Mateusz Loskot

From time to time, Google helps me to find and get new treasures laying deep on the Internet. Today, it dug out OpenGeology.pl website. Apparently, it has been launched quite recently and Google reports very few references about it. Because it’s mostly in Polish language and English version is incomplete, I will give a short overview of it here. So, what is this website about?

The front page explains it very well:

The OpenGeology.pl is devoted to the applications of Open Source Software in Geology

Later, one can browse various resources organized by topic - reviews of Open Source Software, tutorials ie. on DEM processing and 3D technologies in geology as well as collection of free and public geodata. DEM of Poland based on the SRTM-3 is available through a friendly map-based interface in two alternative coordinate systems (WGS 84 and PUWG 92) and three grid formats. It’s worth to notice that holes in original DEM files have been patched. I’ve not played with this data myself but it sounds very promising.

Now, let’s get to the point - the software. And here, my eyes saw a nice list of FOSS packages, including OSGeo Foundation projects…and there was much rejoicing.

OpenGeology community (see below) has found following FOSS4G and OSGeo projects useful: GRASS, Open Source Software Image Map (OSSIM), Quantum GIS, GDAL/OGR and FWTools.

A couple of words about the OpenGeology.pl authors. If my understanding is correct, the website was founded by Polish Geological Institute and Maciej Tomaszczyk is the main author and content provider. Kudos to the OpenGeology.pl Community for their efforts to spread the FOSS4G in Poland.

During last weeks, a lot of fresh bits have been contributed to the PostGIS provider for FDO Open Source. The great part of this work was committed by Bruno Scott and his colleagues. Bruno has recently joined the FDO development team. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bruno for his fantastic help in improving the PostGIS provider. The provider has got better shape and stability.

Recently, I’ve failed my duties in the provider development, so motivated by the load of Bruno’s work I found some gaps in time to submit a few fixes too :-)

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The March 20th, 2008 brought us new patch release of GDAL library. It doesn’t include any new features but a very tidy set of 65 bug fixes. Great Job GDAL Team!

The source code packages with GDAL/OGR 1.5.1 are available from the OSGeo download server.

It may be surprising, but some people still believe it is. Here is an interesting debate the Al-Fayhaa TV aired in 2007, during which astronomy researcher is arguing with physicist on this subject:

It’s been nearly 500 years since Nicolaus Copernicus and afterward Galileo Galilei proved with their researches that we do not leave on a plate but on a potato. Not to mention what we’ve learned from a number of space missions and explorations made with satellites. By the way of digression, how would the Global Navigation Satellite Systems work if the Earth was flat? Hmm…

In this post, I’m going to spread a word about the Cascados project. The project is founded by the European Commission in frame of the Sixth Framework Programme and is focused on development of a trans-national cascade training programme on Open Source GIS & Remote Sensing software for environmental applications. The Cascados project is formed by a number of partners from Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. More detailed information can be found on the project website (multilingual) recently launched at the http://cascadoss.eu/

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Yesterday, Frank announced another milestone hit by GDAL:

Santa and the GDAL/OGR Project Team are pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.5.0. This is the first “new feature” release since the GDAL 1.4.0 release approximately one year ago.

The new release brings a lot of new features and bug fixes. Just give some statistics:

• more than 420 tickets closed on the Trac
• implemented 17 new GDAL drivers for raster formats
• and 4 new OGR drivers for vectors
• implemented 4 (5 counting RFC 16) RFC documents
• added 5 new command line utilities
• plus, big number of features and improvements in SWIG bindings for scripting languages

The complete and long list of changes can be found in the 1.5.0 Release News.

The new GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 sources and a couple of additional packages can be found at Download Source website. There are also Windows 32-bit binaries available: http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/win32/1.5/

On behalf of the GDAL/OGR Project Team, I’d like to send a big thanks to all developers, contributors and users involved in development of the 1.5.0 release for their great work and support, invaluable bug reports and testing. And thanks to Santa too!

Here is the official GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 announcement posted on the OSGeo News.

A few minutes ago, Frank announced new release of PROJ.4 - Cartographic Projections Library 4.6.0. This release brings only a few but important fixes. Follow the announcement link to find more details.