AuScope is running a three-day Spatial Information Services Stack Workshop in Canberra on 22-24 March 2011.

The Spatial Information Services Stack - an Australian Interoperable SDI http://auscope.org/res/file/downloads/grid/SISS_Program-form.pdf

22-24 March 2011 Geoscience Australia Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Drive Symonston ACT 2609

**Background **

The Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS) is a suite of tools for spatial data interoperability. SISS uses OGC standards, GML application schema, modelling tools, vocabulary support services and registries. AuScope is deploying the SISS in multiple Australian Government agencies and research organisations. AuScope has developed a Web portal to demonstrate the infrastructure, and to encourage the development of other third party client tools. As SISS is built on open source technologies others are encouraged to use the stack and assist in its development.

SISS builds on existing technologies including GeoServer, FullMoon and GeoNetwork. AuScope has made enhancements to support complex application schemas like GeoSciML and WaterML, and quality improvements to raise the quality of service level and ensure stack completeness. For example, the AuScope portal uses GeoNetwork to discover services, and the application schemas supported by GeoServer are developed and tested with FullMoon. SISS provides a complete solution to develop, establish and maintain OGC standards compliant infrastructures.The development of SISS was funded by NCRIS through the NeAT initiative.

**Workshop goal **

The goal of the workshop is to show how communities can use SISS to provide transparent interoperable access to spatial data and knowledge about Australia.

Full programme and registration form: http://auscope.org/res/file/downloads/grid/SISS_Program-form.pdf

Space is limited so places will be allocated to ensure representation from the greatest number of organisations in each session.

The GeoServer community is happy to announce that the second release candidate of GeoServer 2.1 is now available for download. There is not much in the way of new features for this release, but the team has been busy fixing bugs. Checkout the change log for the list of fixes.

Download and try 2.1-RC2 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list. Thanks for supporting GeoServer.

The GeoServer community is happy to announce that the first release candidate of GeoServer 2.1 is now available for download. The team has been busy working on some great new improvements and features since 2.1-beta3.

First up is GeoWebCache integration, allowing clients to enjoy the benefits of tile caching through the regular GeoServer WMS endpoint. This enables GeoWebCache to transparently proxy for the GeoServer WMS without the need for a separate service endpoint. Taking advantage of the recently added disk-quota functionality, GeoWebCache now provides the ability to set limits on the amount of disk space used for storing tiles, allowing users to control and limit the size of the tile cache on disk. Big thanks to Gabriel Roldán for the great GeoWebCache improvements.

This release also brings some improvements to RESTConfig, which is now shipped with GeoServer by default so users need no longer install it as a separate plugin. Improvements to the API include the file upload operation that now allows for uploading files into an existing data store. This addition allows users to upload a shapefile and have it converted automatically into a PostGIS database, publishing it as a PostGIS layer rather than as a Shapefile layer. Finally, the API also supports recursive DELETE operations, making it more convenient to remove resources that contain other resources like stores or workspaces. Thanks to David Winslow and Justin Deoliveira of OpenGeo for these improvements.

Thanks to some great work from the folks at GeoSolutions, raster reprojection performance has improved significantly by using linear appoximations of transformation functions. This improvement was initially added in 2.1-beta3 but has continued to be improved for 2.1-RC1. Those interested should checkout this article that links to a white paper with the full technical details.

Last but certainly not least, thanks to Andrea Aime for the addition of a Web Coverage Service request builder, a handy tool for graphically building WCS requests to test a coverage service. As clients for WCS have always been sparse, this tool goes a long way for making the service more usable.

We are happy to report the contribution of yet another translation of the web admin interface—special thanks to Oscar Fonts for submitting a Catalan translation and to Geodata Sistemas for funding the work.

Also worthy of thanks this round is Ivan Grcic who has submitted some excellent patches, including bug fixes for WMS layer functionality. Thanks Ivan!

As always, a number of other bug fixes and improvements have made it into this release. Check out the change log for all new and noteworthy changes.

Download and try 2.1-RC1 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list.

Thanks for supporting GeoServer!

The GeoServer community is proud to announce the release of 2.1-beta3, which is now available for download.

