In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

I'm currently abroad but wanted to share the good news that Landsat 8 Satellite Successfully Launches Into Orbit.

The Slashdot summary: ""The Landsat Data Continuity Mission is now in orbit, after launching Monday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Calif. After about three months of testing, the U.S. Geological Survey will take control and the mission, renamed Landsat 8, will extend more than 40 years of global land observations critical to energy and water management, forest monitoring, human and environmental health, urban planning, disaster recovery, and agriculture." We still need more new observation satellites to avoid losing Earth observing capabilities as the work horses of the NASA/USGS fleet die of old age."

Bloggage update: Hard to believe it's over a year since I left Kuwait - so just out of curiosity I looked for web maps of the area again. Google and OpenStreetMap left a little to be desired in the geography, but Leaddog's Syria GIS Map is very impressive indeed. Then I turn to my old employ's arcgis.com map of a Kuwait University project. It's a full Kuwait Municipality map, with GIS and geodesign of the new university, but also the whole city complete with directions including barriers, which I haven't seen on Google or Bing maps!

While cleaning up old emails I ended up on this scientific article named Metrics to Measure Open Geospatial Data Quality published last year by Jingfeng Xia. Data quality is a topic we discussed before.

From the conclusion: "Because of the uniqueness and complexity of geospatial data, quality control is always a challenge to data providers, managers, analysts and data service providers. Metrics developed to measure data quality need to reflect the nature of the data, and therefore must be diversely structured to handle maps, coordinates, attributes and other types of geospatial data. A list of dimensions with clear and accurate definitions will provide necessary standards for the measurement. When the practice of open access is also considered, several more layers of complexity are added and additional tasks are created to solve issues pertaining to web communication, data usability, data integrity and related issues. Both quantitative metrics based on objective measurement and qualitative metrics based on subjective measurement are essential to the quality control of geospatial data."

Major news for geospatial open source, earlier this week the LocationTech Initiative was launched by the Eclipse Foundation.

From the official press release: "The Eclipse Foundation has launched a new initiative to support user driven development of location aware systems. The new LocationTech working group will allow companies to jointly develop and deploy components that bring location awareness to Enterprise IT. The Eclipse LocationTech initiative is led by Oracle, IBM, OpenGeo, and Actuate."

Its 4 initial areas of focus:

• Storage and processing of massive data volume
• Model driven design
• Desktop, Web, and mobile mapping
• Real time analysis of business critical data

I liked Direction Mag summary of how LocationTech complements the OGC and OSGeo: "In particularly, LocationTech offers a “full-service not-for-profit Foundation providing support for open source location aware technologies.” He ticked off this list of differentiators: 

• software licensed under commercial friendly open source licenses
• intellectual property (IP) management services
• a professionally-supported open source forge
• full-service, not-for-profit staffed by full-time professional staff to support the ecosystem"

Some time already since we heard of this open source geospatial ETL tool, GeoKettle 2.5 has been released. Unless I'm mistaken, the other open source geospatial ETL tool formerly named 'Spatial Data Integrator', now known as 'Talend Spatial Module', is at version 5.2.1.

From the announcement: "GeoKettle 2.5’s new features include:

• WFS (OGC Web Feature Service): Input step for the retrieval of geospatial data directly from an OGC Web Feature Service;
• CSW (OGC Catalogue Service for the Web): Input and Output steps, introduced in version 2.0, that now support reading from Deegree and MDWeb CSW. The CSW Output step now supports transactions (metadata insertion, update and deletion), tested with in Deegree and GeoNetwork;
• WPS (OGC Web Processing Service): Client step has been added to invoke remote geoprocesses exposed as WPS, briging new geoprocessing capabilities, tested with Deegree, GeoServer, PyWPS, Zoo WPS and 52North WPS implementations;
• Use of the new version (1.9.1) of the GDAL/OGR codebase for the OGR Input and Output steps for even more advanced and powerful capabilities;
• Use of the new version (1.13) of the JTS library to benefit from performance enhancements and bug fixes;
• New conversion functions have been added to the Calculator step (more build and convert capabilities with WKT, GeoJSON, GML, KML, …);
• Use of an up-to-date version of the EPSG database, the definition of custom projection introduced in version 2.0 remains possible;
• Dedidicated installers (Windows, Linux / Debian or Linux / Red Hat, Macintosh) are now available, making the installation experience easier (zip archive still available);
• Sextante Module: Adds advanced vector-based geoprocessing capabilities based on the Sextante library."