL. I have also tried changed the file extension .zip and then uncompressing it. None of these attempts have worked. Please let me know if you how to extract the .tif file embedded in the .kmz. Thanks, Ezra ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] SVN/Trac Migration
Hello, As of this morning, I believe that I have completed the final testing for migration of trac/svn services to the new host. As a result, I will be shifting services this evening, starting shortly after midnight eastern time. SVN: * Writes will be disabled at this time. * A final copy of the data to the new server will commence * After the final copy, the DNS record will be updated. DNS is set to 1 hour TTL, so after approximately one hour, SVN should be functional again. (You can confirm this has occured by checking that 'svn.osgeo.org' resolves to 140.211.15.71) Trac: * A final copy of the data to the new server will commence. * A redirect will be created at this time. * The DNS record will be updated. In the interim, you will be able to use Trac via the redirect. The practical upshot of this is that you should not plan any heavy usage of trac/svn starting around midnight eastern time tonight. Once the DNS changes have been made, I will update the list. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] SVN/Trac Migration
On Wed, Jun 09, 2010 at 11:55:54AM +0200, Markus Neteler wrote: Chris, would you mind to indicate midnight eastern time via URL - do you mean this? http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2010month=6day=10hour=3min=59sec=0 Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks. thanks Markus On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: Hello, As of this morning, I believe that I have completed the final testing for migration of trac/svn services to the new host. As a result, I will be shifting services this evening, starting shortly after midnight eastern time. SVN: * Writes will be disabled at this time. * A final copy of the data to the new server will commence * After the final copy, the DNS record will be updated. DNS is set to 1 hour TTL, so after approximately one hour, SVN should be functional again. (You can confirm this has occured by checking that 'svn.osgeo.org' resolves to 140.211.15.71) Trac: * A final copy of the data to the new server will commence. * A redirect will be created at this time. * The DNS record will be updated. In the interim, you will be able to use Trac via the redirect. The practical upshot of this is that you should not plan any heavy usage of trac/svn starting around midnight eastern time tonight. Once the DNS changes have been made, I will update the list. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] SVN/Trac Migration
Hello, The SVN/trac migration is now underway. The services and servers have all been moved. Trac will automatically redirect you to the correct, new machine, at http://newtrac.osgeo.org/ SVN will not automatically redirect you (it confuses trac); instead, I have marked all SVN servers on the old server as read only (to prevent new commits). You can tell if the SVN changes have propogated to you by looking at the SVN signiature on any SVN HTTP page, such as: https://svn.osgeo.org/featureserver/ If it says: Powered by Subversion version 1.6.9 (r901367). It is the new server. If it says: Powered by Subversion version 1.5.6 (r36142). It is the old server. Thank you for your patience during this transition to better serve you. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Comparison of Mobile GIS applications
On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 03:25:45PM -0500, Bob Basques wrote: Milo, You mentioned MEEGO in your post, I just ordered a N900 to do some testing for GIS related stuff on the N900. What types of functionalities are you focusing your efforts on for MEEGO? Note that the current development platform for the N900 (and likely for the next 6 months at least) is still Maemo. The two platforms will likely not differ greatly; a lot of the UI functionality is already SDK-level in Maemo, and apps themselves likely won't change much other than packaging. In either case, it's mostly just a Very Small Linux Box. -- Chris, proud owner of an N900 bobb miblon mob...@dogodigi.net wrote: I have been using navit and osm2go on moblin. There is a debian build for osm2go which is targeted at maemo, I managed to get it up on moblin and will try to get it running on meego. If you are interested in me filling the blanks for these 2 apps on your feature list, let me know. Kind regards, Milo van der Linden Miguel Montesinos wrote: Hello to all, I'm preparing a presentation for the FOSS4G, with title Comparison of Mobile GIS applications. I know some, but I think that the best way to make an objective analysis is to offer the chance for anyone to collaborate, in order to define common feature lists as well as perfomance or usability check lists. Is anyone developing or using a mobile geospatial application interested? Regards, - Miguel Montesinos CTO PRODEVELOP, S.L. mmontesinos [at] prodevelop [dot] es www.prodevelop.es ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: fastest option of serving huge imagery on web map on the fly
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 06:24:26PM -0300, Fabio Renzo Panettieri wrote: On Fri, 2010-05-21 at 13:17 -0700, Karsten-3-2 wrote: Yes. What I want to do is simply to find out the fastest options to render on the fly from raw data imagery (no tiles whatsoever stored on disk in addition to the raw data ). I will check out what SpatialCache is... From raw aerial imagery: 1. Store everything as uncompressed tiffs. 2. Make images as large as possible. (This probably requires BigTIFF support.) 3. Use overviews -- usually one for every power-of-two level from the base image up to the point where you have 256 x 256 overviews (gdaladdo) 4. If you have too many images to make one large image practical, create one reduced size image that you use at lower zoom levels. All of this is based around serving with MapServer. I have no experience using other imagery servers to solve this problem. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Illegal Request to Geoserver ?
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 03:25:52PM +0100, Jonas Blasques wrote: POST /cgi-bin/proxy.cgi?url=http%2F%2Flocalhost%3A8080%2Fgeoserver%2Fwfs Response Body Illegal request. I would guess it has to do with the prox.cgi (which I got from the ol site) because there is one line of code which says: print Illegal request. Exactly my error message in the response body. Your URL there doesn't have a : -- it just says http//, which is invalid. -- Chris ... but what does it mean ? I tried the proxy in other situations and it works. Anyone has any ideas ? They are deeply , deeply appreciated. Thanks, João -- Ajude um pouco ... já é muito Projecto SOSIndia http://sosindia.net - Shoot for the moon, even if you miss it you will land among the stars. - Unknown - What if for a moment, as an experiment, you drop every belief that you have? - Unknown --- We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding. —David Bohm, quantum physicist, 1917–1992 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] are there any unpaid developers?
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 08:10:13AM +0200, Andrea Aime wrote: Ian Turton ha scritto: One of my students was asking today about the open source development process (with special reference to geospatial projects). One question I'm left with is are there any OSGEO developers who are doing this just for the fun and fame? I know that a lot of us have fun developing but everyone I could think of (GeoTools, GeoServer, uDig) gets paid to have that fun. My first few years of Geotools were completely unpaid: wake up at 5, worth though the weekends, to get it to work enough for my students at the uni to use (so in a sense there was a work purpose, but I was barely paid just for the hours spent in the classroom and nobody pushed for them use an open source library). Today I'm paid to work on GeoTools/GeoServer, but I still put in weekends time so there is still an unpaid portion. I don't think it can really go away: paid stuff is directed by company/customer needs /plans, on the spare time you do what you feel is good/necessary/fun instead. I don't believe you can really be involved if you don't have that kind of passion, yes, one can just work in an OS project, but it's not really the same thing as real involvement. One of the best things that the OpenLayers project ever had came in the form of our first PSC president, Erik Uzureau. Erik was not a big open source community participant -- he wasn't on all the OSGeo mailing lists, etc. His involvement was crucial precisely because of what he did do -- which was organize and document a lot of the processes in the OL community, as well as answering questions on the mailing list, managing the bug tracker, etc. Erik was instrumental in documenting our processes, and I give a significant amount of the credit in the strict coding standards on the OL project to Erik's attention to detail and thorough documentation. Erik, as far as I'm aware, did almost all of his development on OpenLayers on company time. MetaCarta gave him a portion of his time with them as time dedicated to open source projects, and he seldom worked outside of that time on the project. Using only a small portion of his time, and very little to no 'personal' time, Erik was able to accomplish great good for the project, and I think that without him, OpenLayers wouldn't be the project it is today. I think that this kind of thing is not entirely common, perhaps -- the core contributors to many open source projects are also 'free time' contributors -- but I think it can happen, and that these contributions are just as valuable, if not more so, than the others made by hobbyists, on a 'value per time' scale. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] are there any unpaid developers?
On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 06:00:45PM -0400, Ian Turton wrote: One of my students was asking today about the open source development process (with special reference to geospatial projects). One question I'm left with is are there any OSGEO developers who are doing this just for the fun and fame? I know that a lot of us have fun developing but everyone I could think of (GeoTools, GeoServer, uDig) gets paid to have that fun. About 80% of my work on OpenLayers has been entirely unpaid and unsupported by anyone for the past couple years. The early days of OL were a MetaCarta project, and some portion of my work time is still done with support from my employer on open source software, but most of it is just me spending my own time. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] open source desktop shootout
On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 10:16:52AM +0200, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote: Markus Neteler wrote: On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Cameron Shorter cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote: Percy, To start the ball rolling, I've created a wiki page for a desktop comparison here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GIS_Desktop_Comparison Here a reasonable contribution, lead by Tom McConnell: Matrix on OSGeo and COTS software functionality http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Albk_XRkhVkzdGxyYk8tNEZvLUp1UTUzTFN5bjlLX2chl=en Best regards, Markus Here comes the prayer wheel again... What does COTS mean? Ready-made products [1]. Is that the opposite to Open Source software? No. Did anyone say anything about it being an opposite? OSGeo and COTS is one phrase -- there is no distrinction in the spreadsheet (although there is a row stating whether the software is proprietary or not, which is obviously distinct from COTS.) I don't understand your complaint. What would you change about the spreadsheet that causes you to make this point? -- Chris Citing some more Wikipedia: The term often refers to computer software or hardware systems and may also include free software with commercial support. Best regards, [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTS [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf -- Arnulf Christl Exploring Space, Time and Mind http://arnulf.us ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] open source desktop shootout
On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 03:36:43PM +0200, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote: Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 10:16:52AM +0200, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote: Markus Neteler wrote: On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 6:50 AM, Cameron Shorter cameron.shor...@gmail.com wrote: Percy, To start the ball rolling, I've created a wiki page for a desktop comparison here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GIS_Desktop_Comparison Here a reasonable contribution, lead by Tom McConnell: Matrix on OSGeo and COTS software functionality http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Albk_XRkhVkzdGxyYk8tNEZvLUp1UTUzTFN5bjlLX2chl=en Best regards, Markus Here comes the prayer wheel again... What does COTS mean? Ready-made products [1]. Is that the opposite to Open Source software? No. Did anyone say anything about it being an opposite? OSGeo and COTS is one phrase -- there is no distrinction in the spreadsheet (although there is a row stating whether the software is proprietary or not, which is obviously distinct from COTS.) I don't understand your complaint. What would you change about the spreadsheet that causes you to make this point? Did I complain? Your email reads very much like a complaint to me. In fact, as your only reply was a complaint about terminology, with no obvious positive feedback for the person who put a lot of work into a nice spreadsheet, I would feel very discouraged personally on reading it -- doubly so since it comes from someone whose opinion is obviously well-respected in the OSGeo community. Nothing wrong with the spread sheet. It is just the words we are used to. To me Matrix on OSGeo and COTS software functionality reads as Comparing OSGeo software on one hand and COTS on the other. But that's not what the spreadsheet is, nor is that the only way to read the sentence. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Whitebox GAT (Chris Puttick)
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 04:03:52PM +, Chris Puttick wrote: Please understand I am in no way criticising your software, which sounds of interest although out of reach for me. I am also highly appreciative of the work you and others like you put into developing solutions which you then share with others and I do what I can to contribute too. I am just hoping to persuade you and others that .net has far more bad points than good and to consider using a different software development framework/tools in the future. I like your software, I just wish you hadn't written it the way you did. You should have written it the way I would have instead. This kind of argument is why I choose the Open Source moniker for my work instead of the Free Software moniker. Many people are willing to work and open source their work -- continuing to criticize someone for the way they chose to do that goes beyond simply expressing an opinion, and directly in to rude. I don't think anyone here is confused or uninformed about the status of .Net or the technologies around it. I guess it is a matter of perspective. I want to have the widest set of choices professionally and personally want the largest number of choices to be available for others. That's a reasonable desire, but not a reasonable desire to force on someone who wants to develop software (unless you're paying them). Discouraging someone taking steps towards releasing open source software because you don't agree with the design/development choices they made isn't appropriate, in my opinion, in an open source software discussion forum. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Whitebox GAT (Chris Puttick)
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 08:06:59AM -1000, Brian Russo wrote: The latent arrogance displayed in this thread is more destructive than any software license. I'm not trying to be arrogant, I'm sorry if it came off that way. I really just think it's important to realize that Not every programmer programs like I do. There are many different, effective ways, and tools that can be used to write code; writing them off for yourself is fine, but trying to control the decisions someone else makes is ill-advised and potentially harmful. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo maintained ArcSDE (EDN ?) instance
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 03:35:16PM -0500, Yves Moisan wrote: Hi All, I know the subject line doesn't exactly sound like an appropriate topic to discuss on the OSGeo list, but I'd like to make a suggestion to see if there is any traction to it or not. I -- and I'm sure quite a few FOSS4G users on this list -- sometimes have to deploy FOSS4G solutions on corporate/government organization setups that are geared with ArcSDE, for better or for worse. Lately, I've been fighting with MS4W to get it to connect to an ArcSDE server that we set up on our intranet (9.3.1 with postgresql, no postgis is the way it was installed). The intranet SDE was set up as a test server, because we can't access the customer's SDE. So why would I want a public facing OSGeo managed SDE instance if I can set my own ? First, looking at the error logs I'm not sure the installation went well. I'd like to debug being sure that the SDE server is functional. Plus, if I want an independent contractor to work on my problem, I can't offer a test instance because it's on our intranet. I realize most of the people that have customers using ArcSDE will test on the customer's ArcSDE service so there might not be a need for a test instance generally speaking. Am I the only one with that (temporary) need of testing a FOSS4G setup on an ArcSDE server ? Would it make sense to have test data (e.g. like in MS4W) set up on a shared test ArcSDE ? I think that the costs to doing this would likely be prohibitive, right? The software requires a license, and I expect ESRI wouldn't want to encourage use like this? (not to mention the idea of SAC being responsible for maintaining an ArcSDE instance seems costly for no tangible corresponding benefit to OSGeo.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo maintained ArcSDE (EDN ?) instance
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 04:20:18PM -0500, Yves Moisan wrote: I think that the costs to doing this would likely be prohibitive, right? I didn't know it was so costly. The minimum subscription option (EDN license) is $1500 per year but that comes with SDE (as ArcGIS Server I believe) : http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/edn/pricing.html. I wouldn't want OSGeo to support that and there's probably no hope of getting a freebie from ESRI. I didn't think you could put a publicly usable SDE on the web with EDN; Use the type and number of copies of Software, Data, and Documentation and access Web Services (i) for which the applicable license fees have been paid, (ii) for Licensee's own internal use, and (iii) in accordance with Exhibit 1 and the licensed configuration on file as authorized by ESRI or its authorized distributor. the 'internal' there seems like setting it up on the web would be problematic. And 4.2.a: Except as provided herein, Licensee shall not sell, rent, lease, sublicense, lend, assign, or time-share Software, Data, Web Services, or Documentation So, I think ESRI would rather not do this, based on their license seeming to explicitly prevent it. -- Chris The software requires a license, and I expect ESRI wouldn't want to encourage use like this? (not to mention the idea of SAC being responsible for maintaining an ArcSDE instance seems costly for no tangible corresponding benefit to OSGeo.) Thanx for your comments. Yves ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] WCS/WMS accuracy tests?
On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 04:35:59PM -0200, Pablo Carreira wrote: Hi Simone, The issue http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-3702217is not avaliable. http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-3702 Pablo Torres Carreira Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:39:51 +0100 Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] WCS/WMS accuracy tests? From: simone.giannecch...@geo-solutions.it To: discuss@lists.osgeo.org Hi there, any feedback on this from the gdal/mapserver folks? Anyone looked into my findings? Simone. --- Ing. Simone Giannecchini GeoSolutions S.A.S. Founder - Software Engineer Via Carignoni 51 55041 Camaiore (LU) Italy phone: +39 0584983027 fax: +39 0584983027 mob:+39 333 8128928 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonegiannecchini http://twitter.com/simogeo --- On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Simone Giannecchini simone.giannecch...@geo-solutions.it wrote: Dear All, I have spent some time investigating this isue with GeoServer trunk. Here: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS-3702217 you can find a quick detailed report. I am particularly interested in FrankW feedback. Ciao, Simone Steven M. Ottens wrote: On Dec 7, 2009, at 5:47 PM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote: Steven M. Ottens wrote: I know there have been speed tests between different WMS services, but I'm wondering has there been any data-quality/accuracy test been done between WMS and/or WCS services? I wonder if this is the difference between pixel as a point versus pixel as an area. Mapserver uses gdal to handle GeoTiff files and Frank has put a lot of effort in Gdal to handle this correctly. That's our feeling as well. Andrea mentioned that there's an issue with different interpretations on the location of a pixel (centre vs. top-left). Also, I'm surprised that there is any shift in mapserver because I do not think mapserver reprojects data if the in and out projections are the same. I can speak for the other services as I don't know how they work. I'll be doing more detailed tests tomorrow and will post an overview then with the exact versions and configurations and results if people want to reproduce them. I f people have suggestions for specific tests or configurations I'm happy to apply those if possible. Going to test with the latest Geoserver nightly, Mapserver 5.6.0-rc1, Deegree 2.3 rc1 on a windows 2003 machine. With two different GeoTIFFs (one in epsg:4326 and one in epsg:3035) Steven___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/WCS-WMS-accuracy-tests-tp4127002p4148407.html Sent from the OSGeo Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _ Sabia que você tem 25Gb de armazenamento grátis na web? Conheça o Skydrive agora. http://www.windowslive.com.br/public/product.aspx/view/5?ocid=CRM-WindowsLive:produtoSkyDrive:Tagline:WLCRM:On:WL:pt-BR:SkyDrive ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] looking for OS softwre to stitch aerial photos automatically
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:58:30PM +0100, Marco Lechner - FOSSGIS e.V. wrote: Hi, does anybody know a open source tool to stitch a bunch of aerial photographs automatically by detecting similar pixelareas? I know that GRASS is pretty good in processing images, but I there's no funtion to patch a bunch of aerial photos by detecting similarities in overlapping areas, I guess. Hopefully, I'm wrong. Sounds like the kind of thing I'd expect ossim to have, but I never got it to work. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Support for '@' field type in a Shapefile.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 02:32:33PM +0100, Sylvain Maillard wrote: There is a function like this for raster in GRASS : *r.timestamp* - Print/add/remove a timestamp for a raster map http://grass.osgeo.org/grass65/manuals/html65_user/r.timestamp.html I don't know if it's using @, but it should be visible in the source ... A shapefile wouldn't be a 'raster map'. -- Chris @+ Sylvain 2010/1/12 Ariel Nunez ariel.nu...@geo-solutions.it Hi everyone, I am currently working on adding support for reading and writing timestamps on a Sapefile using GeoTools [1]. On a talk with FrankW on #gdal I learned that the timestamp field (code: '@') is not supported by ogrinfo and also that it does not enjoy much widespread use. My question is, apart from ESRI software, is anyone aware of a OS library or software package that supports such field type? Best, Ariel. [1] http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-2903 [2] http://www.clicketyclick.dk/databases/xbase/format/data_types.html -- Ariel Núñez // GeoSolutions http://www.geo-solutions.it/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] HELP PLEASE - Does anyone know where I can get high resolution GIS data for use in tutorials?
On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 10:36:11AM +1100, Simon Cropper (Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd) wrote: Hi, *** Sorry for cross-posting for those people on both lists *** Does anyone have or know of some high resolution vector and raster data that can be used in tutorials? MassGIS. http://www.mass.gov/mgis/laylist.htm Ortho imagery up to 15cm. DEMs. Vector data, including every road in the state, water, parks, and everything down to Abandoned Cranberry Bogs (yes, really). There isn't a better source of unfettered high quality GIS data around. (Okay, maybe there is, but since I live in Mass... not one that I care about :)) The datasets need to be unfetted by intellectual property constraints. Essentially I want to build a set of tutorials around this data and have the users able to download and manipulate the data without breaking any laws. Preferably I would like data for Australia, even better southeast Australia. Data * georeferenced aerial photography (ECW or JPG, 0.15m/pixel) * shapefiles showing cadastral data, soils, contours, roads * DWG files showing details of a development or plan Spatial Reference System * GDA94 MGA55 -- Cheers Simon Simon Cropper Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd PO Box 160, Sunshine, Victoria 3020. P: 9311 5822. M: 041 830 3437. mailto: scrop...@botanicusaustralia.com.au mailto:scrop...@botanicusaustralia.com.au web: www.botanicusaustralia.com.au http://www.botanicusaustralia.com.au ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Software Copyright ownership
give copyright to OSGeo, and what it means when it happens, seems to me like it creates a void in which projects might feel uncomfortable about giving copyright to OSGeo, for fear of what that might mean. Improving that, through solid documentation, seems a great first step in making projects feel more comfortable with that process; this is certainly true for me as a contributor to OpenLayers. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] role of foundation with regard to licensing
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:12:43AM -0800, Tyler Mitchell wrote: On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:16:13 -0500 Frank Warmerdam warmer...@pobox.com wrote: I know that in practice, this is probably the way things already are. Why rock the boat? Why assign copyright to OSGeo in the first place [2]? The primary reason to assign copyright to OSGeo is to make it easier to relicense in the future. It is very hard to relicense a project with copyright held by many contributors. There are also reasons not to assign license, foremost being the paperwork overhead involved in contributions agreements for all contributors. Some contributors are also hesitant to surrender their control over their contribution. A few questions about copyright have come across my desk or face-to-face at events this year. Frank, for the sake of others on the list, could you give us an overview of what does it mean to be an OSGeo project if OSGeo itself does not hold the copyright? I think the question was geared toward whether or not OSGeo could guarantee future appropriate licensing of a product that it has arms-length influence over - or would a non-complying project then be rejected somehow? First, once code is released under a given license, that license can't later be 'removed' in any meaningful way: OSGeo will always be able to maintain and distribute code which was openly licensed at any point, which is a requirement of becoming an incubated project. As far as that goes, OSGeo could always continue to provide a home for open source code that has ever gone through the OSGeo incubation process. If a project were to attempt to 'rescind' its openly licensed status, I believe that it would be the job of OSGeo to: 1. Work to prevent such a change from happening. Given the communities we're working with, I think there would be very strong social pressure against any incubated project going from open source to closed source; changes like these typically simply end up leading to a fork, and OSGeo could continue to provide a home to a community built around the open source project. 2. If all else failed, it would be possible for OSGeo to maintain resources for the open source code, but would probably do best to retire the project, similar to how MapBuilder was retired (but obviously for different reasons). Being an OSGeo project means that the project is a participant in the OSGeo community. Sharing information, collaboration, and resources with other projects in the foundation is the primary motivation for OSGeo projects to continue to participate. OSGeo is not a controlling foundation; in this way, it is somewhat unlike the Apache Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, which take a direct ownership over the projects. This means that OSGeo's role in exerting control over the direction the project takes is limited. However, OSGeo's role as a parent organization means that OSGeo can act as a shepard to code/projects, regardless of the directions that may be taken otherwise. Becoming an OSGeo project means putting your project out there, and participating in a shared community. As a result, you get to exert some control on OSGeo, and OSGeo works with the project to help it succeed. If a project were to take a path away from open source, OSGeo would act as a shepard for the project unless it was no longer in a position where it made sense to do so, at which point the project would no longer be a participating project in OSGeo. This is just what seems to me to be the most reasonable and logical approach to the situation as it stands today. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] copyright assignment
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:47:43PM +1000, Tim Schaub wrote: Hey- I'm interested making simpler the process of collecting maintaining contributor agreements. Specifically in the case where a project wishes to have contributors transfer copyright to OSGeo. I recently had the pleasure of signing an agreement (copyright assignment) digitally. I know the rules for what is acceptable probably vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Does anybody know where a digital signature suffices? Currently, I think the process is that the PSC is responsible for collecting agreements from contributors. The PSC then sends these agreements to the OSGeo Secretary. The OSGeo Secretary maintains the agreements. Not sure how this is working out. I wonder if something simpler would be possible. Sample copyright assignment form: http://tinyurl.com/copyright-assignment And the records: http://tinyurl.com/assignments-on-file Anybody know if this could be made legitimate? Would OSGeo be amenable to having things work this way? Is this a pipe dream? For the record, for CLAs, Google (in getting contributions to their applications/source code) allows digital signing for ICLA contributions, but requires a faxed document for CCLA contributions. I've followed the same basic principle with OpenLayers; accepting emailed ICLA documents, but preferring that CCLAs be mailed or faxed. I don't know if this is based on anything particularly legal, but it seems to be a common thread in most setups -- possibly just because if the copyright is owned by a commercial entity, the risk is higher (Because they can actually afford to sue you), so corporations take a more strict interpretation of their legal requirements. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] distributing read-only vector files?
