… announcing yet another take on getting PostGIS working with Ruby on Rails. Our goal (well, one of them) is to make it easy to arrange for web-based presentation of geographic data, with mouse-sensitive polygons, line-strings, and the like. The code is still quite new, but it’s to the point that other people may find it useful. So, without further ado, the URL for the code http://ivygis.justec.co.in/
and a demo: http://ivygis.mgxkernel.com:3000/canada
The demo requires Firefox 1.5 or IE6. It’s a tiled map, which you’ve seen before; the mouse sensitivity and highlighting of the parks polygons, and railroads, are (we hope ;-), a bit more unusual. The data for the mouse-sensitive objects is being pulled live out of PostGIS, and processed for display as SVG or VML, whichever the browser supports — just a simplify() for now, but more complicated transforms and queries would be easy to arrange…

[from Robert Thau’s email today]

April 15, 2006

Geoserver (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home) will hopefully add another service to it’s 2.0 release. The FROGS (http://frogs.tigris.org/) project has implemented a WPS, and is likely to join forces with geoserver. According to OGC “A WPS may offer calculations as simple as subtracting one set of spatially referenced numbers from another (e.g., determining the difference in influenza cases between two different seasons), or as complicated as a global climate change model. The data required by the WPS can be delivered across a network, or available at the server”. cool huh :)

As I said in my last post one of the topics of discussion at the melbourne’s Mapserver users group meeting was the uptake of OGC standards by the OSS community. Here’s an example of OSS taking lead in implementing upcoming open standards: the current CVS version has has already implemented partial support for Sensor Observation Service for enabling Sensor Webs. If you can’t wait go a head and try it. So currently its not generating an XML response to getCapabilities request but rather needs a predefined URL. This will change very soon, I’m sure.

In the weeks leading up to the day of the first MapServer/OSGIS Users Group meeting, Melbourne was blessed with constant sunshine. The the day finally arrived and it started raining… typical of Melbourne. Gus MacAuly and I wearly made our way to Melb Uni’s computer science department expecting the worst — a no show. Upon arrival I waited at the door of the building for any unsuspecting by-passers while Gus tried to locate an empty room we could use since the room orignally booked was locked! (Must remember to make sure we get the key next time). At precisly 6.35PM Simon McBride (Spatial Vision) & Mark (from Geomatics Technology — sorry Mark forgot your last name) walk in. As I am chating with them a call from Dr Matt Duckham (Dept of Geomatics, Uni of Melb) — my phone discussion with Matt went on for a bit but the end result was he also decides to come down for the meeting.
Finally we started the presentation on my 12″ Laptop screen — the room had no projector. Experiances with Geoserver, Mapserver, PostGIS and Mapbuilder were all discussed, so were issues pertaining to the changing business of GIS as the open source technology adopts OGC standards faster than commercial software compaines.

So a relative success I would say — 5 of us at the 1st meeting who knows next meeting we might have to book the Melbourne world trade center :)

Oh and we also decided to move the meeting to Wednesday since most ppl are trying to get out of the CDB on Fridays…

That’s right, with the help of the Arizona State University, Google maps now supports the mars landscape. Now everyone can see the landing sites (or crash sites). Check it out: http://www.google.com/mars/. And while it is not currently supported in the Google Earth Client, check out: http://themis.asu.edu/valles_video.

Ali’s organizing this