This amazing Geo2011 has come to an end. Welcoming Geo2012!

It has been a while I didn't write here, but we have been very busy in bringing it on with our community projects.

Thanks to Lisasoft and the restless Jody Garnett uDig got a whole pile of new features and will be growing nicely over the next year.

Thanks to us, we now finally have a stable Spatial Toolbox in uDig, which for now bases on the JGrasstools project, but is extensible through the OMS3 model linking technology.

Also the cooperation we had with the Colorado State University and the USDA on OMS3 has been amazing and could be summarized in this presentation.

Also on the mobile side a lot has been going on. In the last months Geopaparazzi could welcome a new contributor, Luca Delucchi, which is an active member of the Openstreetmap community. Sharing a train travel together when returning from the Italian GFOSS conference, it happened that we lost the train and started to talk about how we could make geopaparazzi a better tool for OSM members. Well, we didn't just talk and sure thing one of the most important features that will get out with geopaparazzi 2.6 (we are testing those right now) is the support for OSM points.

The map view now presents an OSM logo handle on the right side, and when opened it shows the supported OSM categories:

By selecting a category you gain access to the supported tags:

The tags description generates the form:

Once the form is saved the OSM point is in the database.

The OSM points can then be synchronized with the online OSM account of the user. I really have been waiting for that a long while :)

Another small addition is the enhancement of the profile view for gps logs, which now supports real charting and zooming as well as zoom to selection:

A more complete story about geopaparazzi can be found here.

It has been also a great year for our enigneering company, which lead as side product from a cooperation with the university of Trento to the release of the Nettools. I recently gave a presentation about how we use the nettools, so I will leave it to this post and that presentation.

That has more or less been my Geo2011. A great year. I wish you all an even more amazing geo2012. See you around the world, being it in Trieste, Prague or Beijing.

On your marks, get set... spatial toolbox on the line

Doing the last piece of migration JGrass into uDig, i.e. the Spatial Toolbox (aka. OmsBox) has been a lot of pain. One of those things in which the last 2% cost you almost as much as the 98% before.
We have been using the toolbox in testing now almost half a year now and finally today the last bits have been placed in the proper locations:

* the PSC has reviewed and accepted my plugin
* the code is inside the main uDig repository
* the libraries needed have been sorted out
* a new release of jgrasstools has been made to be aligned with the uDig libs (0.7.1)

and...

* the uDig help page that is required by the heavy metal Jody Garnett reviewer (thanks for helping) is also there. It can be found here.

Tomorrow we should be able to tag a snapshot release and on tuesday we should have the release ready for the Osgeo DVD. I think I will soon sleep much better...

OMS3 Grass modules Wrapper at Prague GRASS-Hackfest

Last week I took part at the GRASS Community Sprint. As every sprint I took part at, it has been an amazing experience and it has been good to catch up with "old" grass developers I knew and to get introduced to some really great "new" developers.

At the sprint I wanted to wrap all the grass modules in an OMS3/jgrasstools wrapper. Well, I had only two days to code on it, so I am not exactly where I wanted to, but lot's of stuff is already working and I can show you some stuff already loaded in the OmsBox:

Running r.watershed from within uDig:



And the result:



If you want to know what OMS3, jgrasstools and the omsbox are, you are invited to have a look at the presentation I gave at the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2011.

While in the screenshots you can see the modules inside the OmsBox (just so it looks nice), the result is a very small java package that depends on no big library or toolbox, so that the whole java world can take advantage of this. Amen!


I would also like to thank personally the sponsors that helped out:
GFOSS.it Associazione Italiana per l'Informazione Geografica Libera
Stefan Sylla, sylla-consult, Frankfurt, Germany
R3 GIS, Merano, Italy
FOSSGIS e.V., D-A-CH

The first release of jgrasstools is out

The first official release of JGrasstools has been released as 0.7.0.

We have worked about a year to prepare not only the algorithms contained in this release, but also the supporting the evolution of the OMS3 framework to gain the main objective of the JGrasstools library: the possibility to link together models in a most possible flexible way, being it along a timeline or in standalone mode, being it in complex and recursive way or in simple standalone mode.

JGrasstools represents the effort to extract the processing power of JGrass to library level.

For documentation, downloads, you can read the whole story at the release notes page.