The big feature for this release is support for WMS 1.3. Special thanks goes out to Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, for providing OpenGeo with funding to complete the task. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, the Ordnance Survey needed to meet the INSPIRE requirements.  Rather than implement a solution on their own, they opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world could all benefit.

This is the value and the beauty of open source. Government agencies across Europe can now upgrade their servers to the latest GeoServer at no additional cost.  In time, other mapping agencies can and will further benefit one another by funding additional GeoServer improvements, like WFS 2.0 and Application Schema configurations for INSPIRE, but the Ordnance Survey deserves special recognition from all GeoServer users for taking the lead.

In addition to WMS 1.3, this release includes some SLD 1.1 / SE 1.1 enhancements.  It will be possible to use most SE 1.1 documents, though not every new option is fully supported yet.  User feedback on which new options we should support first is greatly appreciated.  Also funded by Ordnance Survey is a community module to implement the WMS extensions for INSPIRE View Service compliance—namely the language parameter and several extended capabilities fields.

The release also includes a few nice fixes and improvements from beta2, such as upgrading CQL to ECQL, and a fix by Eli Miller, a newcomer to the GeoServer community, to allow the REST Config API to properly handle SQL Views.

We encourage you to download GeoServer 2.1-beta3, try it out, and let us know if there are any bugs. This software is still a beta, so we recommend testing extensively before running it in a production environment. That said, we’re hoping to move to 2.1.0 release candidates soon, so any and all testing will this process move along faster.

Download GeoServer 2.1-beta3

We are pleased to announce the second beta release of GeoServer 2.1.  Big thanks goes out to GeoSolutions for stepping up to the unglamorous and thankless process of creating a release, not to mention adding lots of great new features.

GeoServer 2.1.0 is shaping up to be quite an incredible step forward. In addition to all the great features of the first 2.1 beta, this release brings a few more.

Graphical File/Directory Chooser

Ever found it difficult to remember the full path when loading a shapefile or GeoTIFF?  A new improvement brings an easy graphical file and directory selection tool to browse the file system that GeoServer is on.  This is definitely a great enhancement to make GeoServer even easier to configure.

Read more about the new file chooser.

Core improvements to support database-backed catalog

GeoServer’s core catalog interfaces received some tweaks to be able to more easily support different backend storage formats. The current in-memory implementation has a number of drawbacks, the most notable being that it is memory bound which means it can not scale up to large amounts of layers. The support for specific new storage formats is still only available a community module, but these core improvements make it possible to more easily swap in and out different backends.

Read more about the improvements for database-backed catalog.

Font Improvements

Adding new fonts for your maps should now be much easier, as you can just drop font files directly in to your GeoServer data directory and they will be picked up by GeoServer.  The admin interface also will list the fonts currently available, including the ones picked up directly from the Java Virtual Machine.

Upgrade to Spring Security 2.0.6

GeoServer has always had Acegi Security as its core, but that library got absorbed by the Spring community, and improved and upgraded to become Spring Security, the official security module of the Spring portfolio.  This brings a number of new security protocols to GeoServer, including OpenID and Windows NTLM.  It also should be easier to customize security setup, with even more powerful options.

Read more about the upgrade to Spring Security.

WCS limits

WFS and WMS both have had the ability to limit what a user can request.  Now, similar controls are in place for WCS calls as well.  Thanks to MassGIS for funding this improvement.

Web Processing Service (WPS) in extensions

The one thing to note from last beta release is that the WPS is maturing, It has been split up in to three modules, “core”, “web”, and “sextante”.  The latter has all the algorithms of the Sextante project, but is not yet mature, so it lives in a community module.  Web and core live in a new WPS extension, meaning that the core of WPS is now officially supported by GeoServer. You can find the WPS extension on the download page, and add it to GeoServer just like any other extension.

Read more about WPS in extensions.

And more

This release also included a number of other bug fixes and improvements.  Check out the entire changelog. Help us get to a stable 2.1.0 by downloading the beta and trying it out. Be sure to report any issues on the mailing list or in the bug tracker. We appreciate any and all feedback. We’re hoping to move soon to Release Candidates, after getting one last major improvement in — WMS 1.3.

Download GeoServer 2.1-beta2