On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 08:58:58PM +0800, maning sambale wrote: Before anything else, let me introduce our dilemma. We are a non-profit geo-research institution. In many cases we produce geospatial datasets no other local institution can create in my country at the moment. What we create are sometimes benchmark info useful to various research and policy initiatives. At the moment we have two broad users the public (we provide free download of pdf maps) and special interest group (requesting for GIS data). We always want our datasets to be used by other geoshop. However, we have several concerns regarding the release of GIS data: 1. Securing data integrity - once released we cannot guarantee that the data will be distributed from other sources with alterations/changes. Some of this data may contain critical info that if used (coming from altered data), our institution might be blamed. 2. Ensuring corrections will be reported back to us for data enhancement. 3. Ensuring non-commercial use of the data I'm sure these concerns are not unique to us but also common to other institutions. I am hoping we can discuss options on how we can resolve the above concerns in areas both technical and institutional policy. My advice would be Figure out how to deal with the fact that these are not going to happen. If you are distributing data that people care about altering, modifying, etc. then there is no practical way to prevent them from doing so. A license agreement of some kind can keep 'honest people honest', but no means, technical or otherwise, will prevent people from distributing data that they want to distribute. Additionally, these types of restrictions typically serve to limit the usefulness of the data -- the more restricted a dataset is, the more likely you are to block legitimate usage unintentionally while 'protecting' the data. That said, the last restriction is well-addressed by Creative Commons licenses. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:24:37PM +, Chris Puttick wrote: - Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: Speak to whom? Decision makers with no real knowledge of the thing they are signing off on, being advised by lazy people who have some understanding but want to ensure they cover their back and don't have to try too hard rather than implement the best solution for the least money? No, to the lazy people. If your code is good enough, then the right way -- even the lazy way -- will be the Open Source way. In order to really succeed, You've not been hanging with enough lazy people. Laziness is taking the path of least resistance; in IT that means using the brand most people know about regardless if it is the best tool for the job. Sometimes brand is all that matters. In that case, I don't think that a successful marketer changes the equation. Sometimes more than the brand matters; especially when the person who is going to be implementing any potential solution has a say in the way the solution is developed. I maintain that *Those* cases are the ones to target first: When OSGeo software projects are succeeding at those regularly (not a done deal yet, in my mind) then we (as a community) can turn to outreach as a next step. You think people went to NT Server because it was better than Netware? It wasn't. People chose MS SQL Server because it was better than its competitors, open or closed source? It wasn't (and in so many ways still isn't). And the reasons for those are not ones that would be swayed by any marketing argument that an OSGeo representative could make. If the fact that our software is better, cheaper, and more fully featured, and people still want to use ESRI -- as is often the case -- then why fight them? What is the point in spending your effort to force your way into a community that is fighting against you, rather than -- for example -- expanding into a developing market that doesn't have the same preconceptions? The latter will have way more chance of improving the projects through more contributions, etc. in the end, in my opinion. Marketing. Branding. Lots of ferrying decision makers to shiny demo labs and glossy events and making them feel good about the product, regardless of the fact that driving sports cars around race tracks has nothing to do with the promo'd products effectiveness (although such events should provide some pointers about value for money...). Again, if people are making decisions based on irrational things, then OSGeo software isn't going to convince them. I do not think that OSGeo should attempt to compete with the 'big boys' in terms of dollars and effort spent on advertising. That would be a mistake, because those dollars could almost universally be better spent -- by the organization -- in supporting a developer attending a conference or sprint, in getting better project hosting together, or other things like that. Sure, if money, time, and energy were infinite, marketing in the same way that the Big.Co.s do would make sense, but they're not. With that in mind, I think that OSGeo should not be about trying to push out other software: We should document what projects are, what they do, how they do it *better* -- and if people don't want better, that's all there is to it. (Note that this does not apply to companies using OSGeo software, or doing contracting, or anything else like that. They are well-suited for that type of 'convincing', whereas OSGeo is positioned poorly for it.) Laziness is going with the solution most people have heard of; in particular not having to look at lots of options and not having to come up with a real defence in the event of issues arising from the choices made. No one ever got fired for buying IBM was a line in the 80s regarding computing solution purchases; in GIS right now I guess you all know the products in the typical organisational list - how many open source ones are on it? Actually, to be honest, I don't. I do know that the products in my organization's list are MapServer, GDAL, and OpenLayers, and have been since before my time. I'm sure that there are many companies out there that are like this. Changing companies that aren't -- rather than documenting what exists and allowing them to make the choice -- is (at least at this point, and in my opinion for the forseeable future) not worth the effort when it could be easily spent better. For sure OSGeo and most open source products will never have big marketing budgets, so no sports cars, F1 practice days, Grand Prix tickets, WSB tickets (to name a few I've recently been offered as a decision-maker); but there are other kinds of marketing and that we can, should and do engage in. And the next time I meet a typical peer at an IT management conference and he has gvSIG on his desktop GIS shortlist and his SDI components are all open source or at least open standards compliant, I'll know
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 09:36:35AM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote: That kind of high-touch approach will have to be left to those (like, hopefully OpenGeo) who are building and monetizing products around the core software. The non-profit core organization can't do that unless it's willing to become much more vendor-like, which is something OSGeo has repeatedly shied away from (perhaps because OSGeo has many members who work for companies, that, like OpenGeo, are monetizing open source). (And Paul says in a paragraph what I say poorly in 10.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:40:17PM -0500, Howard Butler wrote: On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote: Hi everyone, a recent chat I was asked about our vision for OSGeo over the next 3 and 5 years. I'd really like to hear thoughts on the matter and pool a few of the ideas together for further discussions amongst committees, projects, chapters and the board. It's also a good way for the board nominees in the upcoming election to get a sense of where other members are thinking these days. My measurement of success for OSGeo and priorities I hope it shares in the next 3-5 years are the following three items: - Continued expansion of the local chapters. Local chapters make OSGeo real in the sense that mailing lists, websites, and an IRC channel can't. - The conference continues uninterrupted for the next five years, and we start to use it our central fundraising piece. - Cross-project collaboration, like the journal, osgeo4w, metacrs, benchmarking, system administration, and geodata continues to be fostered by us. From my biased developer's perspective, these have been OSGeo's biggest accomplishments along with the local chapter development and consolidation of the conference. I was going to write a post in response to this, but after reading Howard's, I realize I hardly need to: essentially, his opinions and position mirror mine 100%. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Election: Christopher Schmidt
Greetings to All and Sundry, I'm Christopher Schmidt. I feel proud to have been nominated for the OSGeo Board, and would gladly serve on it in order to help OSGeo continue to grow and mature as an organization which is able to represent the best in Open Source GIS software. I have participated in many projects across the OSGeo sphere since my (relatively recent) introduction to GIS software in general. My background prior to that was mostly in web development, and I have especially worked to help create and extend the possibilities for web mapping with Open Source software. Some of the projects I've participated in are well known in this field: as a founding member of OpenLayers, TileCache, FeatureServer, an author of the GeoJSON specification, and a contributor to other software like MapServer, GDAL, and more, I feel that I have a broad base of experience of the OSGeo community and software. In addition, I have worked as a member of the Systems Administration Committee, worked as part of the Geodata committee, and more, to help enable OSGeo to continue to provide the excellent resource that it does today. I believe that OSGeo is reaching a point in its life where the next several years will help truly define what the organization is in the long term. As the organization reaches maturity, I think it's important that we establish a clear direction for growth into the future. Many graduating students have heard the phrase: Today is the first day of the rest of your lives: Make the most of it. I think that this sentiment applies to OSGeo at this time, and I think that I am well suited to helping usher OSGeo towards a future which is beneficial to all of its projects. I look forward to seeing the results of the board election this year. If anyone has any questions for me as a board candidate, I welcome them to either my personal email address, or you can find me on IRC, as 'crschmidt'. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Options for setting up a Web Feature Service
On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 12:34:34PM +1000, nicholas.g.lawre...@transportandmainroads.qld.gov.au wrote: Hello osgeo people, I am a member of a professional institution that is considering setting up a web feature service that publishes point locations, of members and offices, in a global context. The idea being to, instead of producing a map directly, to instead just publish the WFS, which makes the information available for mash-ups. The published data is likely to have a very small volume and only be updated a few times per annum. How do you go about setting up a WFS? To be honest, in this case, I wouldn't. Instead, I would publish a file describing the data in a well understood data format. KML is widely used and understood by many different clients. Publishing the data in a single file, well understood by many clients -- like Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. -- is likely to be more effective at having the data reused than publishing it in a WFS. If the data was large -- many thousands of results -- then WFS might be a better answer. (Though KML NetworkLink might still be better.) With a small collection of data, however, a static file -- KML, GeoJSON, or some other widely used format (GML doesn't count, Ron), would probably be good. (The primary reason I would select GeoJSON over KML is if the attributes -- more than name and description -- are important, though recent KML work has sort of improved that situation as well.) Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open File Formats andProprietaryAlgorithms[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 09:45:04AM -0700, Landon Blake wrote: MPG wrote: Tiling essentially means you can take a large file and compress pieces of it independently. This avoids having to deal with the large memory footprint issues, but it can also lead to seam-line artifacts under certain conditions. Ideally, one would prefer to have the option of compressing large images without resorting to using tiles. This is probably a stupid question, since I know absolutely nothing about image compression, but couldn't you overlap the tiles slightly to avoid the seam lines? This would obviously result in a slightly larger file size because some pixels would be compressed twice. But that might be OK if you were trying to compress a huge image. What about reading chunks of the image off disk, instead of trying to put the whole image in memory? This would be slower, but might make an impossible task possible. Reading chunks of image off disk == tiling. With compression, bits aren't stored on th disk in a way that you can say Okay, bytes 0-32768 are the first 720 pixels in any way. Instead, you have to decompress the image, or part of it, to start to learn these things. Tiling lets you split the image up into many little chunks, which you can read individually. We run into this problem with vector datasets to. Some datasets are just to stinking BIG. One of my tasks for OpenJUMP is to write a core module that displays vector data accessed directly from disk, instead of from memory. This will be slower, but it is better than crashing the program because there isn't enough RAM. Most Vector datasets have some lvel of random access -- I can look for feature 7, and get it, because i know where the start and end of feature 7 are. I don't know where the start and end of pixel 7 is -- because its' different depending on exactly how wth file is compressed. This is all a vast simplification, and some of it is probably not-entirely right, but the problems are -- as you suggested -- more complex than most people not working in imagery know. (And even more complex than some of them know, most likely :)) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Lurkers
On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:55:30AM -0700, Landon Blake wrote: Is OpenJUMP the only community with these open source lurkers? No. How many of these companies do you think there are? (I'm not talking about one guy who downloads an open source app and uses it. I'm talking about actual companies with more than one employee.) The majority. I figure it's approximately equal to the iceberg effect: Unless you are a consultant advertising your services far and wide, my guess is that for every one company you see participating openly in an Open Source project, there are probably about 9 that are using the software without you having any clue. Why don't they get more involved? * No need: When Open Source solves the problem, you don't need to get involved. * No time: We'd love to participate more, but we've got our own problems to solve -- and they don't match those of the community. * No understanding: We download this software just like all of our other software. What's a mailing list? * Not enough encouragement. Gtting started in an open source project can be a daunting task even for the well-educated in the open source world; for those who aren't, it's an order of magnitude more difficult Are they embarrassed? Do they not want their competition to find out about the open source program they are benefiting from? Are they violating the terms of the license and don't want to get busted? I think these are generally unlikely. Do they not understand that their involvement is a key part of the program's survival? It is likely they do not, in my opinoin; and in this, they may well be right. The software existed before they started using it; it is likely it will exist in some form afterwards as well. This has become an important question for me recently as the active development of OpenJUMP has slowed. We don't have any organizations actively participating in development. (Well, maybe one or two, but they have been quiet lately.) I'm the only one working on serious improvements or changes, and not just bug fixes. I would really like to reach out to these lurkers to get them more involved. Ultimately, the survival of the project may depend on it. See also: OpenLayers. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open File Formats and Proprietary Algorithms
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 01:57:16PM -0700, Landon Blake wrote: MPG: Thanks for the clarification. When you said there is today no open source implementation of JP2 that is suitable for geo work do you mean that there is no open source library that can read and write JP2? If so, who is using the format? There are: 1. Several non-open source implementations (most of which cost money) which work at geo-sized JP2 images. 2. Many use cases of JPEG2000 which involve imagery at sizes that are less than geo. (This is the much more common case, in my research.) Do you know why there hasn't been a broader adoption of JP2? I'm not sure what your definition is of broader adoption; many of the datasources I worked with for OAM were provided in either JP2 or MrSID formats. I would almost always go with MrSID, because I could: * Work with it easily, and for free * It was typically significantly smaller. Perhaps you're asking why there hasn't been more open source software written to handle large, highly compressed JP2 images better -- to which I would point out that there isn't *any* format that has good open source support for large, highly compressed images. (gzipped TIFFs work to some extent, but don't compare to the benefits gained by JP2 or MrSID in many cases.) It's a hard problem, and -- given that the major players see the costs to 'pay to play' as being trivial (and they typically are, in the big scheme of things), not in a situation where it's likely that the people with ots of money ar ein a position to spend it on open source, rather than simply paying a smaller amount for existing non-opensource solutions. Despite the claims that 'disks are cheap and bandwidth is free', many providers *are* limited by bandwidth: MassGIS, for example, had to put in cash for a costly upgrade to their badnwidth solely due to the demand put on their servers by people downloading aerial imagery. Those funds could have gone to funding more open geodata, but instead were used to maek the data that already existed more readily available. These things *do* matter, and MrSID offers, by far, the best 'bang for the buck' for amount of data per byte of download. This applies even more at the consumer end; when you talk about consuming data, MrSID is even *more* user-friendly, because the users (who have limited bandwidth) are able to open it more easily. Additionally, many viewers which include MrSID support are able to display larger images -- due to the MrSID library -- than they would be by opening the entire image in RAM or something similar. Many of my friends have used MrSID for looking at thigns like Shakespear's Folios, because tools like IfranView include it by default, and the tool Just Works better than anything else. I believe that the important things in terms of delivering public content to users are: * License -- Are they allowed to do what they want with it? * Ease of use -- Is it *possible* For them to do what they want with it, including downloading it in the first place? * Openness -- Can they do what htey want with it with free/open tools? If the formwer two are true, then the latter -- openness -- can be handled by third parties. Imagine that you have two options: * Data provided online, for users to download, in MrSID * Data provided on CDs, for users to have shipped to them, in GeoTIFF (The latter will almost always have a non-trivial fee, because it involves person time, but ignore that for the time being.) If these are your options -- and this *is* the case for a non-zero number of imagery providers -- which one would you prefer to use? Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Options for sharing geodata symbology along with WFS?
