If you love Pragmatic Programmers books, you've now got a couple strong ones that teach a variety of open source geospatial tools and concepts.

Scott Davis' '''GIS for Web Developers''' and Gary Sherman (of QGIS fame) has '''Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools'''. It's always good to have more books that teach on the projects that I love, but it's doubly satisfying when the authors are both great guys. Each one has written in a enjoyable reading style and they both know what they are talking about. I highly recommend them.

Now in stores - the German translation of my book, including several updates:

• Updated to MapServer 5
• Desktop mapping with Quantum GIS
• Web Mapping Client introduction: OpenLayers & Mapbender
• New / updated URLs for data and services
• Forward by Arnulf Christl, with updates by Astrid Emde & Arnulf Christl

For more information see, buy, review, enjoy:

• O'Reilly.de
• Book Site

While the complexity and sophistication of online mapping applications continues to grow, there are still many end-users that simply need a little integration with other open source tools.

This group in the South Pacific Islands are an interesting example of MapServer being integrated with the Tikiwiki Content Management System.

Jeff McKenna, Perry Nacionales and I regularly lead a MapServer 101 / Getting Started workshop. We did it again this year at the FOSS4G conference. Reading through the feedback comments is always interesting. Although there are always useful criticisms, one specific positive comment stuck out at me and reminded me of the reason we do the workshop:

Not an encouraging notice, is it? Have you ever had the "Backorder Blues"? You know, when you get excited about picking up a new book only to find that it is on backorder via your favourite store, or is entirely unavailable? It's hard to be motivated to actually complete your order, isn't it. Having to "wait and see" isn't much incentive for a willing buyer.

I've had a few books like this over the years, but I never expected it to be my own book! That's a wound that cuts twice for any author.

First Issue is free.

Looks like lots of interesting articles. I've been interested in learning more about Cairo graphics library, so I'm looking forward to reading their Creating custom PyGTK widgets with Cairo article.

See http://www.pythonmagazine.com/

GeoNetwork opensource is a metadata catalogue. Like GeoServer, it uses a Java server in the backend. Since I already have Tomcat java server from my GeoServer install it should be really easy to get started with GeoNetwork. Here are my notes for installing it for Mac OS X on a Macbook.

Today I started to install GeoServer, in preparation for some demos next week. I do almost all of my work on a Macbook, so this is a great opportunity to enjoy the strengths of a cross-platform Java app like Geoserver. I have limited Java experience and certainly have never used Tomcat for anything except GeoServer and GeoNetwork in the past. JBoss - what's that?

Now that OSGeo has a CMS up and running, I will be putting my OSGeo-relate blog posts on that site. Spatialguru.com blogs will be more about personal projects and ideas.

Please consider adding this new low-traffic blog to your feed reader: http://www.osgeo.org/tyler/feed - the web version is here.

Note: This is mirrored from my new OSGeo-related blog on osgeo.org (www - rss)

February 4th, 2007 was the first anniversary of OSGeo. One year ago 25 people met face-to-face, and many more via phone and IRC, to discuss the possibility of starting an umbrella organisation. These participants represented over 13 different open source projects. The foundational purpose of the organisation was to help promote and continue to develop open source tools in the geospatial sphere. Since that time, much has happened and momentum around OSGeo continues to develop. Here are only a few highlights from that first year.

Members Added

The initial 25 charter members were expanded to a full 45 voting members after a public nomination process. These are the members who are responsible for voting in the Board. Regular members were also invited to join at no cost and without any formal process. The development of a membership management application is currently underway, which will allow members to formally sign up.

Committees Established

Several committees are overseeing day-to-day work and special projects:

• A Board of Directors was created early on and expanded to include 9 representatives from around the world. The Board has been very active in setting direction, policies and helping in general.
• Website and Systems Administration committees - focused on website content and infrastructure maintenance and development
• Project Incubation - monitoring and guiding projects through the incubation process
• Promotion and Visibility - developing promotional material, coordinating OSGeo presence at conferences, creating press releases
• Conference planning - helping organise the annual OSGeo FOSS4G conference event
• Fundraising - raising funds to cover day-to-day costs of the foundation and its projects
• Public Geospatial Data - working towards making more data publicly available and building tools for finding it
• Education/Curriculum development - working towards a set of teaching tools for bringing open source into the academic mapping and GIS environment

Projects Joining

The primary goal of OSGeo is to help further develop and promote particular software projects. An initial set of projects joined the incubation process at the beginning and since then a couple have graduated and a few more have joined. Even more are waiting for approval to join the process. Projects can be loosely categorised into the following groupings.