Geopaparazzi 4.0.1 is out: Welcome to Slovakia!

Geopaparazzi 4.0.1 has been released to google play.

This is mostly a language update release and includes Slovak as new supported language.

This is the current status of the localization effort:

Some languages need more love than others. Do you have that love to share?
Just jump on the geopaparazzi translation site.





We also hit the 10000 installs badge in google play. That is not so bad for an engineering app, right? :-)

Release note have changed place as well as the download area for those without access to google play. This is thanks to the fact that the amazing Github gives a clean and simple space to add releases with binary downloads.

Click here to find geopaparazzi's release and download area.

And that's also quite all. Enjoy!

Geopaparazzi at FOSS4G 2014 Osaka/Tokyo

This year I have the great honor to be invided to attend and present a the FOSS4G in Osaka and Tokyo and do some research with the team of professor Venkatesh Raghavan.

There will be to mainstreams we will contribute to:

Geopaparazzi

This is quite natural, since the Japanese is one of the most supportive communities to the project.

Well, we do not know all the details about the program yet, but we know for sure that apart of the talks there will be a:

Hands-on workshop:  27 Oct 2014: FOSS4G-Osaka

Code Sprint: 25 Oct 2014: FOSS4G-Osaka

I have to admit that for me as author of Geopaparazzi it is amazing to attend the first geopaparazzi code sprint in Osaka. I do love code sprints!

I know for many of you it is far, but maybe some nearby community members can come? It would be great to meet you in person and maybe discuss some future geopaparazzi features.


uDig, the Spatial Toolbox and LESTO

We will give some presentation about uDig and its Spatial Toolbox, both from a technical point of view as well as a user pooint of view.

We will also introduce the LESTO toolbox, which enables LiDAR data processing in the Spatial Toolbox.To get an idea about LESTO, have a look here.



That is all for now. But we'll keep you posted as soon as we have news.

uDig 1.4.0 on Osgeo4W + BeeGIS and the Nettools (and java 7) + 32/64bit

I have been made aware of the fact that java is outdated on Osgeo4W and that I am the maintainer. So I checked into it and noticed that I never upgraded uDig to 1.4.0 (and of which I know I am the maintainer).

Also I was told that the Nettools didn't work very well and even BeeGIS!!!

So I took the time to do a huge upgrade of everything and and very important: also added the 64 bit versions for Osgeo4W. This is almost mandatory for those that do raster data processing with uDig.

So pick your software: 32bit installer or 64bit installer.

Enjoy!!! :-)








 

Geopaparazzi 3 retirement

Since Geopaparazzi 4 is getting near to a first release and a lot changed in the database and project formats, we think it is important to have a Geopaparazzi 3 version still out in the market for those who still need it.

Even if Geopaparazzi 4 will have a ton of new features and will be the maintained version, at least two reasons come to my mind for using Geopaparazzi 3:

1. if you were using it with the geopap-browser, since the project structure of version 4 is no longer compatible with it
2. if you are using it to work on OpenStreetMap POI insertion. At the moment the OSM tags part is broken in version 4.

We would love to do more, but resources are not available to maintain two versions of geopaparazzi.

So right now we fixed the last bugs reported for version 3 and created a new application named geopaparazzi3, which you can find here in the google play. (it might still take a few hours to be visible though)

This will most probably be the last bugfix release for Geopaparazzi 3.

On the bright side this definitely opens up the doors for Geopaparazzi 4, which will soon be out in the wild.

STAGE - Desktop Tools (also) for Geopaparazzi

With the new upcoming geopaparazzi 4 release a few issues had to be solved:

1. What should I do with all my old geopaparazzi 3 surveys? How do I integrate them with new data?
2. What do I use to export data from a geopaparazzi 4 project to my GIS environment?

Well, we solved both the above problems inside STAGE, a Spatial Toolbox And Geoscripting Ennvironment, which is the tool we develop and use for the JGrasstools library for environmental modelling.

For those asking if it is the same Spatial Toolbox that comes with uDig, the answer is yes and no. Yes, because it is the same source code. And no, because since uDig is in the process of (and a bit stuck in) migrating through the Locationtech incubation, we needed to step forward with the geotools versions. So see STAGE as the temporary solution to work with the Spatial Toolbox, until we can enhance the uDig version again.

So where do I get STAGE and how do I use it for Geopaparazzi? A video tutorial showing it all can be found here:

Enjoy!