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 11:58:00AM -0400, Alexandre Leroux wrote: Hi all, My team is starting to play with WFS and a colleague had the following question: what are the options we have for sharing the symbology of geodata served via WFS? If I'm not mistaken, symbology isn't part of the WFS service. I know there's the OGC Symbology Encoding standard, but is this the best way to share symbology of WFS-served data? Can't the geodata be styled directly by the GML styles of the WFS-served data? If that's an option, what tool (open source ideally, of course) should we use to create those styles? I think what you're looking for is SLD. To be honest, no one of my team knows a lot about WFS yet (or much on the other OGC standards). I thought of asking the WFS forum (http://feature.opengeospatial.org/forumbb/viewforum.php?f=17 ) but activity is pretty low. I'm confident this list will provide insightful answers! :-) To my defense for this OSGeo-unrelated question, we do process and serve all the related geodata using OSGeo software! ;-) Which software? Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Options for sharing geodata symbology along with WFS?
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 02:22:51PM -0400, Alexandre Leroux wrote: Hi, Thanks Christopher for your answer. A colleague excluded SLD by telling us it only applies to WMS, which, based on your comment, isn't true. The OGC website isn't clear on this (I guess we should read deeper). This would enable us to generate SLDs with uDig :-) SLD is a language; at least some non-WMS tools can read SLD, and style WFS vectors according to it. (OpenLayers can do this; I'm sure that other client software can as well.) Insofar as such a thing exists, SLD is the primary standards based way of communicating styling information regarding a set of data. Some WMS servers are capable of using SLD as their style descriptions; I believe both MapServer and GeoServer can do this. However, other clients can as well. answers! :-) To my defense for this OSGeo-unrelated question, we do process and serve all the related geodata using OSGeo software! ;-) Which software? Since you're asking.. still the same project already mentioned on this list: providing Canadian weather information with web maps and standard web services. Our (fully working) prototypes use MapFish, OpenLayers GDAL/OGR. (we also use other OSGeo software for other projects) Hm, I guess my question was unclear; I was curious what software you were using for WMS/WFS. GeoServer uses SLD as the primary styling configuration on the server, for example. Cheers, Alex -- Alexandre Leroux, M.Sc., Ing. Environnement Canada / Environment Canada Centre météorologique canadien / Canadian Meteorological Centre Section de la réponse aux urgences environnementales / Environmental Emergency Response Section alexandre.ler...@ec.gc.ca ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Patent for feature of paper map.
On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 08:14:10AM -0600, Bill Thoen wrote: You might be surprised what people might be able to get away with, though. There's been repeated attempts to patent web mapping for example, and if it wasn't for the efforts of a few dedicated people, there would now be patents in both Britain and the USA on displaying maps over the web. But the threat is not dead yet, believe it or not, and it may culminate in a battle between Microsoft and Google sometime in the near future. Check out Daniel Morissette's blog entry for Feb 21, 2009, Microsoft Patents the Map at http://www.systemed.net/blog/?p=68. If Microsoft really uses the Multimap patent to put the bite on Google, then you can bet your bippy that it'll affect your web mapping business too. Er, that blog is written by Richard Fairhurst. http://www.systemeD.net/blog/about.html Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Using GPL for geospatial software in a commercial application.
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 04:12:14PM -0700, Landon Blake wrote: I'm working on a group of AutoLISP scripts for IntelliCAD and AutoCAD that increase cooperation between these CAD programs and FOSS GIS software. (For example: One set of my scripts allows CAD users to export drawing geometry in OGC WKT format.) I'd like to release these scripts under Version 3 of the GPL, but I'm not sure if this is possible. The scripts are read by proprietary CAD programs, and I don't have the power to release the code for these programs under the GPL. The GPL requirements for this case are only when you 'distribute' the work. I'm assuming you don't expct that people will take your scripts, build them into the CAD programs, and then 'distribute' them togther. So long as that is the case, it seems likely that this won't be an issue: your code is GPL, and you're not 'shipping' their code, or at least not outside 'mere aggregation' (which doesn't drag in derivative clauses). So, I can't see any likely problems with this. IANAL, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:24:47AM -0500, P Kishor wrote: On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Daniel Ames amesd...@isu.edu wrote: Nenad, The OSGeo projects use a variety of licenses. You'll see LGPL, MPL, GPL, MIT, and others. If you are developing commercial tools, you'll need to avoid GPL (someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Disclaimer: IANAL. Get legal advice from your lawyer before embarking on your million dollar enterprise. I'll correct you, because, as stated above, you are misrepresenting at best, and wrong at worst. ;-) GPL does not prevent you from making money. GPL only requires that if you modify the code that is under GPL, then you must redistribute the modified code under GPL. Granted this may not be easy to figure out in real world scenarios, but consider the following -- Let's say ShapeLib is published under GPL (I don't know whether or not it is; this is only for illustration purpose). Let's say, MapServer utilizes ShapeLib, but doesn't modify ShapeLib, but uses ShapeLib as is. Let's say, MapServer's creator decides to make millions off of MapServer, Inc. He is under no obligation to release the source code of MapServer, but he is obligated to release the source code of ShapeLib, which is no big deal, because the source code of ShapeLib is already available to anyone. On the other hand, let's say, ShapeLib is modified to perform better, or differently, for MapServer. Now, there is an obligation to release the source code to the modified version of ShapeLib no matter what the value of that value-added might be. That is what the GPL obligates. MapServer itself is still governed by whatever license that its creator decides to apply. Er, I think you're confusing the GPL and the LGPL. What you have just described is the situation with the LGPL, but not with GPL. Because MapServer integrates ShapeLib (I'm assuming from your description above that it does) then MapServer is also required to be released under the GPL, because shapelib is linked to MapServer. MapServer -- as it is linking ShapeLib -- is *also* required to be released under the terms of the GPL, even if the MapServer code itself was not. (For the record, no part of shapelib or MapServer is released under the GPL, to the best of my knowledge, so this is simply a straw man, not a practical discussion.) Any time your code includes GPL code, all of the code that incorporates it must also be treated under the GPL. This does *not* prevent you from making money. It simply means you also have to give source code to the people you give object code to, and that they are then able to do the same to others, if they choose to do so. Red Hat makes a large amount of money by doing exactly this, for example -- though they don't make money off giving you the software, and it seems unlikely that much software can be 'sold' when it's under the GPL. (It's not impossible, though -- especially when things like 'compiling on Windows' come in to play.) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 10:33:40AM -0600, Daniel Ames wrote: IANAL either, but I do read wikipedia. So by way of clarification... Everything I've read makes a clear distinction between GPL and LGPL such that GPL code can not be embedded in or linked to a closed source application. Period. Whereas L-GPL licensed code can be linked to a closed source application. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License So if the individual wants to link to GPL licensed code/libraries and is willing to make his code GPL then fine. He can still run a commercial business based on this code, as many people do. But if he wants to keep his code under some closed-source license then he can not link to or embed any GPL licensed code or library. You beat me to it :) this is exactly what I tried to say in my previous post. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries
___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org/ Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org/ Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/ Science Commons Fellow, Geospatial Data http://sciencecommons.org Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ --- collaborate, communicate, compete === Sent from Madison, WI, United States ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 01:47:32PM -0400, Yves Moisan wrote: But if he wants to keep his code under some closed-source license then he can not link to or embed any GPL licensed code or library. Whence licence exceptions e.g. in ExtJS (http://extjs.com/products/floss-exception.php) to allow using ExtJS (GPL) with an application/library that is distributed as an open source type of license. Assuming that you consider them valid. Red Hat Legal is firm that this exception clause isn't valid. -- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471509#c2 (The comment even points out that the FLOSS exception would require you to make your program not open source in order to apply, because you limit the field of use, which is a violation of the OSD.) ExtJS is a whole different ball of wax than the OP was talking about; it's best not to treat too much in that project's licensing as doctrine, since it's different from any other open sourced project I've ever dealt with, and unusual in a number of ways. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries
On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 10:09:50PM +0200, Cuinet Jérôme wrote: I'm curious and I have seen the GNU libc license, and it's obviously GPL. It's not GPL, it's LGPL. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, glibc is free software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library According to this thread, if I have well understood the GPL, all software linked with glibc are licensed under GPL ? If glibc was GPL, yes. I had seen http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#PortProgramToGL wich suggest that a lib such as glibc is under LGPL. But the license text of glibc is well the GPL, with the last paragraph : This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. Where are you getting the license text of glibc that it says this? I can't find a license file which indicates this. What I have missed ? Jérôme - Original Message - From: P Kishor punk.k...@gmail.com To: OSGeo Discussions discuss@lists.osgeo.org Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 7:19 PM Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] GIS_Libraries On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Christopher Schmidt crschm...@crschmidt.net wrote: On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:55:47AM -0500, P Kishor wrote: .. Thanks Dan (and Christopher and others), I see the distinction now between GPL and LGPL. However, I am reading the actual GPL text and its extensive FAQ, instead of Wikipedia's interpretation of it, to try and sift through all the variations and exceptions to better understand this now. Hopefully I will come out better informed from this process. In the meantime, the distinction that you point out between GPL and LGPL makes sense. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL The combination itself is then available under those GPL versions. .. This actually gets even more clear as mud... from the para above the link provided above, we have the following -- Can I release a non-free program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in? It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. For instance, if the program uses only simple fork and exec to invoke and communicate with plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program. If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. In order to use the GPL-covered plug-ins, the main program must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when the main program is distributed for use with these plug-ins. If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case. Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking. So, the above question is possibly closer in spirit to the OP that started this thread. Can I create a commercial (and ostensibly closed source, although that closed-source-ness of the program was not asked for by the OP) program with LGPL GIS SDK or library. The answer would be yes. But, the answer would be yes with GPL as well, but then we would get into whether or not the result would be open or closed source, and what the license of the result would be. Yes, I muddied the issue a bit by using the example of ShapeLib, but, perhaps that is a good thing, because it does illustrate the need for thinking it through carefully... what are we doing with the GPL program? Are we linking? Are we doing a simple fork and exec? Do we have some other borderline case? Once again, the clearest advice would be -- if you think you have the possibility of creating a business that is based on software worth protecting its source, and yet want to use other free software, pony up some cash up-front and get a real lawyer to advice you. Don't listen to folks on mailing lists or read wikipedia articles... invest in a lawyer. Otherwise, take the easy way out and stay free. I actually quite like GPL's philosophy -- it doesn't restrict at all what I do with GPLed software. It only stops me from restricting others. Puneet. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: TOP 20 OSGeo Mailman subscriber statistics - GeoNetwork stats
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 06:00:15PM +0200, Jeroen Ticheler wrote: Here are the GeoNetwork opensource mailing list subscribers statistics, running on sourceforge: User mailing list: 430 User mailing list in French: 21 (new mailing list) Developer list: 249 Commit mailing list: 44 OpenLayers: dev - 494 users - 1081 trac - 31 commit - 24 -- Chris Cheers, Jeroen On Apr 25, 2009, at 3:52 PM, Markus Neteler wrote: TOP 20 OSGeo Mailman subscriber statistics: I have written a small script to count the *enabled* subscribers of all OSGeo hosted mailing lists, here the top 20 lists: mapserver-users: 1667 gdal-dev: 1006 grass-user: 938 announce: 868 discuss: 864 mapguide-users: 748 qgis-user: 728 grass-windows: 382 mapserver-dev: 335 gdal-announce: 335 spanish: 303 grass-dev: 299 mapbender_users: 278 mapserver-announce: 274 grass-announce: 270 qgis-developer: 251 grass-stats: 234 geodata: 229 africa: 229 portugal: 227 Best Markus ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] List of FOSS GIS Implementations
On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 01:49:45PM -0700, Landon Blake wrote: I was thinking of starting my own list of FOSS GIS software being used in the real world. Several examples have been cited in this mailing list over the last couple of weeks. This list would be my ammunition in the nobody uses that stuff gun battle. I was wondering if there might be a home for this on the OSGeo wiki? Would we consider keeping use cases/recommendation letters from organizations using OSGeo projects? http://gallery.osgeo.org/ http://gallery.openlayers.org/ http://docs.openlayers.org/casestudies/index.html#all-case-studies http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Case_Studies -- Chris Just thinking out loud here... :] Landon Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] seeking OS client API to embed maps in desktop app
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 09:32:21AM +0200, Tim Sutton wrote: Hi 2009/1/23 Judy and Chris Beaudette jcbea...@yahoo.com: greetings. my company is developing a demo that queries tabular data for environmental facilities based on environmental interests, NAICS codes, etc. and generates reports that have embedded simple maps (google maps) with the facility location and some facility details in a custom marker. we want to embellish the maps by pulling data from different sources as follows: - environmental tabular/attribute data in xml fed from Web services - GeoRSS with location data from the same Web services - spatial data from other WMS, WFS, WCS services to that end, we're looking for an appropriate open source GIS client application that can do the OGC stuff and that we can pass the attribute and GeoRSS stuff for rendering the environmental data. those are the gotta-haves. the nice-to-haves are: - .NET or C/C++ API (preferred) or Java API, so that the maps can be embedded in a desktop application, but barring that: - a Web API (HTML, python, php, etc.), and barring that: - a desktop client that can be invoked from our app that can do all of the above after browsing the products pages at osgeo.org, opengeospatial.org, opensourcegis.org and freegis.org, the names that kept coming up were gvSIG, iGeoPortal, and maybe uDIG, with various other possibilities (cartoweb, GeoDango, Chameleon, Mapfish, and of course many others). does anyone have any thoughts or opinions on what would: - work best to support the functionality required in the demo, while at the same time (and to a lesser degree): - what is a viable long-term solution (i.e. not likely to go away any time soon) thanks in advance, ~~crb QGIS (http://qgis.org) is probably a good fit for your needs - we have an API that can be used from Python or C++. It doesnt have everything you need (e.g. GeoRSS support isnt there) but its a great solution for writing vertical applications with embedded GIS data browsing functionality. GDAL trunk has GeoRSS support; I don't know if you can open arbitrary GDAL datasources with QGIS yet, but at the very least, it's not inconceivable to add that support with relatively limited coding effort. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Symbology/styles exchange
On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 11:58:44AM +0100, Andrea Aime wrote: RAVI KUMAR ha scritto: Hi, symbology is of particular significance for Geologists. Orientation (Rotation) of symbols and labelling through attribute table are essential. OpenJUMP user list has made great contribution towards this. Wish to know if any other Open GIS has similar resources. Any software using SLD should be able to rotate symbols, at least point ones. GeoServer does for example, I think MapServer does too. OpenLayers does too. http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/styles-rotation.html Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] State of OpenAerialMap
be improved with some work on improving existing libraries, but the work has not been done yet. * The current server status is unclear to me. The primary thing that OAM has always needed is disk, more disk! thus far. Early on, the server that OAM runs on got access to a large amount of disk. However, after a couple months of loading data, I was told I was using too much disk. When asking another server admin, I was told to use as much as I wanted. Clearly, there is some lack of clear understanding about the way that OAM should be using its resources. TelaScience, which has acted as a gracious host thus far, is not in a position where adminning servers is part of their day to day work. Clarifying this aspect of things with TelaScience -- what resources are available, and what resources should be conserved -- would help allay a lot of my personal confusion acting as a host. This also applies with regard to other aspects of the actual maintenance of the server. These are the problems that have existed so far, from my point of view. The lack of community around OAM makes all of these problems much more difficult to handle -- previous cries for help have gone essentially unnoticed. In an effort to kick-start the community, I think we have the following needs: * Improving the relationship with TelaScience, and the servers provided by them, to be more clear. * A clear vision for what OAM should be should be defined. * An active community needs to be built around supporting and improving the site, so that it does not stagnate again. * It is important to make it as easy as possible for the target users of OAM to upload data. I apologize for my poor stewardship of the OpenAerialMap project up to now, and in more than one case, turning away possible contributors due to my frustrations at working with the project. At this point, I think it would be best -- once we have a clearly defined relationship with TelaScience -- for someone other than me to take over as point person for communications about the OAM project. I would like to suggest that OAM falls within what I consider to me the responsibilities of the OSGeo Geodata committee, and it probably makes a lot of sense to stop treating OAM as anything other than an 'arm' of that committee. I hope this helps to clarify the situation with regard to OAM, and spur the community onwards towards taking the base that has been started with and developing a real solution to some of the hard problems the project needs to solve to continue to grow. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: GeoExt: call for participation
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28:10PM +1100, Roald de Wit wrote: Hi Bart, Cameron and lists, Now it's time to de-lurk I guess. I've been subscribed to these lists for some time now and this is my first post. OSGeo Discuss members: this is a discussion started by Cameron Shorter, 2 posts down in this email. As Cameron points out: for our organisation the GPL (v3) license is too restrictive. I don't have context for this, since I'm not on the GeoExt list, but the answer to this seems easy to me: GeoExt itself can be licensed in a non-restrictive way (under BSD/MIT). Then, the resulting 'product' from combining Ext + GeoExt is licensed as per the Ext licensing -- which means that if you haven't paid, you're stuck with GPL, but if you own a commercial Ext license -- which is not prohibitively expensive -- you're good. The only case this *wouldn't* work in would be the case where GeoExt itself is GPL licensed. Since GeoExt has no license file or license mentioned on their website that i can find at this time, I assume this is, at the very least, still flexible, and you simply need to convince the GeoExt community that letting you mooch off their code without contributing back is worthwhile for some reason :) Is there room for another project that wants to achieve a similar goal as GeoExt but uses a less restrictively licensed JS library (like jQuery's dual GPL/MIT license) and would there be interest from the OSGeo-minded community to join forces to achieve that goal? The Commercial Ext license is very open: I've not found *anything* I can't do once I've paid for it. If GPL restrictions are a problem, it's easy enough to make them go away. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The state of WMS tile caching
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:46:48PM +0100, Gilles Bassière wrote: I was recently confronted to the same problem. I needed a cached WMS, although on some occasion I would need to perform untiled map requests. Of course, it would have been much easier to send tiled and untiled request to a single front server. My idea was to hack TileCache. Indeed, TileCache already has WMS request support et grid calculation and cache and so on. When the requested extent/size does not match the tile grid, TileCache returns an error. I guess it would be possible to catch this error. Then, instead of returning the error to the client, it should be possible to forward the request to the rendering back-end and return the resulting image to the client (without storing it in the cache). I'm not sure whether this could be possible with all back-end. At this time, yes, in the future, no. However, I would *never* be supportive of that change in the code. (There are other implementations I *would* be supportive of; just not that one.) Specifically, the problem with that is that there is no trivial way to communicate to the user You are using non-cached tiles: the error is the way that we tell the user. Additionally, the default use of TileCache is that users *don't* want to allow non-cached hits: Take the openstreetmap example, where a single non-cached tile hit can take 3-4 minutes to render, and realize that if you got a half dozen f those at once, you'd kill most servers for minutes at a time. I did not think of performance either. But I think that could be a solution for someone needing seamless map caching. As I said, there are other solutions. (Specifically, TileCache rendering could take a *set* of tiles to fetch, cache each of them, then put them together.) For some reasons we did not implement this idea. The main problem was the lack of support for GetFeatureInfo in TileCache. I'm now thinking of some kind of integration of TileCache within the OGCserver (part of the Mapnik project). It is still a rough idea and, unfortunately, I don't have any time to work on it. Moreover, I doubt if it's reasonable to mix WMS with TMS-based cache. Of course, TMS-based cache is incredibly efficient but it also impose the grid parameters to the client. In my opinion it is an important restriction that reduce interoperability. With such restrictions, it may not be possible to feed OpenLayers with WMS-C stream coming from different servers. I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. I've combined WMS-C with different servers many times. (There are limitations in OpenLayers with regard to using different grids at the moment, but none are unfixable, just awaiting interested people to invest the time or effort). WMS-C is reasonably well defined, well-understood, and well-supported within the tiled clients on the web. If you can't use tiles - or don't want to - I've already proposed ways to wrap TileCache in a 'real' WMS server. I'm a bit surprised because standard-compliance is an important part of this thread but the OGC discussion paper about tiled WMS was not mentioned (see http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms). I missed a mention of 'standards compliance' being an important part of this thread. Is there a specific reason that *OGC* standards are important? TMS and WMS-C are widely used in the community, are written as specifications, have supporting implementations, etc. These *are* community standards -- documented ones, even -- and I would highly recommend them over the current state of the art available from OGC to anyone who cares about solving problems (rather than meeting the terms of a contract). The paper is more than 1-year old now, does anybody know if there is ongoing work or if it could become an implement specification soon? The discussion paper indicated has already been replaced twice in internal OGC discussions. TileCache already implements the WMTS described in that discussion paper, but since it is going to be thrown out as soon as the next version of the spec is released, writing clients for it is silly. An important point discussed in the paper is about describing the tile grid so that an arbitrary client can build a valid request. Huh? The values for LAYER, STYLE, CRS, FORMAT, any mentioned dimensions and SCALE must exactly match the options that are specified in the WMS_DescribeTilesResponse document. TILEROW and TILECOL are integer indices indicating a particular tile in the tile matrix. This is no different from TileCache -- you have to request a tile that the cache knows about. the WMTS request format can be used with TileCache -- there is nothing you can get out of WMTS that you can't *already* get out of TileCache, except the URL Format. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The state of WMS tile caching
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 07:37:54AM -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 12:46:48PM +0100, Gilles Bassière wrote: I was recently confronted to the same problem. I needed a cached WMS, although on some occasion I would need to perform untiled map requests. Of course, it would have been much easier to send tiled and untiled request to a single front server. My idea was to hack TileCache. Indeed, TileCache already has WMS request support et grid calculation and cache and so on. When the requested extent/size does not match the tile grid, TileCache returns an error. I guess it would be possible to catch this error. Then, instead of returning the error to the client, it should be possible to forward the request to the rendering back-end and return the resulting image to the client (without storing it in the cache). I'm not sure whether this could be possible with all back-end. At this time, yes, in the future, no. I should qualify/explain this: one of my short term goals is to allow for requesting tiles in TileCache from a backend TMS service (making TIleCache a proxy, of sorts), which would mean that you could only request along the pre-built grid. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The state of WMS tile caching
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 09:30:35AM -0500, Alexandre Leroux wrote: Hi list, I have a rather simple question about the state of WMS tile caching. The wiki pages content is mostly one or two years old now: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/WMS_Tile_Caching http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/WMS_Tiling_Client_Recommendation I took a look at http://www.tilecache.org/ and http://geowebcache.org/trac but wasn't able to confidently answer my question. Can WMS tiles be cached by the server for any WMS client and still serve WMS according to the standard? TileCache does not support this. However, what some people (including myself) have done is: * Set up a Layer to be served via WMS (GeoServer, for example) * Set up a TileCache in front of it * Set up a MapServer in front of it, using GDAL's WMS-C support: http://gdal.org/frmt_wms.html Then, a request from a client like OpenLayers can go directly to the TileCache, while a request from a 'normal' WMS client can go to the MapServer layer which pulls from the cache. However, I would not recommend this technique if you expect heavy load -- the restriction of tilecache to not do stitching is somewhat intentional. (Enough people complain about it being slow without ading in intentional slowdowns!) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Language Specific Lists Summary
All, From my previous thread, I've come up with the following list of foreign langauge OSGeo discussion lists: * French: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/francophone * Japanese: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/osgeojapan-discuss * Italian: http://www.faunalia.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gfoss * Spanish: http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/spanish My understanding is that each of these lists would be supportive of users who, for example, were having a problem with OpenLayers and needed help getting more help due to their inability to speak English. It appears that there are also the following language lists on the lists.osgeo.org server: Dutch -- http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/dutch Portugese -- http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/brasil Finnish/Swedish -- http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/finland Would these lists be open to the above? Also, from the AGM, there were local chapters for: * Korea * India * Germany Which are not represented in these lists. Are there lists for these chapters hosted elsewhere? Would they be open to such questions? Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Language Specific Lists Summary
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 09:32:17PM +0100, Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote: luckily the Dutch are pretty English-minded, so 99,9% of the people will be able to ask the question in English, which would be my preferred way. If people really can't speak English, yeah they can come to the Dutch osgeo list, no problem. I would really discourage the use for the exception of language handicapped people. Bart, I'll take that into account. The intention is to translate our Getting Foreign Language Support page into as many langauges as possible, so in the Dutch translatin, we'll just mention that the Dutch mailing list should be reserved for cases of real lack of English, I guess :) Thanks for the feedback, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support
On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 04:15:38PM +0100, Yves Jacolin (free) wrote: (Hum after reading again your mail, it seems I a little bit misunderstood). So yes all Local chapter are often a good starting point for asking general questions in native langage. There are a lot of local ML for that. Yves, Yes, I'm writing text like this (which I intend to request help of various local chapters in translating into other languages): http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding easy in-wiki multi-langauge support. At the moment, I'm simply putting 'fr:' in front of the page title to indicate it is a translation of an English page of the same name: http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/fr:GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport I'm hopeful that I can find a Trac plugin which does this for me, as well as showing when pages that are in different langauges are 'out of date' with regard to each other. However, from what I've seen so ar, I'm not particularly hopeful on either of these points, so I may need to write a plugin myself. I'm assuming that the Wikipedia-style 'fr:OtherTitle' links are probably a preferred way of handling this situation (so that the Page *link* can also be in a different language) but I think that would likely be harder to handle initially, so I'm not sure I'm going to actually go to the extent of tackling that (depending, in part, on what feedback I get from the community) -- the URL itself is (I would hope) not the most important part of the page, and bad titles can hopefully be resolved with adequate linking. Anyway, feedback on the text of the English page (the french is just an earlier machine translation) is welcome. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support
On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 08:21:04PM +0100, Lorenzo Becchi wrote: Christopher Schmidt wrote: does http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport seem like an appropriate way to enocurage people to seek help? Does my suggestions for how to handle lack of speaking a language make some sense? I think this is a good initiative. trying to be a bit critic, it is the kind of page that a person who knows a little of English doesn't need because they can write to the international list. a person who knows nothing of English cannot understand all that text, probably. Yes, I understand that. I didn't want to encourage people to futz with the international pages until I had some basic agreeement on the text of the English, since translating something and then translating it again when I heard that the existing page was bad seemed somewhat of a waste :) To make it easy, we can maybe add links to the automatic translation to many different languages, ex: -- Version en Español, linking to: http://translate.google.es/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftrac.openlayers.org%2Fwiki%2FGettingHelp%2FForeignLanguageSupportsl=entl=eshl=enie=UTF-8 -- better would be to create human translations of your text but it will take more time. Automatic translations are good in some languages, but (as I've found by staying here in Japan) *terrible* for others. It is my goal to seek out translations from any communities that I can find, and getting them involved on ading foreign langauge translations of the text -- once it's decent :) I think that using the language chapters as reference is a good idea. I would put a bigger emphasis on them. Talking about the Spanish Language Chapter List, I can say that there are already some good expert on OpenLayers (and not only). I would suggest other projects with small/medium communities to do the same. I'm still not sre I'd rather have these converesations on project mailing lists rather than on the OpenLayers Users mailing list. In the spanish local chapter list, the likelihood that someone is going to be able to find the answer that was given on an OpenLayers issue is low. Er, sorry, half asleep, not typing right: What I mean is, someone looking for help with an OpenLayers bug is not going to look in the Spanish list archives. But if someone has done a translation into English, or heck, even sent the message entirely in Spanish there's still a fair chance that it will be findable in the OpenLayers mailing list. Also, I've seen too many cases where people have fixed bugs and never mentioned anything about the bugfixes back to the OpenLayers community to trust that the same wouldn't happen with local chapters. A little note about Interested in English Language List. I would avoid to live this part here. If a lot of people starts to add his name there, that page will convert soon in a mess, loosing the target of the message. I would leave to local chapters the organizations of list request if the traffic on a single project (ex: OpenLayers) starts to be aggressive. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Essentially, this is a way to gaurge the interest and abilities of people to pariticipate in a local language list for the project I don't see a way that can be gauged without *some* kind of list -- most people will always be quiet if something requires activve participation with an existing community. (The barrier is simply too high.) Editing a wikipage is lower cost, and gives a record of people interested in a particular language community for a project -- that 'hard copy', so to speak, seems valuable to me, especially in comparison to something which (to me) seems more transient, like sending an email to the italian or spanish mailing list. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Foreign Language Community Support
On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 06:18:35PM +0100, Yves Jacolin (free) wrote: This is an interesting question (How manage I18n content in website). I think there are three ways (at least): * a two letters word put it in the URL, as we did at the begining in the wiki osgeo [1], [2], [3] and like you did in your example ; Yves, Though I appreciate your technical feedback on my translation question, what I'm more interested in at the moment is just the *contents* of the English page -- especialy from the point of view of someone who might end up working with the results of it :) It is my hope that local language communities can take a role in helping users to pose their questions to the OpeNLayers list -- or at least giving some advice to beginners, when English-only communications aren't enough. WIth that in mind, does http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/GettingHelp/ForeignLanguageSupport seem like an appropriate way to enocurage people to seek help? Does my suggestions for how to handle lack of speaking a language make some sense? Thanks in advance, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Benefits raster data on RDBMS
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:13:49AM -0200, Gilberto Camara wrote: Dear all Concerning the benefits of having raster data stored together with vector data in a spatial database, let me first quote from an excellent paper from the late Jim Gray (Scientific Data Management in the Coming Decade): What’s wrong with files? Everything builds from files as a base. HDF uses files. Database systems use files. But, file systems have no metadata beyond a hierarchical directory structure and file names. They encourage a do-it-yourself- data-model that will not benefit from the growing suite of data analysis tools. They encourage do-it-yourself-access-methods that will not do parallel, associative, temporal, or spatial search. They also lack a high-level query language. Lastly, most file systems can manage millions of files, but by the time a file system can deal with billions of files, it has become a database system. In other words, if you have substantial amounts of raster data (as is increasingly the case in geospatial application), you will need to develop a significant amount of software to manage your files. Unless... your data is handled by a raster-enabled spatial database. I don't see anything in that paragraph that indicates that storing the *image data* in the database is important. (A link to the paper online or something could change that, of course.) Specifically, I don't think there's any doubt that if you have many-many files, it makes sense to store the *queryable image information* -- things like spatial extent, temporal extent, etc. -- belong in a database. The question is, in the data column, do you store a File Path, or the Image Data? Until/Unless databases get/have image manipulation tools directly, I can't see the value of storing the image data itself in the database. The points above argue against file-system based metadata storage/retrieval: sorting files by date, searching through index files, etc., so far as I can tell, but I don't see a compelling argument for image data in the database above. Of course, this is assuming that the image data access pattern is the same in the database and on disk: for example, storing GeoTIFF data, then using GDAL to parse the string from the database as a GeoTIFF file. If the database you're using has a different (faster) Image access algorithm, then of course there can be benefits. However, those same benefits could presumably be realized with sufficiently complete libraries for accessing the image externally: If Oracles' Database product, for example, internally tiles the image, and they had a library to access the image in the same way, presumably you could store those bits on disk as well. However, if that library depends internally on a database, then integration of all points into the same database might help in some ways. In any case, I think there's obvious reasons to store your image metadata in a database -- and *using the same tools for accessing the images*, I don't think we've yet seen a compelling argument for storing image blobs in the database. Of course, all things are not equal :) If your database has built in MrSID support, for example, you could imagine using Database Storage for Images, because you'd get the automatic compression combined with the querying -- but that's not about the Database Specifically, just the image storage/reading library that comes along with it. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Raster data on a DBMS
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 08:57:53PM -0200, Gilberto Camara wrote: Jim Gray´s paper and much more on this issue is on his site at MS Research. Gray has hundreds of papers listed on his Microsoft Research page. As I said, I'm not claiming that Gray's paper said or did not say something, merely that the section you quoted did not. Allow me to reiterate my earlier argument, which is that FOSS4G should **allow** users the option of storing raster data in a database. Storing images in a database is not recommended in each and every situation. The user should have the option, according to his needs. I'm not sure if you feel that someone is preventing this from happening in some way. It sounds like you think that there is some blocker here other than someone investing the time and effort to make this happen. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] defining a Geospatial Integration Showcase to be launched at FOSS4G 2009
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 08:21:03PM +0900, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote: Cameron Shorter wrote: If we find a data custodian who is keen to get their data into the Integration Showcase, what sort of criteria should we be specifying for that dataset? What license? Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Same as OpenStreetMap Please do not encourage new data releasers to release geodata under creative commons licenses. It has ben a source of major disagreements with regard to openstreetmap, and I don't think it's any better for anyone else. Geodata is not creative. Creative Commons licenses are written for creative works. Even the Creative Commons people I've talked to don't think geodata should be covered under anything other than 'CC Zero'. http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 sums this up quite well: if you haven't read it, *Please do* before advising anyone who has not already released data on license issues. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] defining a Geospatial Integration Showcase to be launched at FOSS4G 2009
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 06:22:50AM +1100, Cameron Shorter wrote: Chris, and the geodata list, Your comments are valid. Does OSGeo have an official stance on data licencing? If not, I think we should. Currently, the Australian government is moving licencing the majority of their data (including geospatial) under Creative Commons. I've been waiting for the Open Database License to move forward, since at the moment, I see no licenses that make sense to license new geodata under. OSGeo/Geodata committe has not expressed an opinion at this time. The responses I've heard from Australian government about Zero Commons is that the license is still in draft, and that a government will need the license to move out of draft before a government can recommend government agencies use it. If the reason they're concerned is the CC0 license isn't actually 'done', would they really be willing to release their data with no legal restrictions? If so, then the Public Domain Dedication (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/) seems sufficient, simple, and not to offer any more or less legal protection than CCZero seems intended to. My expectation is that neither CCZero nor Public Domain dedications are sufficient for most organizations, who would rather maintain Attribution and Share Alike requirements (sometimes just the former). For those cases, the Open Database License (http://www.opencontentlawyer.com/open-data/open-database-licence/) is probably what most people want, but it also is incomplete: Jordan (who was the primary lawyer behind the license) has not done any work on it in a long time, and I don't see any evidence that it will ever be completed at this point, which is a shame, since I've been pinning my hopes and dreams for licensing on it for more than a year. In any case, in the US, CC-By-SA has no practical meaning for factual information, so any organization which actually seeks to protect their databases of information via copyright (rather than just make them available regardless of the things that will be done with them) should be made aware that at least in some jurisdictions, the lack of creativity (depending, of course, on the type of data) means that their data can't be protected that way. (In other countries, database effects kick in, and may have a different interaction with the CC licenses: in the US, even collections of pure facts are not protected.) Encouraging users to 'protect' their data with CC this way is a mistake -- and if they don't actually care, then encouraging Public Domain dedications of data seems like the right way to go. I assume this is the license being referred: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCZero ddi Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 08:21:03PM +0900, Venkatesh Raghavan wrote: Cameron Shorter wrote: If we find a data custodian who is keen to get their data into the Integration Showcase, what sort of criteria should we be specifying for that dataset? What license? Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Same as OpenStreetMap Please do not encourage new data releasers to release geodata under creative commons licenses. It has ben a source of major disagreements with regard to openstreetmap, and I don't think it's any better for anyone else. Geodata is not creative. Creative Commons licenses are written for creative works. Even the Creative Commons people I've talked to don't think geodata should be covered under anything other than 'CC Zero'. http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 sums this up quite well: if you haven't read it, *Please do* before advising anyone who has not already released data on license issues. Regards, -- Cameron Shorter Geospatial Systems Architect Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050 Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254 Think Globally, Fix Locally Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source http://www.lisasoft.com ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] defining a Geospatial Integration Showcase to be launched at FOSS4G 2009
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 10:22:59AM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please do not encourage new data releasers to release geodata under creative commons licenses. It has ben a source of major disagreements with regard to openstreetmap, and I don't think it's any better for anyone else. Geodata is not creative. Creative Commons licenses are written for creative works. Even the Creative Commons people I've talked to don't think geodata should be covered under anything other than 'CC Zero'. http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262 sums this up quite well: if you haven't read it, *Please do* before advising anyone who has not already released data on license issues. Creative commons licences rest upon copyright law. If a legal juridstiction determines that copyright is not applicable to geodata, then both copyright and the creative commons license go away. But contract law doesn't. The Open Database License rests in part on Contract Law, Database Protections, etc. Copyright law isn't all there is. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can we use a LiveDVD for workshops and labs at FOSS4G 2009?
On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 07:25:01AM +0100, Chris Puttick wrote: - Daniel P. Ames [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi folks. As you all know, there is a growing interest in open source for Windows. Especially with Microsoft's release of its developer tools in free express editions and the availability of such tools as SharpDevelop and Mono. MapWindow is .NET based and the bulk of our developers and users are strictly MS based. I don't think this makes them any less human, it just says that their threshold for open source is set such that a $90 Windows operating system is considered acceptable but a $1 GIS is not. But to split hairs, if MapWindow is .NET based it is not entirely open source as it is dependent on a closed source platform. That's like saying OpenLayers is not open source when used with Google Maps -- OpenLayers (and correspondingly, MapWindow) is (or can be) still Open Source, regardless of the libraries it depends on. Let's not play the My software is more open than your software game; Stallman is good enough at that. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2009 Code sprint
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 10:18:46PM +1100, Cameron Shorter wrote: Could someone who was at the 2008 sprint give us a summary about what went on, specifically with details like which projects were represented? how many people attended? OpenLayers had about 8 people. how long did people attend for? From whatever time they showed up -- ranging from 8:30 to 12:30 -- til we had to leave at 5. did everyone stay for the full 3 days or did some leave early? There was only one day of the sprint. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2009 Code sprint
On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 01:10:47PM -0700, Dave Patton wrote: On 2008/10/11 12:42 PM, Tim Sutton wrote: Another point to make is that the turn out to the sprint was 3.5 x the number of people who said they would come so getting attendance of the sprint as part of the registration process will help you plan better. Were there people who attended the FOSS4G 2008 Code Sprint who were not registered delegates to the FOSS4G conference? In other words, does the code sprint registration need to be distinct from the conference registration in order to capture everyone who is wanting to attend? I don't think we've had anything ike that happen in either 2007 or 2008... not to my memory, anyway. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Conference Photos
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 06:09:20AM -0400, Christopher Schmidt wrote: I finally finished uploading all the photos I took at/around the FOSS4G conference. http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/sets/72157607549536663/ An additional point: All of these photos are CC-By, which means that they can be reused according to the Creative Commons Attribution license. Photo courtesy Christopher Schmidt or something similar meets the requirements of the attribution requirement as far as I'm concerned. I'd also love to see where/how people are using the photos, so dropping me a line is (though not legally required) totally awesome. Also, if there is a picture of you that you don't like included in this set, or you don't want your name/a tag associated with your pictures, please let me know. I've tried to be respectful of people's wishes in this regard, but I realize that not everyone has the same expectation of privacy (or lack thereof) that I do. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Conference Photos
I finally finished uploading all the photos I took at/around the FOSS4G conference. http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/sets/72157607549536663/ Includes photos from: * Various nights hanging out at the bars/hotels during the conference * A trip up Table Mountain with OpenLayers/OpenGeo folks * GeoDjango Workshop * Sessions, exhibition hall, etc. * PIctures from the Gala Dinner at Moyo * Closing Session * OSGeo AGM * OpenLayers Workshop * GeoServer Workshop Photos that are taken at the conference center/of conference proceedings are also tagged with foss4g2008: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/tags/foss4g2008/ And most photos of people who I recognized are tagged with first name in the title, and with a username (as used on IRC or other unique identifier) attached as a tag: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/tags/seven/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/tags/stvn/ Photos of the AGM are also tagged as such: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/tags/osgeo,agm/ I've made my tagging settings as open as possible, but I believe you still need to be a contact on flickr in order to add notes/tags to photos: simply add me as a contact, and I'll add you back. Any names I got wrong, please let me know, either via email or by simply commenting on the flickr photo. Thanks to all for helping to create such a photogenic conference. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Questions about CS-Map, ArcSDE 9.3, buffer operations
On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 07:48:02AM -0700, surrounded wrote: Excuse my ignorance - here goes, I am building a GIS web application using FDO 3.3.1, C#.net, MS Virtual Earth, and Silverlight. As I am not sure of the relationship between OSGeo and FDO, I will post these questions here: 1) I need to project coordinate systems (ex. WGS 1984 to state plane) and cannot find a way to do this using FDO. WHAT TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE UNDER THE OSGeo UMBRELLA TO MAKE PROJECTIONS. IF CS-MAP (recent donation from AutoDesk) IS THE TOOL TO USE FOR PROJECTING COODINATE SYSTEMS, WHERE DO I DOWNLOAD IT FROM? http://trac.osgeo.org/csmap/ points to http://trac.osgeo.org/csmap/wiki/HowToGetTheSourceCode which seems to indicate there is no release of the CS-Map code, so you'll be building/installing from SVN. However, like the previous poster, I agree that you may be better off *not* using CS-Map, and using poj.4 at this time. CS-Map is a recently open sourced project, and thus is still (in my estimation) in a relative untested state of its current incarnation. proj.4, has been a relatively stable project over the past long while, and is probably slighly more tested in its current state. (And it has releases and binaries for many packages due to this...) 2) FDO 3.3.1 currently supports ArcSDE 9.2. DOES FDO 3.3.1 ALSO SUPPORT ArcSDE 9.3? IF NOT WHEN WILL THAT HAPPEN? I'd recommend this question isbest directed to the DO list rather than included along with these other questions on this list. 2) I need the ability to buffer features and cannot find a way to do this using FDO. WHAT OSGeo TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE FOR BUFFERING FEATURES WHOSE OBJECTS ARE COMPATABLE WITH FDO? I would typically use GEOS/OGR for that. I have no idea aabout its compatibility with FDO, but I wouldn't be that hopeful. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] The existence (and value of) clean geocoding tools?
On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 01:53:34PM -0700, David Dearing wrote: Hi. I just recently stumbled across OSGeo and have poked around to try and get a feel for the different projects, but still have a lingering question. Forgive me if this isn't the appropriate channel to be asking this. It seems that there is a solid focus on mapping, image manipulation, and geometric processing at OSGeo. And, in the more broad world including non-open source projects, there are a lot of tools available for the mass production of geotagged or geocoded documents. However, the accuracy of these systems, while good, doesn't seem sufficient when accuracy is at a premium (from what I've seen they tend to focus on volume). Are there any existing tools that can be used to tag/code documents, perhaps sacrificing the mass-produced aspect for better accuracy? Have I just missed/overlooked some existing tool(s) that meet this description? Or, am I in the minority in wanting to produce fewer clean geocoded/tagged documents rather than many pretty good documents? I'm not aware of many/any open source solutions for geotagging documents. The solutions that exist tend to be proprietary, so far as I'm aware. In general, if you're looking for a tool to tag natural langauge placenames in documents to lat/lon locations, the 'best' solution I'm aware of is MetaCarta's GeoTagger (which we can discuss more offlist, if you're interested). However, I'm not aware of anything that does this kind of analysis that isn't statistical in nature -- and statistical-based things are subject to the same types of flaws in this field, so you just tend to look for the people who are doing statistics the best. (Given that I work for MetaCarta, I won't offer an opinion on how much better we are than everyone else at this. ;)) Is this what you're looking for? Are there open source related solutions that you've found? Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo and use of freenode for IRC
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 07:13:22AM +0200, Mateusz Loskot wrote: Tyler, I also that main benfit of registration is to prevent hijacking of IRC channel. Er, but that's not the same as *group* registration: channel registration is technical (creating/registering the channel through chanserv), group registration is social (filling out paperwork with network admins) right? Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Thematic Mapping Engine as Open Source?
On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 02:01:17PM +0200, Arnulf Christl wrote: Just as a side note: Google has been overly submissive to US Export Regulations and rejects requests from IPs that can be traced to a location within an country that falls under their export ban list. Unfortunately the same applies to SourceForge. Thus publishing your project through Google Code or SourceForge effectively prevents interested folks from joining the project if they are citizen of a nation that falls under the US Export Regulations. This also applies to people only visiting such countries. Is there some other easy option here? Hosting your own is fscking painful, OSGeo doesn't offer hosting for small projects like this, and I expect anyone else who is big enough to make solving this problem easy likely isn't in a position to be much more open/unrestricted, because they're governed by the same laws. It seems to me like an option is just to make the code available on google code, and also republish it in another easily-googled place. Then, if it becomes an issue that is blocking contributors, put the effort into doing something about it -- setting up an SVN mirror, or something similar, to allow those users to contribute. In general, OpenLayers has not seen major contributions from technology export-embargoed countries. (Our server doesn't have technical restrictions blocking export to these countries.) Although it is a concern -- and certainly, it's unfortunate because it is a vicious cycle where contributors are typically blocked, so they don't even bother kind of thing -- I think that the relative importance of this to, say, a website being down an hour a week or something like that is relatively low (and if you're maintaining it yourself, you'll always have downtime when things break). Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Thematic Mapping Engine as Open Source?
