Slashgeo

GeoBase User Support writes "What is GeoBase?

GeoBase is undertaken to ensure the provision of and access to a common, up-to-date and regularly maintained base of quality geospatial data for all of Canada. GeoBase is a federal, provincial and territorial government initiative that is overseen by the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG). Through the GeoBase portal, users with an interest in the field of geomatics have access to quality geospatial information at no cost and no restricted use. More on http://www.geobase.ca./

Users have to subscribe on GeoBase to download data. When subscribing, they can authorize GeoBase to inform them of latest developments (approximately 2 — 3 e-mails a year). Furthermore, a newsletter published twice a year is available on the Website.

For any questions or comments please contact:
Client Service
Natural Resources Canada
2144, King West Street, suite 010
Sherbrooke, Quebec, J1J 2E8
Canada
E-mail: SupportGeoBase@nrcan.gc.ca
Telephone: 819-564-4857 / 1-800-661-2638 (Canada and USA)"

A short note to those of you still using the slashgisrs.org domain, our former name and domain used in 2005-2006, to access slashgeo.org: please update your bookmarks and RSS feed URL (still feed://slashgeo.org/index.rss at the moment) to use Slashgeo.org instead of the old one. I'm not sure if anything will break, but it's a good idea to update it anyway! Thank you. And yes, we'll keep the Slashgeo.org name despite moving away from Slashcode and will try to break as little URLs as possible.

Update: 01/07 20:17 GMT by S : Ok, I confirm the old subdomains are broken. If you try accessing technology.slashgisrs.org, you'll end up on a broken link. I'm struggling at whether or not I should fix this or not. Maybe I'll fix some of the old subdomains but not all: since we moved to Slashgeo.org in 2006, I'm ready to break a few very old URLs.

We've been running the last poll for too long, time to change! We asked you about the impacts of the limitations of the Google Earth/Maps Terms of Service, the results are, out of 147 answers: 40% admit never having read the terms of service and an additional 12% say they don't fully understand what these terms mean for their data. About 25% of people answered the Google terms are a problem so they have to use an alternative (25% is a surprisingly high number to me!), and a total of 15% use the tool and either don't care about the ToS or willingly take the risk anyway. Only 4% claim they're fine with the Google ToS.

The new poll ask you about 2009 and geospatial: was this a good year to you?

Last year I had the audacity of selecting November 13th as the "Make Slashgeo Known to the Community Day", guess what? It's November 13th again! Your mission is the same and still very simple: if you like the site and find it useful, you must tell one of your colleagues about Slashgeo.org. We recently posted about our 4-years anniversary. Amongst the good news, I can confirm the migration to Drupal started. Even if I have very little precious time to devote to this migration, we'll get there! (unless there's a major showstopper, but I'm confident) As I said last year, our small team of volunteers provides this geonews aggregation service for a community we love and we want to make sure people who might benefit from it actually know that it exists! It takes only a minute to send an email and fulfill your mission :-) (with enough missions accomplished, you'll gain experience and levels and be able to develop new geospatial skills ;-)

Bull_UK writes "The original version of World Wind was built using .NET, but was switched to Java to promote cross platform development, this current incarnation has been recognised by NASA who have awarded it the NASA Software of the Year award. As a community member who has worked on this project for several years I feel this shows how the public and Government agencies can work together to produce great software, which is beneficial to the Government, Private sector and the public in general."

Inventis - ogr2gui writes "Inventis today announced the release of OGR2GUI version 0.6, the graphical user interface used to convert and manipulate geospatial data.

What’s new in this version?

• The migration of the GUI code to Nokia’s QT platform
• Now supports database formats such as Oracle Spatial, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and ODBC connections.
• Added support for GPX, GMT, GeoJSON, Geoconcept and FME Objects Gateway formats
• A new website for downloading and exchanging between users : www.ogr2gui.ca

OGR2GUI is based on OGR2OGR, a command line utility from the "Geospatial Data Abstraction Library” (gdal.org). Through its graphic interface, OGR2GUI allows to use all the power of OGR2OGR without worrying about its complex syntax. It brings speed, efficiency and accessibility to its users.

OGR2GUI is an open source project licensed under the GNU General Public License. Everyone in the developer community is invited to join. The source code and the binary executables for Windows and Linux can be downloaded at ogr2gui.ca

The development of OGR2GUI is connected to Inventis mission to promote data access and to deploy easy-to-use geospatial solutions. To date, hundreds of users in over 42 countries have adopted our application."

A short note to let you know that geonews publication on the site will rely on other Slashgeo editors and should resume to full speed next week. Thank you for your patience.