ADDENDUM: since it has been asked, this is the link to the current download area of STAGE: http://git.io/stage_releases

The New York Natural Heritage Program embraces GeoPaparazzi! (a small preview of Geopaparazzi 4.0)

I am really excited to say that the Research Foundation for State University of New York really did embrace Geopaparazzi for some of their projects and sponsored a nice piece of functionality:

EDITING OF POLYGONS IN A SPATIALITE DATABASE!

This is a functionality that has been in the wishlist of many Geopaparazzi users and thanks to Tim Howard and his group, it is going to happen really soon.

I also hope to get them to write us a nice post about their use of Geopaparazzi in the field of mapping invasive species.

Since these new functionalities were calling for a geopaparazzi 4.0 release, it was about time to also do one other long wished (at least by me) change: make the Geopaparazzi project single file based, in order to be self-contained and compact.

I won't keep this post really long right now, it is more about letting you know what we are up to next and also thank the Foundation for State University of New York for the sponsorship.

To explain a bit the two main changes that will be in Geopaparazzi 4, a small preview of it in two quick and simple videos.

The first one focuses on the new project structure, which has changed from a folder structure to a single sqlite file:

The second one shows how to use the spatialite polygon creation and editing tools:

We are currently in testing phase and some small things may change, but this is more or less what it will look like.

Geopaparazzi 4 is going to be exciting, I am looking forward to it!
Enjoy!!



PS: There are two major downsides to this migration:

• we will need a conversion tool to transform old Geopaparazzi projects into the new, single file based, project format. I have a huge archive of hiking and travelling projects I can't loose... they are kind of my diary.
• the OSM tools were currently lost in the process, since the database notes structure has changed

We are currently out of resources to solve this right away, but we will do our best.

geopaparazzi 3.9.5 is out

This is mostly a bugfix release, but has one important addition, that sneaked in: the scaling of OSM online tiles on high resolution devices.

In the following image you can see the OSM tiles in geopaparazzi on a Nexus 5. The left image is from when we were not handling the scaling, and it is impossible to read the labels. The right one instead is scaled.

Advantage: you can read it.
Disadvantage: the image is scaled and therefore not as smooth as the original.

This can be enabled in the screen settings:

A bug that was keeping new map or mapurl tile sources to not being displayed in the treeview, brought us to the choice to simplify the tiles tree viewer. It has now only 2 levels, one of which represents the folder and the other the tile sources.
Filter buttons help to simplify searching on the source type:

Everything else has been mostly around enhancing the GPS system and fix the tile system that in the last release was giving problems on:

• position on map wrong due to map bounds
• move to bookmark not working
• center on gps not working

Last but not least I am happy to welcome the Polish localization.
This brings us to 17 languages, of which 13 quite well supported. As usual, if you want to help out, this is the place.

Geopaparazzi 3.9.4 is out

Yes, this is open source development.
You publish a release and after a week of development you feel you need to release again to have them all use the new stuff :)

So version 3.9.4 is out in the google play.

Quickly the news:

1) automatic center on gps is now also on map menu. This is nice if you need to turn it on quickly. You don't want to go all the way to the settings.

2) Fixes:

• fix timestamp on log details in local time (was UTC)
• fix for logging sometimes interrupting without apparent reason
• fix for geopaparazzi not able to deliver SMS on android 4.4

3) Log analysis tool

This is the nice new entry.

Maybe not everyone knows that from the Secret View one can enable 3 levels of logging.

This gives the possibility to have a look at what happened and for example it helped me to solve the aforementioned problem with interruption of logs, since errors are always logged.

If you push the "analyze log" button, you will get:

You can select between different types of log message, of which the most importants might be E (error) and G (GPS related). The others would be I (info), CH (check), A (anomalies) and M (memory related), but they still have to be better defined.

Maybe this tool is more suited to developers than users, but I have seen some advanced users in the geopaparazzi mailinglists that I am sure will be fiddeling around with this.

Enjoy!


PS: remember to clear the log from time to time (clear log button in secret view).

There is also a related feature worth to mention: if you need to convert geopaparazzi data to GIS data, check out this short tutorial.

Geopaparazzi 3.9.3 is out

Well well, jumping from 3.9.0 to 3.9.3.

Not that there haven't been news in the last two releases:

version 3.9.2 (released 2014-02-06)

Fix for two nasty bugs:

• TMS tile map source not working
• form text resets on rotation

version 3.9.1 (released 2014-02-03)

• language updates
• fix for gpx export time bug
• fix for image notes problem
• fix zoom "jumping"
• fix for spatialite info tool
• several enhancements

But well, time is what it is :)

Let's get to the point of this point: version 3.9.3!

