The past couple of months have been an exciting time for open source at Azavea. In case you missed it, we are proud to announce Azavea has joined the Eclipse Foundation and its new working group, LocationTech. We are glad to be joined by the likes of Boundless (formerly OpenGeo), Google, and others, and hope we can help make LocationTech a thriving hub and community for open source geospatial software.
LocationTech is taking its show on the road. We are going to welcome the LocationTech Kick-off Tour to Philadelphia on November 13th! To get things going, members of the LocationTech community will be visiting 6 Northeastern cities in Canada and the U.S. for day-long events, talks, and happy hours all about open source geo projects. In Philly, we’ll be hosting an afternoon “mini-conference” with longer talks and an evening social event with lightning talks with speakers from the City of Philadelphia, Rackspace, OpenPlans, CCRI, our own staff at Azavea and others. We would love to see you there, so please register now! If you can’t make it to Philly, do consider attending the Tour stops in Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, New York, or Washington.
Also, you can read elsewhere in this newsletter about our recent release of GeoTrellis Transit, an open source project and hosted API for the Philadelphia region that leverage our GeoTrellis library to make the generation of “travelsheds” quick and easy for lightweight web applications.
In addition to GeoTrellis Transit, near the end of September the GeoTrellis team released version 0.8.2. Alongside additional raster operations and other improvements, GeoTrellis 0.8.2 marks our first release under the Apache 2 license. We decided to switch from GPL to Apache based on feedback from potential users for whom the GPL was a roadblock, and we hope this less restrictive license will allow more people to take advantage of GeoTrellis’ high-performance geoprocessing for the web.
Finally, to bring it all full circle, we have submitted a project proposal to LocationTech for GeoTrellis, which is now open for public comments, so please make sure to let us know what you think.