Written on December 22nd, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
ESRI Inc. has just launch a new challenge, in preperation to next developer conference. It is to do with the customisation of their ArcGIS Viewer for Flex.
1. Download the compiled package of the latest version of ArcGIS Viewer for Flex—it’s free.
2. Either modify an existing core widget or create your own custom widget from scratch—the widget must work with ArcGIS Viewer for Flex 2.2 or higher.
3. Upload your widget to the ArcGIS Viewer for Flex Code Gallery and share it with everyone. Complete instructions coming soon.
4. Then starting on January 14, 2011, fill out the Flex-A-Widget Challenge registration form and provide the link to your widget details page on ArcGIS.com.
PRIZES
1st prize
Adobe Creative Suite Web (donated by Adobe)
1 free pass to the 2012 ESRI Developer Summit in Palm Springs, CA
1 EDN Subscription
2nd prize
1 free pass to the 2012 ESRI Developer Summit
1 EDN Subscription
3rd prize
1 EDN Subscription
The winners and the first 100 participants who submit a widget will receive a custom Flex-A-Widget t-shirt. Limit one t-shirt per person.
Written on December 21st, 2010 by Pascal Coulonone shout
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.
Written on December 20th, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
The first week of December was a chilly one for much of Europe and parts of the United States.
arctic oscillation
This image shows the temperature of the land surface for December 3-10, 2010, compared to the average temperature for the same period between 2002 and 2009. The measurements are from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Read the full article on the Earth Observatory site.
Remember last January the UK and much of the UK had already been frozen.
Written on December 20th, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
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.
Written on December 20th, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
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.
Written on December 17th, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
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.
Written on October 9th, 2010 by Pascal Coulonone shout
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
Written on October 1st, 2010 by Pascal Coulonno shouts
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:
Partners will also have greater flexibility in how they can onward license Ordnance Survey products, with the choice of how much or how little they want to include in their offerings. This will give customers greater choice of where they source their Ordnance Survey data.
The mapping agency hopes greater clarity around the use of ‘derived data’ and the inclusion of new ‘Free to Use Data’ terms will alleviate many of those issues, allowing for greater sharing of information that has been inferred from existing features. The Framework Direct Licence now clearly states, the licensee is now entitled to create other user derived data from, with reference to or by inference from the licensed data.
The GeoServer community has announced the release of 2.1-beta3, which is now available for 
From one place to another one, here is another great example of applying geospatial technology to the thermal industry. Check the heat loss 
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.
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