Version 3.9.3 brings a couple of nice enhancements, so I will take some time to describe them properly:

1) Labels for spatialite layers

From the layers view it is now possible to access a labels button (second from left):

to select some simple properties for labels: 

This will result in something like (thanks Mark for the screenshot):

Labeling at this time is very simple. No collision detection and labels on lines suffer of steep angles. Also labels in polygons are placed in the baricenter of the polygon, so for strange shapes (or multi-shapes), the label might lie outside the geometry. 

But it is a good and very useful start.

2) WMS mapurls TANTO service

Together with the friends from the geospatial blog TANTO and in particular Giovanni, after having seen all the problems that the creation of a mapurl for WMS services was causing, we decided to create a small service, that would automatically generate mapurls for geopaparazzi for known services.

For geopaparazzi users everything is transparent, the import view has a new entry: MAPURL

Once you enter that menu, you find the services query view:

Here you can define some filter parameters and start the query. 

In my case I had the gps placed in Italy, so the query returned me:

One can then simply download the service, which will install the mapurl inside your system. The user is prompted for a custom name to name the service after, else the original name will be used. Since the original name could be duplicated in different services, the prefix "tanto_" will be added in that case.

This service is in a very experimental state right now, but it works fairly well. If you experience problems, please report them at the link right here below.

Also to auggest WMS services you would like to see inside geopaparazzi, please follow the link below and read how this can be done.

Documentation about this service will be maintained at the geopapurls homepage. Report any issue there.

3) GPX fixes

GPX data are now imported also with the name and dsecription in it.

4) OSM and GMAP urls are better supported

While geosms is still well supported, I had the need to add some message to it that could be nicely tapped on and create a bookmark. The real problem here is that urls do not allow spaces, so something like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=45.40658400,10.90924600&GeoSMS place to link

when tapped in the sms app, would not include the "place to link" in the url.

It is now possible to add after a last dash some information without spaces:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=45.40658400,10.90924600#placeToLink

or

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/46.68124/11.13489&layers=N#placeToLink

The above will both result in a new bookmark in geopap with the text: placeToLink

5) new icons

All the icons have bee redone with the Android Asset Studio resulting in very smooth icons on all device I tested them on.

Well well, I wish I had more time to dress this as a 1st April joke as many do, but I think I am just boring today. And if the app doesn't appear on google play, it is just because google play is slow in releasing :)

Enjoy!

Italy 4 INSPIRE

Hashtag: #italy4INSPIRE

See below for English version.

Premessa

INSPIRE prevede che ogni Stato Membro fornisca almeno un endpoint nazionale per il discovery di metadati.

Ad oggi, la maggior parte degli Stati Membri (23 su 28) ha soddisfatto questo requisito registrando il proprio riferimento nazionale nel geoportale INSPIRE: http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/INSPIRERegistry/

In particolare, come si può vedere, alcuni paesi hanno registrato più di un endpoint, come l'Austria, il Belgio e la Lettonia: è infatti possibile registrarne anche più di uno per paese

A differenza di ciò, l'Italia non ha ancora alcun endpoint registrato per il servizio di discovery.

Per questa registrazione è necessaria una semplice comunicazione (email) del National Contact Point INSPIRE (o di qualcuno delegato dal NCP) indirizzata a EC/EEA INSPIRE Team (env-inspire@ec.europa.eu) ed per conoscenza JRC (michael.lutz@jrc.ec.europa.eu).

Domanda

Perché il servizio CSW realizzato da RNDT non è ancora stato registrato come endpoint italiano?

Dal punto di vista normativo, sia il recepimento della Direttiva INSPIRE (Dlgs. 32/2010) che il Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale riportano che RNDT è il riferimento nazionale in questo contesto: "Il repertorio nazionale dei dati territoriali, [...] costituisce il catalogo nazionale dei metadati relativi ai set di dati territoriali" (Dlgs. 32/2010, art.5) [1].

Dal punto di vista tecnico-operativo i test effettuati nel luglio 2013 e gennaio 2014 dal Joint Research Centre della Commissione Europea (su richiesta dell'Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale) hanno dimostrato che il servizio CSW del RNDT e la quasi totalità dei metadati raccolti sono perfettamente conformi a quanto previsto dai Regolamenti 1205/2008 (metadati) e 976/2009 (servizi di rete) della Commissione Europea, nonché alle relative Technical Guidelines (1.2 del 2010 per i metadati, e 3.1 del 2011 per i servizi di discovery).

In particolare il test effettuato a gennaio 2014 ha riportato 4412 metadati "passed" e 412 "passed with warnings" su un totale di 5540 metadati sottoposti ad harvesting (nel RNDT i metadati disponibili sono 6143).

