There has been great interest in the OpenGeo Suite from around the world since its launch almost a year ago, from end users and solutions providers alike. We feel that the best way to foster greater access to the OpenGeo Suite is in collaboration with organizations that share our values and offer outstanding solutions expertise to end users. Our Partner Program will expand the capabilities of these solutions providers by giving them a complete, certified, and fully supported open source geospatial stack backed by core experts on PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers and GeoExt.

Read more about our Partner Program.

OpenGeo managers and technical staff will be in attendance at FOSS4G, the leading conference for open source geospatial software, in Barcelona, Spain, September 6 – 9, 2010. Stop by booth #15 if you are interested in discussing partnerships and plans for the OpenGeo Suite.

Next week we will be running regular “office hours” at our booth on the FOSS4G exhibition floor. Come meet the core project developers on our staff and get your question about PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, or GeoExt answered.  Show up on Wednesday at 15:30 to learn about the “GeoNode“, the next generation of SDI.

• Tuesday, 14:00-16:00
  GeoServer and PostGIS:  Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, David Winslow, Paul Ramsey
• Wednesday,  10:00-12:00
  GeoServer: Justin Deoliveira, Andrea Aime, David Winslow
• Wednesday, 13:00-15:00
  OpenLayers & GeoExt: Andreas Hocevar, Tim Schaub
• Wednesday, 15:30-17:00
  GeoNode: Sebastian Benthal, Galen Evans (World Bank), David Winslow
• Thursday, 10:00-12:00
  OpenLayers & GeoExt: Andreas Hocevar, Tim Schaub
• Thursday, 13:00-16:00
  PostGIS: Paul Ramsey, Alyssa Wright

We hope to see you there!

Control flow is now included in GeoServer. This extension allows for the ability to control the amount of concurrent requests executing inside the server. This can improve performance and utilize resources more efficiently.

In addition, GeoExplorer now sports an improved Print Preview dialog, and the Dashboard has some more helpful notifications.

The Community Edition is free to use but is unsupported. Feel free to use the OpenGeo Community Forum to share your questions and tips with the community.

So give the OpenGeo Suite a try. If you’re already running an older version of the OpenGeo Suite, it’s easy to upgrade to get the latest features. Just download and run the new version, and your data and settings will be preserved.

OpenGeo is committed to making tools for simple, fast, and reliable mapping and are happy to announce the OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition, a pre-configured cloud deployment of the OpenGeo Suite.

The OpenGeo Suite Cloud Edition comes in three different flavors to meet different industry needs.

• Experiment with the latest features of the OpenGeo Suite with the Community Cloud Edition—perfect for developer prototypes.
• Remove the risks of enterprise GIS with our pre-optimized Enterprise Cloud Edition package.  Security and scalability features combine with software and infrastructure support.
• Enjoy the flexibility  of a customized infrastructure with our Enterprise Auto-Scaling Cloud Edition package.  On-demand scaling allows organizations to efficiently process large and cyclical datasets.

We offer these editions in partnership with Skygone, a leader in high-performance GIS cloud infrastructures. For more information about pricing and deployment, visit our GIS marketplace.

GeoNode aims to be the next generation of spatial data infrastructure. Some of it—such as GeoExplorer with integrated styler or data publishing through open standards—will be familiar to users of the OpenGeo Suite. What GeoNode provides on top is search enabled by an ISO metadata catalog and an integrated front-end for user management, security, data browsing, cartography, and more.

The best way to learn about it is to try it yourself on the live demo!

We are almost ready for our 1.0 release, and we need your help testing GeoNode.  So please, make an account and give it a shot.  If you find any issues, please don’t hesitate to report them on our project Trac.  We’ll be squashing bugs and redeploying regularly in the upcoming weeks.

Our hope is to have a robust release candidate available for a grand unveiling at FOSS4G this year.  See you there!

In previous years, the exercise has been just MapServer versus GeoServer, and both projects have learned a lot in the process. Last year ESRI joined the process, but unfortunately ran out of staff time before the results were complete. This year the participation has exploded! The final number of teams that complete the testing might be smaller, but as it stands now the participants include: MapServer, GeoServer, CadCorp GeognoSIS, Constellation SDI, ERDAS Apollo, Mapnik, Oracle MapViewer, and QGIS mapserver.

As the participants get their servers online and configured to use identical data and styles, it becomes possible to compare their results visually. To make the comparison a little more dynamic, I wrote a small multi-map page that uses OpenLayers to view all the servers at once, looking at the same area.

It’s really fun to see so many different implementations chew up the same data and styles and spit out the same map. Standards work? Standards work!

POLYGON((-40.0 52.0, 102.0 -6.0, -67.0 -29.0, -40.0 52.0))

Of course, that depends on what projection it is in, but let’s skip cartesian systems and look at it as a geographic shape on the sphere. Google Earth thinks it is shaped like this:

But I don’t really think so. It all comes down to how you interpret the edges. I’m not sure what rule Google Earth is using to interpret the edges, but they aren’t Great Circles, because this is what a Great Circle map of the polygon looks like:

See how far south and north they get? Way different from the Google Earth interpretation. If anyone knows what rule Google Earth uses, I’d love to hear it.

Update: Here is the KML if you want it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<kml>
  <Placemark>
    <Polygon>
    <outerBoundaryIs><LinearRing><coordinates>
    -40,52 102,-6 -67,-29 -40,52
    </coordinates></LinearRing></outerBoundaryIs>
    </Polygon>
  </Placemark>
</kml>

Update 2: In the comments, GeoXP posits and Mano Marks confirms that the polygon edges are rhumb lines. Mano notes that curiously, if you draw the same lines as, er, lines, instead of polygons, they will follow great circles instead.

Update 3: Once I take the bit between my teeth, you can’t stop me. In the KML 2.2 specification, the OGC has also ratified this fun interpolation scheme! “The boundary control points of each descendent kml:LinearRing are first projected to the plate carrée plane (where altitude is dropped), then straight line segment interpolation in the plate carrée (long,lat) plane is used between consecutive control points. The interior points are then filled in linearly in the plate carrée plane. Finally, the (long,lat) points of the polygon in the plate carrée plane are mapped back to (long.lat,alt) points on the earth’s terrain surface model.”

Update 4: In the comments, Mike Sumner suggested that I try one over the dateline because it’s “much dumber”. Who can resist an offer like that? So I just translated the whole polygon 150 degrees to the west, giving us this KML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<kml>
  <Placemark>
    <Polygon>
    <outerBoundaryIs><LinearRing><coordinates>
    170,52 -50,-6 143,-29 170,52
    </coordinates></LinearRing></outerBoundaryIs>
    </Polygon>
  </Placemark>
</kml>

And here is what it looks like in the venerable Google Earth.

Basically, it refuses to cross the dateline, it takes the long way around. Which, if you read the OGC description, is entirely unsurprising, since all the interpretation of the edges is happening in cartesian space, in plate carrée, where there is no “dateline” and Siberia and Alaska are at opposite sides of the plane, farther apart than New York and London.

Update 5: Last one. Because the effect is hard to see in the last example, see how this small triangle over the dateline is rendered (in green, below):

POLYGON((170 72, -170 70, -165 54, 170 72))

A polygon enclosing the pole looks even cooler (in yellow, below).

POLYGON((45 85, 135 80, -135 85, -45 80, 45 85))

That dateline is sacrosanct!

This year will be no different. And OpenGeo will be descending upon Barcelona en masse.

As you may know, the first day of FOSS4G is devoted to workshops – long form, hands-on sessions where you learn the tools you need to make your work awesome. This year, we are leading or co-leading four workshops:

• Web Mapping with GeoServer
• Web Mapping with OpenLayers
• Introduction to PostGIS
• Geospatial for Java

With the exception of the last one, these are all introductory courses, designed for those who want a flavor of these tools and to see what they can do.

We don’t want to bribe you, but for our PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers workshop attendees, we will be giving away t-shirts emblazoned with the software logo. Not only does this mean that you can now go one more day before doing laundry, but you can show your true colors, your PostGIS blue, your GeoServer green, or your OpenLayers, um, teal, I think.

There are just a few slots left for each workshop, so you want to register now.

