Hello geopublihing.org readers! In this blog we want to update you on two things: The OSGeo Live DVD and the general roadmap of Geopublisher and AtlasStyler for the next months.

OSGeo Live DVD

The OSGeo Live project creates ready-to-use DVDs with preconfigured, runnable and documented FOSSGIS (free and open source GIS software) applications. The next release will be version 4.0 and and it will be distributed at the FOSS4G conference in Barcelona in a few days.
Wikisquare (the company sponsoring geopublishing.org) has participated in the OSGeo Live project this year to get Geopublisher and AtlasStyler onto the DVD. During that involvement I learned that the project is a lot of work, as dozends of applications have to be made runnable on a live system, documented and tested. I want to thank Cameron Shorter, Hamish, Alex Mandel and all involved for their efforts in creating a quality product that has the power to convince FOSSGIS-newbees of all the great open-source alternatives: Thanks a lot and keep up your great work!

Sadly, I have to announce here, that in the OSGeo Live DVD 4.0 - which will be distributed at FOSS4G - Geopublisher and AtlasStyler suffer a bug and are hardly usable in that release. The bug is fully my fault and I am very sorry it got in there in the last minute. The geopublishing.org web-page will feature a link to fixed version 4.0.1 in a few days. The OSGeo Live DVD 4.0.1 (and any later version) can then also be used for Geopublisher or AtlasStyler trainings, as it contains not only the applications, but also tutorials and demo data.

Until this fixed version 4.0.1 is released: To use AtlasStyler and Geopublisher from the OSGeo Live DVD as handed out at the FOSS4G, you have to do the following steps to fix the bug:

1. Boot the DVD as usual.
2. Open a terminal by clicking on the little black icon in the top panel.
3. Enter the following command:

4. sudo chown -R user:user .AtlasStyler .Geopublisher

5. Press [Return] and enter user as password.
6. Done. Close the terminal window and start AS oder GP with the desktop icon.

Roadmap

Geopublisher and AtlasStyler started in 2007 out of a diploma-thesis by an open-source enthusiast. In 2008 the open-source GIS company wikisquare.de was founded, which funded further development and offered commercial support for Geopublisher and the AtlasStyler SLD editor since then.
So far 2010 has been a very prospering year for wikisquare, but sadly the projects where usually not directly Geopublisher or AtlasStyler related. Hence only limited resources were available for development and were mainly spend on bugfixing instead of exciting new features.

For the future of AtlasStyler and Geopublisher we are more eagerly looking for organizations to invest into these projects. If you need a powerful SLD editor embedded into your software (AtlasStyler) or you can use an easy-to-use end-user desktop GUI to create maps and publish them (Geopublisher) please contact us! We are happy to port parts of it to the web or adapt it to you needs.

For the rest of 2010, the roadmap is very modest: There will be a relase of version 1.6 in November, but don't expect amazing new features. In spring 2011 we are determined to completely rewrite the existing Export-to-Web feature in Geopublisher. Geopublisher 2.0 will be able to export any GP atlas project to an end-user WebGIS consisting of industry-standard open-source components like: PostGIS, Geoserver and Openlayers. Any existing atlas projects will automatically profit from this enhancement, as it will be 100% backward compatible.

Get more involved, you!

I want to finish this blog entry with a general appeal to Open-Source software users:

Every month or so I meet a GIS user in person that has someday before evaluated Geopublisher / AtlasStyler and tells me that something didn't work as expected or a feature was missing. When I hear that, I usually become a bit angry inside - not because the software has a bug - but because it has never been reported. I then imagine all the other users that might have experienced the same bug - a bug that could have been fixed months ago, if someone would have reported it! So in case you and me meet in person on day, don't you dare to tell me about a bug you have been too lazy to report! ;-)

Developing good and stable Open-Source software is a community efford! The developers invest time = money to write code, and the users have to invest time = money in providing feedback and testing. So, if you don't want to be an Open-Source Lurker, please always take the time to give feedback and report bugs when you see them. The final product, all the other users, and - most important - your karma will profit from it!

Greetings,

  Stefan A. Tzeggai

We are proud to announce that today (June 8th 2010) Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.5 have been relased. The new versions come with a lot of changes "under the hood" which are not visible to the end user. Anyways - from a developers perspective - these changes were crucial to speedup further development and we are happy that we can purely focus on new features in next version 1.6 now.

The following points mark some of the most important new features in version 1.5:

Geopublisher:

• Geopublisher.exe
  For Windows users the ZIP download of Geopublisher now contains a Geopublisher.exe file. The .exe will offer to install Java if it can't be found on the computer.
• Direct import of zipped ESRI Shapefiles:
  Users can import zipped Shapefiles directly, without the need to unzip the Shapefile first.
• Import of GeoCommons metadata:
  When importing Shapefiles which have been downloaded from GeoCommons, Geopublisher will automatically parse title and attribute descriptions stored in the readme file.
• Map scale unit selectable:
  When composing maps, one can choose to show the map scale in feet & miles (US) or meters & kilometers (METRIC).
• Cleaner offline exports:
  Atlases exported for offline distribution (e.g. on a USB Stick or DVD) have a cleaner root directory. It now only contains atlas.exe (for Windows), start.sh (for MacOS and Linux), icon.gif and autorun.inf. All other files were moved to a subfolder atlasdata.
• Google EPSG:900913 is now supported
  
• Fonts: You may now add your own fonts to your atlas and use them for labelling.

The Geopublisher 1.4 software allows the creation and publication of multimedia atlases. It has been developed for users like scientists, consultants and institutions that want to communicate their research results to the general public. The primary aim is to deliver a software that reduces the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data to a minimum. Your final product will be a user-friendly atlas which can easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Besides the possibility of publishing maps with custom styles, labels or HTML as already introduced in former blog entries, Geopublisher 1.4 includes a new charting module.

The charting module enables you to create charts based on the attributes of your geo-datasets. These charts are interactively linked with your maps - for example: if you select a point in a scatter plot, the related geo-object will also be selected in your map and the attribute table. Of course this auto-selection works vice-versa, too.

Currently Geopublisher 1.4 supports two different chart types: bar-charts and scatter plots. More types will follow (Note: If you need any other chart type, feel free to contact Wikisquare and order an extension of Geopublisher.).

Geopublisher is a software to create and publish multimedia atlases and has been developed to overcome the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data. The targeted users are scientists and institutions that want to communicate their results to the general public. The exported atlases are user-friendly and can therefore easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Video

By watching the following video tutorial you will learn the steps you need to create and export a basic atlas using the free Geopublisher software. The video takes about 5 minutes and its purpose is to show the basic steps needed to create a first atlas with Geopublisher.

After four months of development, we today release version 1.3 of Geopublisher and AtlasStyler as the new stable release. A general overview of Geopublisher has already been given in an earlier post, so this post is just summarizing some of the new features that ship with this release.

New features in Geopublisher 1.3:

Bugfixes: Geopublisher 1.3 now comes with a 72h bugfix guarantee! If you find & report a bug, we promise to look for a solution within 72h!

In den letzten Monaten konzentrierte sich die Softwareentwicklung von Geopublishing.org besonders auf die neue Version der Geopublisher Anwendung. Neben internen Umstellungen wie der Wechsel auf die neuste Version der Geotools Bibliothek, enthält die neue Version 1.3 des Geopublishers auch ein Statistik Modul, welches die einfache Integration interaktiver Statistiken in Ihre Atlanten erlaubt. Warten Sie auf einen extra Blogeintrag zur der Statistikfunktion, der Anfang Januar 2010 veröffentlicht wird.

Neben Verbesserung im Geopublisher, sind aber auch ein paar neue Funktionen im AtlasStyler SLD Editor entstanden, hauptsächlich in die Beschriftungsoptionen.

Die folgenden Seiten beschreiben Schritt für Schritt die neuen Beschriftungsfunktionen wie: Relative Plazierung, ein schöner Halo-Effekt, Beschriftung mit mehreren Attributen und bessere Generalisierung durch die Auswahl eines Beschriftungsprioriät-Attributs. Der Rest des Tutorials ist leider z.Zt. nur auf Englisch verfügbar:

What is Geopublisher?

Geopublisher is an atlas authoring system which allows easy publication of geo-data, documents, images, videos, and statistics in form of digital multimedia atlases. These atlases can be understood as minimal, pre-configured end-user GIS which offer selected functionality only where its meaningful.
Geopublisher provides tools for quality assurance and multilingual meta-data management. No in-depth knowledge of HTML, SLD or XML is required to create an atlas. Atlases can be directly published on CD, DVD, memory stick, external hard-drive or the Internet. The software is platform-independent and Open-Source.

Features as a glance:

Geopublishing.org software has some unique features which make it especially applicable in the fields of international research, participatory GIS, capacity building, and development cooperation. These features include:

The german IT magazine iX published an article by Matthias Lendholt about the visualisation of geodata with the OGC SymbologyEncoding standard in its 3/2009 edition, 108pp. The article is called "Topografische Punkte - Geodaten visualisieren mit Symbology Encoding" and is available at the price of 0,50€ at the heise kiosk.

The article describes the basic concepts of SymbologyEncoding and gives examples on how to write SE files manually. The only application mentioned for the creation of SLD/SE files is AtlasStyler. This encourages us to follow our belief: AtlasStyler is the best SLD/SE editor available! So if you are planning any projects where you deal with SLD/SE files - avoid prorietary software; use AtlasStyler and think about investing in a sustainable FOSSGIS project. 

Geopublisher and AtlasStyler have been presented at the FOSSGIS conference 2009.

FOSSGIS is the acronym for Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformation systems and is the leading conference on this topic in German-speaking countries. The FOSSGIS 2009 was organized by FOSSGIS e.V. together with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Wikisquare - the main service provider for Geopublisher in the  German-speaking countries  - presented the Geopublisher and AtlasStyler applications during the conference in Hannover. We got some interesting feedback from people using the AtlasStyler with different WMS servers.

Presentation slides and paper are available in German-only:

Krüger, Stefan A.; Judex, Michael and Thamm Hans-Peter (2009):

Erstellung von Multimedia-Atlanten mit dem Geopublisher. paper and slides of the presentation at the  FOSSGIS Conference 2009, Hannover, 17.-19. March 2009 (Link to all conference publications)

Sourcecode and bug trackers

For interested developers there is an English-speaking developers portal at wald.intevation.de. There you can access the source-code via SVN or report bugs and feature-request.

Ohloh

Ohloh is a webpage that features comprehensive metrics and analysis on thousands of open source projects. We are also listed at Ohloh:

Integration Server

The Hudson continuous integration server running at wikisquare.de prodives interested developers information about daily builds, test-coverage etc.

JavaDoc