On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 12:01:25AM +0100, Bjorn Sandvik wrote: My plan is to release TME as an open source project under a GNU GPL license v3, and use SourceForge as a code repository. Is there a strong reason behind these choices? These days, I probably wouldnt' go with either of them, personally. Looking back, I realize that the GPL license may well be related to the fact that Ext itself is GPL licensed. I wrote the rest of this before I thought of that, but I think it's valuable as a general statement for users thinking of licensing Javascript libraries anyway. It might still make sense, if the restriction is Ext based, the make it clear that your library itself is licensed as $permissive_license, and combining it with Ext makes it GPL licensed: This way, if someone were to buy an Ext commercial license, they could still use it under more permissive terms. If you are a commercial entity looking to make money with open source, the GPL may well be a very good choice. Essentially, you are the only organization that can make improvements to the code that other people can't have -- as the copyright owner, the license doesn't apply to the work you do. (Once you have a project built with lots of poeple's copyright, that does change, but.) However, if your goal is to create a toolset which is widely used, and you are less concerned about maximizing profit from your actions, it seems possible that a less restrictive license might make sense. (An example of a successful GPL licensed project is ExtJS itself.) For example, one of the things that OpenLayers users have commonly requested is the ability to do thematic styling in the way you describe for their data: The coveted SLD editor is a concept that has been tossed around, literally for years. The Ext browser work that you have done would form a perfectly suitable base -- but OpenLayers is BSD licensed, and extensions to it are strongly encouraged to be BSD licensed as well, for reusability. As a result, if the work that you are doing were to be GPL licensed, then I would not feel comfortable encouraging a user to use your code. Part of this problem is actually specific to browsers, imho: the use of the GPL for Javascript software is 'somewhat weird': there are few definitions of where the lines are drawn in Javascript. (The Linux Kernel doesn't 'pollute' complied code that runs on that platform, but where does the line get drawn for Javascript libraries?) I'll admit that my dislike of GPL is strong enough that I have spent much less time investigating it; it's possible these questions are easy to answer, but I don't know. Sourceforge bothers me, to some extent, but I think this might be mostly historical; I tend to prefer Google Code these days (though, see recent thread about Google Code blocking exports as per US Law, which sourceforge may not do). I don't know if there's any real reason to use one over the other; certainly, startup cost with Google Code was low, and you even get a built in wiki. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Thematic Mapping Engine as Open Source?
On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 05:40:41PM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote: Bjorn Sandvik ha scritto: I'll consider the pros and cons between different licenses. I don't have commercial interests, but I would like the project to be sustainable. I've changed my mind about using SourceForge, - I agree that Google Code is more suitable. Please note: - GPL is more widely used Than what? In any case, GPL is designed to prevent use of the software in a specific set of contexts. I maintain my position that for Javascript Libraries, the GPL is confusing at best, and tends to hurt uptake of an open source project, in my experience. (ExtJS is a strong counter example of a JS library which is GPL licensed -- but they are not an open source project, just open source code.) The GPL is a fine license for many things, I just think that open souce Javascript Libraries isn't among them. - Google Code apparently puts severe restrictions on exporting code to several countries. Google Code follows the legal restrictions that are placed on it by the government of the country in which the company is based. (I mentioned this in my previous email.) Sourceforge is also a US-based company: it has the same *legal* restrictions placed on it, and I don't know if there is evidence that it doesn't have the same restrictions as Google Code; if they do, I believe that they would be in violation of the law anyway, though admittedly, as with all things, something being against the law doesn't stop people from doing it. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] GeoJSON 1.0 Release Announcement
The GeoJSON Authors are proud to announce the finalization of the GeoJSON 1.0 Specification. Representing more than a year's worth of community discussion and development, the GeoJSON specification describes an easy to use, extensible format for transferring geographic data over the web. With support in more than 20 different applications, GeoJSON is already quickly becoming a de facto standard for transferring geographic data in a JSON format. The finalization of the spec represents the final step in formalizing the GeoJSON format for encoding this data. More information on GeoJSON can be found at http://geojson.org/ , or from the GeoJSON mailing list at http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org . Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?
On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 08:21:21PM +0200, Arnulf Christl wrote: What was a Desktop GIS exactly? I only have a browser and for some strange reason all that I do starts with an http://... A Desktop GIS is what you switch to when you realize that the browser makes a really poor operating system, and moving outside of it and using the rest of your computer is important to accomplishing some tasks. The browser is great for a lot of things. There are also many things it is not great for. Knowing the difference is an important step to being successful in creating a solution that works well to meet the needs of the problem. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Simplest of questions (with one assumption)
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:25:07AM -0500, Rick Steinberger wrote: It seems that SDF3 is the native data format for mapguide server. How does one create SDF3 data without commercial software? I think the answer is Use FDO: http://fdo.osgeo.org/ Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 06:53:19PM +0300, Ari Jolma wrote: Frank Warmerdam kirjoitti: In my opinion we would be better off starting with a widely accepted standard like SLD as a basis of a feature styling standard I'm right now looking at SVG. It is a full graphics description language, but maybe the styling information could be somehow picked out an reused for our purposes. SVG is becoming more popular and for example many symbol sets (also mapping symbols) are already in SVG. Thus we'd also need tools for parsing SVG. SVG *isn't* a rule language: SVG is one possible output of taking a Rule language (SLD), combining it with geography and attributes (GML, Shapefile, what have you), and creating a final product. Other products could include raster images (PNG, JPG), Other vector formats (VML, Canvas in the browser, PDF, PS, .ai), or encodings into things like KML. If the stylings that are distributed with geodatasets are SVG, then producing SVG maps would be easier, wouldn't it? I'm not sure this really makes sense. SVG is a style language. SLD is a Rule language. SLD is the source: SVG is the destination (one of many). Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] AAG Boston OSGeo Social Meetup
AAG is happening in Boston this week, and in an effort to make some things happen, I'm planning to have a social meetup this Thursday with anyone who is interested in coming. Time: Thur, Apr 17th, 7:45PM Place: Grendel's Den, Harvard Square, Cambridge Who: Anyone interested in Open Source Geo Why: To get together to chat socially about stuff over some beer and bar food. Directions: Get to Harvard Square. Head south on JFK street past The Garage on your left. You will cross Mt. Auburn St. On the Southwest corner is a small open green space: on the opposite corner from JFK is the entrance to Grendel's, below Upstairs on the Square. I'll be there, hopefully by 7:30, with an eeepc and an OSgeo shirt on. Map: http://tinyurl.com/uof38 See ya there, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Proposal: OSGeo Cartographic Library
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 11:18:48AM +0300, Ari Jolma wrote: I'm still very much interested in this. Cairo would provide a single API to render to an image buffer, on PDF and others. It has good support for rendering text with various fonts and there are high-level language APIs. Currently Cairo can be used in Geoinformatica to render geodata, legends, etc. on a map. I'm already using that a bit and will use it much more in the future. I think that for the task you've described, looking into Mapnik might be a good idea. What I think is needed first, and would be the core content of the library is 1) a mapping of style information into Cairo commands, 2) capability to render cartographic symbols on maps, and 3) a mechanism to allow plugins that add legends etc. on the map, 4) symbol and label placement algorithms. Second need would perhaps be support for various geovisualization methods. 1), 2), and 4) already exist in Mapnik. 3) seems to me like it can either be added to Mapnik, or added via post-processing, without needing to reimplement 1), 2) or 4). Cairo is of course just one technology and not suited for all needs in this domain. Furthermore, the data provider can be made separate from the library, but I'd like to start with and use GDAL (OGR in fact) as the default. Mapnik has support for PostGIS and Shapefiles, but has a plugin-based architecture for reading data, so I would not be surprised to find that an OGR plugin for data access would be too difficult for someone experienced in C++/C. Anyway, I'd like to finally get going with this and start drafting an API. Any ideas how to proceed? Set up a svn repository somewhere? I'd strongly recommend starting by looking at existing solutions. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Google Summer of Code 2008
On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:55:47AM -0600, Erik Uzureau wrote: For the record, Chris Schmidt has set up a page on the openlayers wiki for project Ideas. Can/should we somehow integrate/link this to OSGEO? http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/SummerOfCode Now that we've got more than just me offering to mentor, I've gone ahead and integrated OpenLayers into the list. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 'lossless' JPEG2000
On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 09:04:59PM -0500, Ed McNierney wrote: Christopher - You will very likely find that using different LZW compression options (particularly setting a small strip size) will slightly degrade compression performance while significantly improving read time. While I think your test data are valid, they only address one of many possible configurations and I wouldn't necessarily make broad generalizations about LZW from them. However, I have generally found that LZW compression for photographic data is indeed not a good choice; I'm surprised you got it to perform as well as you did (in compression). Yeah, I think we've stumbled back and forth across these numbers before. I'm aware that they're essentially 'back of the envelope': they weren't run entirely in isolation, they were only repeated a couple of times (half dozen rather than an order of magnitude more), they might have been cached in memory, etc. etc. etc. However, they do seem to serve as a good 'order of magnitude' measure of size and performance for compressing aerial imagery based on other similar experiments, and I have no evidence to seriously discount them, so I'm sticking to them. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] 'lossless' JPEG2000
On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 09:26:16PM -0500, Ed McNierney wrote: Christopher - Let me add the evidence that I have found that reducing the strip size in LZW-compressed GeoTIFFs has, not surprisingly, a VERY large effect on read performance - about a factor of 10 in the particular cases I used. That indicates that the data you report might not be a good 'order of magnitude' measure of performance. I'm not talking about subtler effects of memory, caching, etc. but the substantial effect of changing the LZW strip size in a large image; the amount of work required to decompress a portion of that image is very, very different from the case in which the entire file is treated as one strip, due to the dictionary-building nature of the LZW algorithm. Interesting, I didn't realize that the differences we were discussing were so large. Given that, perhaps I need to reevaluate: My knowledge of image compression is very poor (especially compared to yours!) and you're right in saying that it is poor practice to pass off my numbers without having fully understood them! Thanks for the feedback: now I'll just have to go read a bunch more on how to actually get better results, since clearly I haven't taken your feedback thus far as seriously as I should! Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:26:51AM -0500, Lucena, Ivan wrote: Hi all, I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking about Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen]. I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products from big software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world? Depending on what you're reading (I can't tell from a quick Google which types of stories you're talking about), I'm not sure how Xen really plays a part in the commercialization. Xen can be used to host products in a virtual environment, and if that is the case, there's no money being made off *Xen*, money is being made off the other software. I could be wrong. I just didn't find anything to back up either way in the Wikipedia and related links. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 11:52:06PM -0700, Robert Bray wrote: Chris, I agree and will see what I can do to make it happen. If we want wider adoption it may also be beneficial to see some kind of C/C++ access library created for the format. In the past I always felt the FDO Provider was that library, but the masses seem to be telling me I am wrong about that :) /me sends a '30 days no news' nag, continues to wait patiently. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 05:17:46PM -0800, Traian Stanev wrote: How about an OGR driver for SDF? No need to invent a new API when one already exists. I think that was exactly Bob's point: There is already an FDO driver for SDF. If OGR is sufficient, I'm not entirely sure why FDO wouldn't be by the same argument. I'm with Mat, in feeling that it's not the path to the widest usage in only FDO *or* OGR, and that a reference implementation outside of either of those would result in possibly higher OEM-style integration into non OGR/FDO products, and that a single shared implementation is the best way for all developers to share a single effort when moving forward. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: idea for an OSGeo project -- a new, open data format
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 11:18:42PM -0800, Robert Bray wrote: Is it an open format? ABSOLUTELY (we just never wrote a spec, but I am willing to get it done) All this said, I'd really like to understand everyones requirements for this new format. If SDF fits thats great, if not thats ok too. We are always happy to contribute what we can to the community. I have an interest in seeing wider implementation of SDF. I have a user who is interested in using FeatureServer against SDF data -- but I don't have an environment in which I can build/use the FDO Python bindings (being a mac user), so I can't help the user out. It seems more likely that an alternative implementation to FDO's could be created if documentation on the format was available. Obviously, there's no guarenteee (and unfortunately, I'm not a very good coder, so I can't offer much), but I'd at least like to be able to investigate how difficult SDF might be to implement: not just for my own personal reasons, but because implementation-difficulty can affect uptake of a format as much as the technical benefits can (if not more). so in response to 'I am willing to get it done', I would strongly encourage you to do so! Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
