libLAS has moved forward and has been released as 1.0.0b1 in the hopes of attracting more testers. For those who haven’t been following, “libLAS is a BSD library for reading and writing ASPRS LAS version 1.0 and 1.1 data. LAS-formatted data is heavily used in LiDAR processing operations, and the LAS format is a sequential binary format used to store data from sensors and as intermediate processing storage by some applications.” If you deal with LiDAR on a regular basis, you might want to take a look at libLAS due to its integration with GDAL (see Hobu’s comment below). While I haven’t taken this release out for a spin yet (not dealing with LiDAR in the new job), I’m sure it goes without saying that it is a beta product so be prepared for “issues”. Yet if the goal is to get better LiDAR tools, a little pain now could result in good things for all.
In more OSGeo news, I saw that GeoNetwork graduated incubation last week. GeoNetwork has really flown under the radar and I’m pretty sure it will start to get more notice as time goes on and the need for geospatial/metadata catalogs increases.
Heck, why not one more OSGeo note? The great Frank Warmerdam posted that OSGeo4W is looking for testers and contributors. OSGeo4W can somewhat be thought of as superseding MS4W and FWTools, but it isn’t that simple. Basically it is an installer for OSGeo windows packages that allows users to easily install different OSGeo projects. Windows users wanting to get into the open source GIS world should sit up and take note.
Lastly I find it very interesting that ESRI is apparently looking for a SEO specialist (HT APB). I find that using the Google to search the ESRI forums, knowlege base articles and help is virtually impossible. I can only hope that they plan to get their support and help indexed by the world’s search engines. Of course we’ve been waiting for improved EDN search for years so I won’t be holding my breath.
2 responses so far ↓
1
Howard Butler
// Jun 23, 2008 at 11:36 am
Thanks for the plug. I’m hoping folks that play around or work with LiDAR data can spend a little time with libLAS and let us know what we’re doing right and what’s not so right. With regard to the GDAL integration of libLAS, there currently isn’t a driver for GDAL/OGR that sucks in LiDAR data via libLAS (funders wanted
), but you can link libLAS against GDAL/OGR for simple OGR datasource creation with las2ogr. It is hoped there will be tighter integration of GDAL and libLAS (and GRASS and libLAS) once more funding, developers, or both materialize to provide it momentum.
2
Jason Birch
// Jun 23, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Hmm.
Maybe SpatialSEO? ESRI and others will need to make sure that the content their servers produce are presented optimally for both users and search engines. Scary thought, but it’s already seeing some “black hat” activity. From what I’ve read, Google is fighting fires with its geo business listings; hope there are more comprehensive strategies in place for general “GeoWeb”.
Much of the trust rank, etc, can be inferred from the linking pages or hosting domain, but KML typically isn’t nearly as well interlinked or text-rich as HTML documents. In order to be truly effective at battling index spam, I think that spatial relationships and patterns will need to be taken into the mix.
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