ESA’s 2009 global land cover map was generated using 12 months worth of data, collected from 1 January-31 December 2009, from Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument. GlobCover 2009 proves the sharpest possible global land cover map can be created within a year.
The GeoServer community has announced the release of 2.1-beta3, which is now available for download. GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards.
The big feature for this release is support for WMS 1.3. Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, has been a major driver with provision of OpenGeo. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, the Ordnance Survey now meets the INSPIRE requirements. This means that rather than implementing a solution on their own, they opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world could all benefit. Also funded by Ordnance Survey is a community module to implement the WMS extensions for INSPIRE View Service compliance—namely the language parameter and several extended capabilities fields.
With the UK being once more in the grip of a sever frost, there is never been a better time to review our heat loss from badly insulated buildings.
As reported by geoconexion, an aircraft fitted with specially developed survey equipment is taking to the skies over Britain’s cities at night. Using a new super-sensitive thermal sensor Leicestershire based aerial mapping company Bluesky is capturing highly accurate measurements of heat loss from buildings. The results of these night-time thermal surveys will provide Local Authorities, energy providers and even householders with intelligence to tackle energy inefficiency and fuel poverty across Britain’s towns and cities.
From one place to another one, here is another great example of applying geospatial technology to the thermal industry. Check the heat loss map from Haringey council.
The bookmark sharing service delicious is due to close down, as per reported by Andy Baio. This likely to be the result of massive job cut at Yahoo, as per reported by the American press.
Delicious was launched in 2003et bought by yahoo in 2005. The site allows classifying web pages by key word. This innovative service, symbols of the collaborative web, allows web user to use their web bookmark from any workstation
However, a speaker from Yahoo has not confirmed M. Baio statement, see article on TechCrunch. Yahoo has just announced that the group was looking into stopping service that did not perform as per expected.
On this Halloween day, a light hearted post with a great series of halloween Google Maps, from Owen Parsons…
The recent release of IE9, HTML5 will now be available through the main internet browsers. But the GIS industry is still shy to use the HTML5 technology, there are only a few examples using this technology but none are from main vendors. This article presents few examples of what can be achieved with HTML5 in the GIS industry.
Tile5 is an opensource HTML5 mapping JavaScript library that provides developers the ability to integrate existing mapping platforms to provide a rich HTML5 experience. This library is release under the MIT license. Tile5 makes use of the HTML5 new canvas tag. It currently supports a number of map provider; including OpenStreet Map and Bing. The API remains fairly limited but you can overlay pin, add route.
Cartagen; (http://cartagen.org) is a vector-based, client-side framework for rendering maps in native HTML 5. Written in JavaScript, it uses the new Canvas element to load mapping data from various sources, including OpenStreetMap. One of the advantages of this solution is the concept of geocss. Maps are styled with Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information – a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible.
There is also some interesting attempt to integrate the like of OpenLayer with HTML55. The following post from mobilegeo is nice in depth example. Here is a quick video streamed from their site.
Looking around on Google, here are few arguments why one should start using HTML5. All considered it then seems that using HTML5 should be considered within the GIS industry particularly with the Geolocation API now fully integrated in the HTML5 spec.
Improved Code; HTML 5 will enable web designers to use cleaner, neater code, we can remove most div tags and replace them with semantic HTML 5 elements.
Greater Consistency; As websites adopt the new HTML 5 elements we will see far greater consistency in terms of the HTML used to code a web page on one site compared to another. This will make it far easier for web designers and web developers to immediately grasp how a web page is structured even if they are brand new to it.
Improved Semantics; As the elements used to code a web page are standardised, using the new HTML 5 elements, the semantic value of every web page will increase. As it will be easy to see which parts of the page are headers, nav, footers, aside, etc. and most importantly know what their meaning and purpose is in a machine readable format.
Improved Accessibility; With HTML 5 it should be possible for assistive technologies to expand on the features they can offer their users as they can immediately build up a more detailed understanding of the structure of a page by looking at the HTML 5 elements it contains. Could this spell the end for skip links?
Improved portability; HTML5 brings a lot of advantage over flash, notably in term of portability on the apple platform with the IPad. As reminded by factoidz Flash was created in the 1990s to run internet applications. It was mainly used on desktop PCs. And of course, it was eventually ported to Mac OSX. Now flash is used on laptops and desktops alike, but it has been causing some issues with Mac laptops and mobile devices. Flash doesn’t work well with Mac OSX, causing the CPU to work much harder than it needs to when running flash applications. And of course when the CPU is working harder, it uses more power, and drains the battery faster. That is only one of the reasons why flash isn’t good for laptops or mobile devices.
Geolocation; The new HTML5 geolocation APIs make location, whether generated via GPS or other methods, directly available to any HTML5-compatible browser-based application. See one a recent article on the matter: http://blog.geo-tag.info/2010/01/07/html-5-geolocation-api/.
Client-side database; HTML5 provides a new SQL-based database API that can be used for storing data locally, that is client side. You get fully defined and structured database storage. This allows a developer to save structured data client-side using a real SQL database. It is not a permanent database, but enables you to store structured data, temporarily. The data can be accessed to support the web application and it can even be accessed when the client is disconnected for a short period of time. This database can be used to store e-mails or shopping cart items for an online shopping site
30th October marked the last day of the Annual AGI conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Vanessa Lawrence CEO of Ordnance Survey had announced the upcoming release of the new OS pricing and licensing Model. The year 2010 was marked by the successful and long overdue OS OpenData, freeing large range of OS data. However Vanessa Lawrence reminded that the government and OS had no further plan to give away any further datasets.
Ordnance Survey has just released is new pricing and licensing model, the details are available on the OS press release.
The new licensing model includes the following major points:
Full details of the new licensing model is available on the OS web site; http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/licences/.
Yesterday at a conference on Digital Britain Gordon, Brown prime Minister has announced freeing of OS data by April 1St, as the Guardian reports.
“I can confirm that from 1st April, we will be making a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use. Further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.”
This is a big win for the guardian’s Free Our Data campaign; as are all the other non-personal datasets being released. It’s a huge, huge win for the campaign.
Full transcript of Gordon Browns’ speech is available on the number 10 website: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22897
Google has just released a major batch of data to complete a near compete coverage of Street View in the UK. Google has expanded its Street View universe in the UK, photographing around 95 per cent of the country.
But, has anybody yet wandered how Google managed to capture this 360?pictures? Well here are few pictures of the vehicles currently used across the world.
Google has even got a bike for capturing small foot path.
The following article from tech radar presents a good summary how the Google Street View cars work.
Google is also moving one step closer to the like of OpenStreetMap with the possibility to edit the location of business; you may feel are not in the right place, say Google Blog.
Following the DeveloperHub Conference, ESRI (UK) has released the material from the presentation. These are available on their site. This conference was an opportunity to get the latest news in for the most awaited ArcGIS 10. The following presentation gives the latest news.
There seems to be a lot of exiting news feature forecasted with ArcGIS 10. Here is a quick non exhaustive summary of the presentation.
ArcGIS Desktop:
- Dynamic TOC
- Integrated Search
- ArcCatalog now integrated in ArcMap, for easier access to the data
- Better graphs and reports
- Performance improvement:
- Improved Editing
- Map Generation improvement
ArcGIS Server
- More flexibility in the install process
- Increased monitoring of SOC processes
- Logging offloaded to SOCs
- New feature service:
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