And don’t just come for the workshops, we’ll be leading or co-leading tutorials and presentations too:

• Building Web Based GIS Applications with GeoExt
• SDI best practices with GeoNode
• The State of PostGIS
• Tips for the PostGIS Power User
• GeoServer CSS: Mapping in Style
• GeoNode Architecture: Wrangling $100 million worth of open source software to make SDI building a walk in the park
• Mobile Augmented Reality using FOSS
• GeoServer WPS: an integrated, extensible processing service
• GeoServer cartographic rendering: new features for map makers
• Graphical style editing with Styler: Make a basemap without seeing SLD
• Web Map Printing with GeoExt
• Performance Considerations In OpenLayers Based Web Mapping
• OpenLayers’ Future

And, of course, don’t forget the yearly WMS Performance Shootout.

You haven’t registered yet?

In addition to all of this, we’ll be at our booth, listening and talking, learning and teaching, and helping to make this year’s event as good as it can be. Come say “hi”. We’ll be easy to spot, as we’ll be wearing the t-shirts too (we got extras for ourselves).

Here’s an example of network walking using a simple collection of segments. As is common in many GIS applications, the segment are implicitly connected — their end points are coincident with the start points of other segments.

CREATE TABLE network ( segment geometry, id integer primary key );

INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(1 1, 0 0)', 1);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(2 1, 1 1)', 2);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(1 2, 1 1)', 3);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(3 1, 2 1)', 4);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(3 2, 2 1)', 5);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(2 3, 1 2)', 6);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(1 3, 1 2)', 7);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(4 2, 3 2)', 8);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(3 4, 2 3)', 9);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(2 4, 2 3)', 10);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(1 4, 1 3)', 11);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(4 3, 4 2)', 12);
INSERT INTO network VALUES ('LINESTRING(4 4, 3 4)', 13);

CREATE INDEX network_gix ON network USING GIST (segment);

Visually, the network looks like this:

To walk our network, use a WITH clause that starts with one segment, then repeatedly adds the next downstream segment to the collection. In our case, the “next downstream segment” is defined as a segment whose start point is close to the end point of the current segment. We’ll walk down from segment 6.

WITH RECURSIVE walk_network(id, segment) AS (
    SELECT id, segment FROM network WHERE id = 6
  UNION ALL
    SELECT n.id, n.segment
    FROM network n, walk_network w
    WHERE ST_DWithin(ST_EndPoint(w.segment),ST_StartPoint(n.segment),0.01)
  )
SELECT id
FROM walk_network

Which returns:

 id
----
  6
  3
  1
(3 rows)

From 6 to 3 to 1, correct! Once we have our walker producing the results we want, we can wrap more PostGIS and PostgreSQL functions around the walker to produce a finished product. Here’s a function that takes in an edge identifier and outputs a linestring based on the downstream path.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION downstream(integer)
RETURNS geometry
LANGUAGE sql
AS '
WITH RECURSIVE walk_network(id, segment) AS (
    SELECT id, segment FROM network WHERE id = $1
  UNION ALL
    SELECT n.id, n.segment
    FROM network n, walk_network w
    WHERE ST_DWithin(ST_EndPoint(w.segment),ST_StartPoint(n.segment),0.01)
  )
SELECT ST_MakeLine(ST_EndPoint(segment))
FROM walk_network
' IMMUTABLE;

And here’s the function in action, generating the downstream path from segment 12.

=# SELECT ST_AsText(Downstream(12));

            st_astext
---------------------------------
 LINESTRING(4 2,3 2,2 1,1 1,0 0)
(1 row)

Check the generated path against our network picture — looks good!

GeoExplorer now includes a printing feature. With a simple export to PDF you can now impress your offline friends and your mom’s refrigerator. Another GeoExplorer improvement includes version 3 of the Google Maps API.  You no longer need an API key in order to host maps with Google layers on your site. And for design aficionados, Styler now preserves GeoServer SLD vendor options. We also fixed bugs around GeoWebCache layer groups and GeoServer layer names.

With 2.1.0 there is a lot more than meets the eye. We invite you to try it out and let us know what you think!

You can find answers to your questions at our growing OpenGeo Suite Community Forum.  Remember, the Community Edition is free (open source and no charge), but unsupported.  If you’re going into production, you’ll definitely want the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition.