Among the items in the category of “what I care about” are renewable energy and open-source geospatial tools. So I was happy to rediscover the various online tools by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Many of the tools have been available for some time but the recent announcement of the RE Atlas application brought me back to them.
OpenLayers
OpenGeo Suite – A Milestone
On May 28th OpenGeo announced the release of the OpenGeo Suite. They also describe their open pricing structure for support of the suite.
This announcement represents a milestone for open-source geospatial software. If you are of a technical nature and are expecting a detailed discussion of the technical advantages of the OpenGeo Suite, you should probably stop reading now. The OpenGeo Suite is a milestone because it establishes a fair pricing model that addresses what, in my opinion, has been the primary barrier to the adoption of open-source GIS in many enterprises: risk.
Writing GeoJSON from SharpMap, Part 1
In between proposals, white papers and the like, I’ve been able to do a little coding to keep myself sane. Recently, I have been playing with SharpMap, GeoJSON and OpenLayers. But not necessarily in that order. Originally, I was looking over the GeoJSON spec to get more of a feel for it and decided that it would be fun (I know) to write an exporter for SharpMap. There is already a converter to write SharpMap geometries as WKT so I went ahead and built another one to convert to GeoJSON. In order to test it, I decided to use OpenLayers.