Il livello di conformità rispetto a INSPIRE è quasi totale per i metadati di dataset e serie (4415 su 4462).
Questo è un risultato importante ed è da notare che risulta essere migliore rispetto ai risultati ottenuti da altri Stati Membri.

Il report completo è disponibile a questo indirizzo: http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/resources/sandbox/INSPIRE-dc160d85-7f54-11e3-9486-d8d3855bd8fc_20140117-095358/services/1/PullResults/


Sottolineiamo che è importante che la registrazione del servizio sia fatta al più presto perché:

1. la disponibilità dei metadati italiani nel catalogo europeo serve a dare visibilità alle informazioni territoriali esistenti in Italia, il tutto proiettato a
   
   • supportare le politiche ambientali nazionali e comunitarie
   • favorire la conoscenza e la promozione del nostro territorio;
2. l'iniziale disponibilità di metadati potrà innescare un processo virtuoso spingendo gli enti pubblici di ogni livello a conferire i metadati all'RNDT per far conoscere le attività dell'amministrazione su scala internazionale;
3. per incentivare la realizzazione di servizi innovativi da parte di professionisti, consulenti e PMI locali da offrire agli enti locali sulla base della disponibilità di dati;
4. per istanziare il ruolo del "nodo" Italia all'interno della rete;
5. per dare riconoscimento e visibilità alle persone che, su scala diversa, hanno attivamente operato per la realizzazione dell'infrastruttura e dei servizi.

Conclusioni

Alla luce di queste considerazioni, esortiamo il NCP INSPIRE italiano a comunicare al più presto al JRC l'indirizzo del servizio CSW di RNDT affinché questo venga registrato come primo endpoint italiano in INSPIRE.

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Firmatari (in ordine alfabetico)

• Giovanni Allegri
• Roberto Angeletti, ExportToCanoma blog
• Andrea Antonello
• Fulvio Ananasso, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Associazione italiana per l'informazione geografica libera - GFOSS.it
• Associazione Stati Generali dell'Innovazione
• Ugo Bonelli, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Andrea Borruso
• Stefano Campus
• Giovanni Ciardi
• Piergiorgio Cipriano
• Bruno Conte, Stati generali dell'innovazione, Social4Social
• Simone Cortesi
• Laura Criscuolo
• Antonio D'Argenio, Nadir
• Margherita Di Leo
• Alessio Di Lorenzo
• Gianfranco Di Pietro, Geofunction
• Antonio Falciano
• Sergio Farruggia, Stati Generali dell'Innovazione, AMFM GIS Italia
• Daniela Ferrari
• Maurizio Foderà, Kartoblog
• Marco Frattoddi, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Antonio Fregoli, MNDAssociation
• Pietro Blu Giandonato
• Cesare Gerbino
• Simone Giannecchini
• Jacopo Grazzini
• Nicola Guarino, ISTC-CNR
• Giuseppe Iacono, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Carlo Infante, Stati generali dell'innovazione, Urban Experience
• Andrea Latino, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Simone Lella
• Walter Lorenzetti, gis3w
• Jody Marca
• Flavia Marzano, Stati Generali dell'Innovazione e Rete WISTER
• Giacomo Martirano, Epsilon Italia, coordinatore progetto smeSpire
• Stefania Morrone, Epsilon Italia
• Lorenzo Orlando, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Alessandro Oggioni
• Mariella Pappalepore, Planetek Italia
• Stefano Parodi, GeoWebLog
• Lorenzo Perone
• Emma Pietrafesa, Stati generali dell'innovazione (Rete WISTER)
• Renzo Provedel, Stati generali dell'innovazione, SOSLOG
• Angelo Quaglia
• Morena Ragone, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Paolo Russo, Stati generali dell'innovazione
• Alessandro Sarretta
• Monica Sebillo, AMFM GIS Italia
• Gian Bartolomeo Siletto
• Claudia Spinnato, Consorzio TICONZERO
• Lorenzino Vaccari, Provincia Autonoma Trento
• Franco Vico, AMFM GIS Italia
• Fabio Vinci, Epsilon Italia
• Massimo Zotti

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[1] Inoltre, il Decreto 10 novembre 2011 relativo alle regole tecniche del RNDT, emanato dal Ministro per la Pubblica Amministrazione e l'Innovazione e dal Ministero per l’Ambiente e la Tutela del Territorio e del Mare, dispone che il RNDT, parte integrante dell'infrastruttura nazionale, eroghi i servizi di ricerca (art. 2) e prevede la pubblicazione dei metadati nel RNDT, assicurando il rispetto degli adempimenti di cui al Regolamento (CE) n. 1205/2008 e al D. Lgs. n. 32/2010 (DM art. 4)

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ENGLISH VERSION

Petition to the Italian NCP for the RNDT registration in INSPIRE

Premise

According to INSPIRE each Member State must provide at least one endpoint for the discovery of national metadata.

