For a while now, QGIS releases have been named after moons. This will change with the next release 1.6:
All releases from 1.6 forward will be named after a place on earth, preferably a very obscure place with an interesting story behind it.
You can submit your name suggestions on the QGIS Wiki page.
Looking for a great resource to learn about map projections? Stop searching and go to Carlos A. Furuti’s Map Projection Pages.
Kudos to Matt Wilkie from gis.stackexchange for the link.
Carson Farmer has written some new classification functions for QGIS. QGIS 1.5 only has “Equal Interval” and “Quantiles” classification algorithms implemented. Carson added the following algorithms to trunk:
QGIS classification algorithms for layer symbology in current QGIS trunk version
Read more on his blog: “Playing around with classification algorithms: Python and QGIS” and “Adding a bit of class(ification) to QGIS…”
The aim of Time Manager plugin for QGIS is to provide comfortable browsing through temporal geodata. A dock widget provides a time slider and a configuration dialog for your layers to manage.
a wildlife telemetry dataset managed by Time Manager
Time Manager filters your vector datasets and displays only features with timestamps in the user specified time frame.
two views of the scenery, using a two-days time frame
Give it a try! The project website can be found at http://anitagraser.github.com/TimeManager/.
I just stumbled upon the following handy Firefox plugin:
WMS Inspector provides a set of tools for integrators and developers that work with the Web Map Service (WMS) standard. It aims to ease repetitive tasks like debugging requests or checking which individual services are used from an online mapping application. It also focuses on provide a user-friendly output of the different services’ capabilities.
Justin O’Beirne from 41Latitude has compiled a thorough – and not that “brief” – comparison of Google Maps, Bing Maps and Yahoo! Maps:
Now that FOSS4G 2010 is over, we’re looking forward to next year. The free and open source GIS community is going to meet in Denver from September 12-16, 2011.
I just stumbled upon this interesting piece of code for visualization of network flow on gis.stackexchange.com: It’s called “Flow Map Layout” and was developed at Standford University (project page).
Flow Map Layout mapped on a globe
The corresponding paper describes the methodology and shows interesting example uses.
Discontinuous or Interrupted Projections like the Butterfly Map are certainly exotic. But does that also mean that there are no open source GIS supporting them?
Butterfly Map example
This question on gis.stackexchange.com is awaiting an answer :)
Update:
Using Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) it seems relatively easy to create a map showing an Interrupted Sinusoidal Projection. Here’s an example out of their manual (PDF, page 121):
World map using the Interrupted Sinusoidal projection
For all of us who couldn’t attend FOSS4G in Barcelona this year there are some of the great workshops available online:
