[OSGeo-Discuss] Opportunity: Enabling FAIR Data project commitment statement
Dear all, This is a reach out to all OSGeo projects and especially their respective project steering committees. I would like to draw your attention to the Enabling FAIR Data project (http://www.copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/) and the opportunity to become signatories of their online commitment statement (more on this below). The gvSig project already became a signatory. Independently, a proposal was made to the OSGeo board to consider becoming a signatory, too. Background: The Enabling FAIR project is funded by the Arnold Foundation (comparable to the Gates Foundation. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_and_John_Arnold_Foundation) and managed by AGU, the American Geophysical Union (OSGeo has a MOU with AGU. Details: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/osgeo-and-agu-sign-a-memorandum-of-understanding/). The project goal is to create an initial critical mass of researchers, research institutes and organisations, publishers, data repositories und funding agencies to establish the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as best practices in the (Geo-)Sciences. The FAIR principles are compatible with the paradigm of Open Science (including Open Source, Open Data and Open Access). FAIR can be applied to provide transparency especially for cases where access to data is limited to small communities (instead of open data / open access) for reasons like confidentially or protection of personality rights. The full text (& online signing opportunity) of the commitment statement is available here: http://www.copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/commitment-to-enabling-fair-data-in-the-earth-space-and-environmental-sciences/ The core statement is: --snip-- we commit to these goals: Ensuring that Earth, space, and environmental science research outputs, including data, software, and samples or standard information about them, are open, FAIR, and curated in trusted domain repositories whenever possible and that other links and information related to scholarly publications follow leading practices for transparency and information. This means that: Publication of scholarly articles in the Earth, space, and environmental science community is conditional upon the concurrent availability of the data underpinning the research finding, with only a few, standard, widely adopted exceptions, such as around privacy for human subjects or to protect heritage field samples. These data should, to the greatest extent possible, be shared, open, and stored in community-approved FAIR-aligned repositories. Leading repositories provide additional quality checks around domain data and data services and facilitate discovery and reuse of data and other research outputs. --snap-- To my understanding, the goals of the project and OSGeo are highly compatible and the growing number of projects is well on track to establish an open source infrastructure that meets the FAIR requirements. Because of this I would like to encourage the OSGeo projects to sign the commitment statement. As said above, the goal of Enabling FAIR Data is to demonstrate that a critical mass of stakeholders pushing for FAIR (and Open Science) exists and can be extended. This is an opportunity for the OSGeo projects to support the shift of the best-practices in science towards openness and (long over-)due credit for geospatial open source software. Overview over all signatories so far: http://www.copdess.org/enabling-fair-data-project/commitment-to-enabling-fair-data-in-the-earth-space-and-environmental-sciences/signatories/ BTW: The commitment statement can be signed individuals, too. best, peter ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] GEOS 3.7.0 is released
The GEOS development team is proud to finally release GEOS 3.7.0. After many years of soul searching, we finally got out a release. Note this is the first release to require a C++11 compiler to compile. Source code can be downloaded from: https://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-3.7.0.tar.bz2 3.7.0 changes 2018-09-10 - New things: - CAPI: GEOSDistanceIndexed (#795, Dan Baston) - CAPI: GEOSCoordSeq_isCCW (#870, Dan Baston) - CAPI: GEOSGeom_getXMin, GEOSGeom_getXMax, GEOSGeom_getYMin, GEOSGeom_getYMax (#871, Dan Baston) - CAPI: GEOSFrechetDistance (#797, Shinichi SUGIYAMA) - CAPI: GEOSReverse (#872, Dan Baston) - CAPI: GEOSGeomGetZ (#581, J Smith) - Improvements - Interruptible snap operation (Paul Ramsey) - Numerous packaging, doc, and build changes (Debian group: Bas Couwenberg, Francesco Paolo Lovergine) (NetBSD: Greg Troxel) - Allow static library with C API for CMake builds (#878, Dakota Hawkins) - C++ API changes: - Require defining USE_UNSTABLE_GEOS_CPP_API for use without warnings. - Make C++11 required (Mateusz Loskot) - Use C++11 unique_ptr, nullptr, and override constructs (Mateusz Loskot) - C++11 standard delete on noncopyable (#851, Vicky Vergara) - Fix CommonBits::getBit to correctly handle i >= 32 (#834, Kurt Schwehr) Thanks, GEOS Development Team ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Wonderfull FOSS4G 2018 Community Sprint in Dar es Salaam
See the OSGeo Foundation news with photos at: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/wonderfull-foss4g-2018-community-sprint-in-dar-es-salaam/ The FOSS4G 2018 Community Sprint was held in Dar es Salaam at dLAB Tanzania September 1 to 2, the weekend after the closing sessions of FOSS4G. This sprint brought together nearly 70 members of the OSGeo community, HOT and students from closeby. dLAB - Tanzania Data Lab, located on the beautiful campus of the University of Tanzania, was a great place to meet with several workshop rooms, a nice patio (we all love patios) and a welcoming team that organized amazing food that was served on the patio (in fact the food arrived by tuk-tuk / bajaj). It was a very relaxing and calm atmosphere with all you need. After an introduction by the 2018 Sol Katz winner Astrid Emde, we split in smaller teams and worked on several topics like ODK, OSGeoLive, Mapbender, MapServer, GeoServer and more. OSGeoLive There was an introduction on OSGeoLive 12.0, the new version that was prepared for FOSS4G 2018. Some students tried the brand new OSGeoLive with a bootable stick that was handed out to them as a present. Everything worked fine. Also a new language Swahili was added to Transifex (great!) and Peter, a student from Tanzania, made his first translations. Hopefully more volunteers will join to work on the Swahili translation. It is a lot of work. During the Community Sprint some volunteers also worked on the Finnish and German translation of OSGeoLive. Thanks for all your help! ODK (Open Data Kit) Ping (one of the ODK developers), Iddy (from HOT) and Ivan (from HOT) did an introduction and tutorial session to Open Data Kit (https://opendatakit.org/). It is open source software for collecting, managing, and using data in resource-constrained environments. The tutorial was about creating a simple use case to get familar with the concepts of ODK. The students could choose between roles like coder, writer, translator and user. Jose from Brazil gives feedback on his experiences: "The code sprint was a very good experience to me. In the first day I could talk about the open source software I develop to manage the water pipes and consumers as a GIS application to two participants that were very interest to learn more. Better than this I also learned about Open Data Kit (ODK), an open source software developed with the participation of Google. This software enabled us to go to the field and collect data; then we went to the field, and returned with the data that we collected. Later I learned how to use Transifex and started to work n the translation to Brazilian Portuguese that was already started by Portugal. On Sunday I continue the translation and then Ivan and Ping teach us how to install the source code of the Collect software and we read an issue from GitHub and did an improvement in the software to then commit and create a pull request. It was approved and tested through the continuous integration implementation to then be delivered at the PlayStore. I also had the opportunity to introduce information about OSGeo and the activities we were doing at the code sprint to a new person from Tanzania, that was for the first time in a code sprint." MapServer Jeff, Karsten and Lars where discussing how to improve the visibility of MapServer and how to make it more attractive to new users or even contributors. Multiple talking points were collected and will be discussed with the PSC and the MapServer comunity within the next weeks. Among these points are code spints and improved documentation with mentioning third party tools utilizing MapServer like mappyfile, scribeui or porting the QGIS export plugin to the new version. From one of the QGIS developers Pirmin Kalberer a new benchmarking tool (https://github.com/pka/mvt-benchmark) for vector tiles was recently published, and it was agreed here that since MapServer can also output vector tiles in MVT format, it might be worth contributing a MapServer test case for the MVT benchmark. GeoServer A team worked together on GeoServer and a delegate made his first commit to the projects and learned about the full process. Mapbender On the second day Astrid Emde from the Mapbender team and two participants from Pakistan had a workshop on Mapbender. They created a WebGIS application with Mapbender for Pakistan. In the end the team created an application with several WMS, lots of functionality and a search module for places in Pakistan. Maybe in the future Mapbender will be translated to Urdu and the gallery will show an application from Parkistan. Would be great! OSGeo & FOSS4G A team worked also on the OSGeo website and improved the content and instructions. Others discussed FOSS4G and lesson learned and prepared already FOSS4G 2019. After an amazing week and a very successful FOSS4G Community Sprint everyone left with many impressions, new knowledge, new friends, a full &