To date, the majority of Member States (23 out of 28) met this requirement by registering its national endpoint in the INSPIRE geo-portal :

http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/INSPIRERegistry/

In particular it’s worth noting that some Member States have recorded more than one endpoint, e.g. Austria, Belgium and Latvia : it is also possible to register multiple national endpoints.

In spite of this, Italy has not yet registered its endpoint for the discovery service.

In order to get this registration, a simple communication is needed (e-mail), sent by the INSPIRE National Contact Point addressed to EC/EEA INSPIRE Team (env-inspire@ec.europa.eu) and the JRC (michael.lutz@jrc.ec.europa.eu).

Question

Why the CSW service exposed ​​by the RNDT has not yet been registered as one of the Italian endpoints?

From the regulatory point of view , both the transposition of the INSPIRE Directive (Legislative Decree 32/2010 ) and the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale report that RNDT is the national reference in this context :

"The national repertoire of spatial data, [... ] is the national catalog of metadata for spatial data sets" (Legislative Decree 32/2010 , Article 5).

From the technical and operational point of view, otherwise, the tests carried out in July 2013 and January 2014 by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission ( upon request of the Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale) have shown that the CSW service and almost all of the metadata harvested are fully compliant to the provisions of Regulations 1205/2008 (metadata) and 976/2009 (network services) of the European Commission, as well as the related Technical Guidelines ( 1.2 of 2010 for metadata , and 3.1 of 2011 for discovery services) .

Notably the test performed in January 2014 reported 4412 metadata "passed" and 412 "passed with warnings " out of a total of 5540 " harvested "metadata  (the total available metadata in the RNDT are 6143) .

The level of compliance to INSPIRE is almost complete for the metadata related to data (4415 of 4462) .

This is an important result and it is noteworthy better than the results obtained by other Member States.

The full report is available at this address :

http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/resources/sandbox/INSPIRE-dc160d85-7f54-11e3-9486-d8d3855bd8fc_20140117-095358/services/1/PullResults/

We emphasize that it is important that the registration of the service is done as soon as possible because :

1. the availability of Italian metadata in the European catalog is needed to give visibility to the spatial information existing in Italy , in order to

i. support national and EU environmental policies;

ii. improve knowledge of and encourage investment in our country;

2. the initial availability of metadata can trigger a virtuous cycle by pushing government entities at every level to provide new metadata to RNDT,  to promote their activities at the international level;
3. to encourage the creation of innovative services by professionals, consultants and local SMEs, based on the availability of data, to the benefit of local authorities;
4. to instantiate the role of the Italian " node " within the European network ;
5. to give visibility and recognition to people who, at different scales, have actively worked for the implementation of infrastructures and services .

Conclusions

On the basis of the aforementioned considerations, we urge the INSPIRE National Contact Point to provide as soon as possible the URL of the RNDT CSW, in order to have the first italian endpoint registered in INSPIRE.

Geopaparazzi 3.9.0 is out

The last months have been tough. There have been a lot of contribution to the project and too few time to run after them.

So there will be no big talk around this release (not by me at least).

You will have to check through it on your own. :)

To cite the release notes, the following are the important bits done:

• user interface enhancements
• option to insert note both in gps or mapcenter position
• added min/max visualization zooms for spatialite
• added dash pattern for vector styles
• import of different bookmarks files
• enhanced support for setting sdcard path
• interactive comboboxes in forms
• integer numbers in forms
• context menu now on actionbar for compatibility
• mapview slider remembers last status
• gpx export fix for time
• fixes in map centering and zooming
• fix for spatialite data queries
• moved build system to gradle

I spent my last sparkle of energy to port the old wiki from the google code repo to the github wiki in ReST format. The next step will be using sphinx on it.  Even if the images are sometimes a bit big, it is useful and a bit better organized. But it needs love... a lot of love. Any love around?

Check it out here.

As usual it will take some time to get through the google play process... but it should be on your device in few hours.

We hope you enjoy it, there has been a lot of work by several people, both developers and testers.

Thanks in particular to Mark for the spatialite support and Eli, Tim and Zsolt for testing and constructive discussions.