\title{Brief News from the OSGeo Community}
\author{Compiled by Jason Fournier}
\maketitle

\section{FOSS4G 2008 Awarded to Cape Town, South Africa}

The RFP solicitation closed July 20th, 2007.  Four organizations submitted proposals to host next year's event:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Bangkok, Thailand
  \item Cape Town, South Africa
  \item Florian\'{o}polis, Santa Catarina, Brazil
  \item Seville, Spain
\end{itemize}

The OSGeo Conference Committee is pleased to announce that the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference will be held in Cape Town, South Africa, with the tentative dates of September 29th to October 3th 2008. The OSGeo Conference Committee would like to thank all of those who submitted to host the 2008 conference, we were all very impressed with the number and quality of proposals.\\

\noindent With the 2007 conference approaching\footnote{FOSS4G 2007 web site: \url{http://www.foss4g2007.org}} and the excitement building in the FOSS4G community, the 2008 conference will be an important date on the calendar not to miss. The 2008 organizing committee has already begun preparations, and will be following up with a larger announcement. The detailed proposal is available online.\footnote{South Africa proposal to host FOSS4G: \url{http://www.osgeo.org/files/webfiles/conference/proposals/South_Africa_proposal_to_host_FOSS4G_2008.pdf}}\\

\noindent Again, thank you for all of the excellent submissions.
\begin{flushright}
	\textit{OSGeo Conference Committee}
\end{flushright}

\section{Google Summer of Code Projects}

There are 15 OSGeo-sponsored projects underway in the Google Summer of Code program:

\begin{itemize}
  \item GRASS Modules for line generalization and smoothing
  \item GDAL Raster Driver for PNG/JPG Tile Structure + gdal2tiles utility
  \item Materialized Views with Geometric Support
  \item Plugins for multidimensional raster data sources.
  \item Caching data in uDig
  \item JTileCache
  \item Shortest path in free (vector) space avoiding obstacles module in GRASS
  \item GDAL: KML read support for the existing driver
  \item New Transformation Algorithms for GeoTools and uDig
  \item Coverage model and operations for PostGIS
  \item GeoServer Style Editor
  \item Implementation of An Interactive GeoRSS tool in uDig
  \item A Synthetic Aperture RADAR Processor using GDAL
  \item 3D Rendering Pipeline for GeoTools
  \item OGC WMS GDAL driver
\end{itemize}

\noindent For more information on each project, including the participant and mentor, please visit the Google SoC OSGeo page.\footnote{Google SoC OSGeo page: \url{http://code.google.com/soc/2007/osgeo/about.html}}

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\section{Project News}
\subsection{MapGuide}
MapGuide Open Source announces that the Fusion Technical Preview is available for download.  The announcement was made by Paul Spencer of DM Solutions Group Inc.:

\begin{quotation}
\noindent \textit{"I am very happy to announce that DM Solutions Group will be contributing our \textit{Fusion} technology to the MapGuide Open Source project. \textit{Fusion} is the project name for a Software Developers Kit that provides tools and templates to speed development of web mapping applications.}

\noindent \textit{Having worked with MapGuide Open Source since its first release, we saw an opportunity to better meet our clients application needs by creating a new toolkit based on our experience with MapServer - and we made quite a few improvements on the way!}"
\end{quotation}

\noindent The MapGuide Open Source developers and project steering committee are pleased to announce the release of MapGuide Open Source 1.2.0.  This release contains many performance improvements, bug fixes and enhancements.\footnote{MapGuide release notes: \url{http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/Release/1.2/Notes} and \url{http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/milestone/1.2}}

\noindent For more information please visit the MapGuide OSGeo home page.\footnote{MapGuide home page: \url{http://mapguide.osgeo.org/}}

\subsection{MapServer}
MapServer 5.0 is slated to be released just in time for FOSS4G 2007 on Wed Sept. 12, 2007.  With this release comes a number of feature enhancement proposals including:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Enhanced image output quality via the AGG library
  \item Dynamic Charting Capability
  \item Labelling prioritization
  \item and many more!
\end{itemize}

\noindent For more details please visit the MapServer Release Plan web page.\footnote{MapServer Release Plan page: \url{http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/release_plans/mapserver_5_0/release_plan/}}

\subsection{QGIS}

It is our great pleasure to announce the immediate availability of Quantum GIS (QGIS) Version 0.8.1. The release includes numerous bug fixes and stability improvements to the 0.8 code base. QGIS is available in source form, and will be available as binary executables for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.

\noindent The next release, Version 0.9, is well underway and is slated to be released soon.  For more information see the QGIS web site.\footnote{QGIS web site announcement: \url{http://qgis.org/content/view/143/65/}}

\subsection{MapBender}
Mapbender 2.4.2 was released on August 2, 2007.  A number of features have been added including:

\begin{itemize}
  \item Bulgarian translation of the introduction to Mapbender
  \item Improved module Add WMS from filtered list: loading a configured WMS from a GUI is now possible
  \item JavaScript compression; Mapbender will load faster
  \item First draft of an API documentation for JavaScript classes
  \item and many more!
\end{itemize}

\noindent For a complete listing of changes and bug fixes please visit the MapBender changelog page.\footnote{MapBender changelog page: \url{http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/Template:Changelog_2.4.2_rc1}}

\subsection{GDAL/OGR}

\noindent The GDAL/OGR team is pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.2. This is intended to be a bug fix release extending the GDAL/OGR 1.4 stable branch and does not include the many new features in the development trunk (which will appear as GDAL/OGR 1.5.0).  For more information please visit the GDAL/OGR news item.\footnote{GDAL/OGR release announcement: \url{http://www.osgeo.org/node/367}}

\subsection{GRASS}

\noindent GRASS 6.2.2 is a new stable release which fixes several bugs discovered in the 6.2.1 source code. This release is solely for stability purposes and adds no new features. The default Graphical User Interface has been further stabilised, and the LIDAR processing tools and Linear Reference System support significantly improved. GRASS 6.2.2 also includes a number of new message translations, and updates for the help pages.  For more information please visit the GRASS GIS news item.\footnote{GRASS GIS release announcements: \url{http://www.osgeo.org/node/369}}

\subsection{GeoTools}
GeoTools released version 2.3.3 on August 2 2007.  This is a bugfix only release. Most notable changes are Oracle datastore improvements (bug fixes and speed ups), as well as improvement in coverage serving and rendering speed.  For a full change log, see the online release notes.\footnote{GeoTools release notes: \url{http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10270&styleName=Html&version=13532}}

\subsection{OpenLayers}

\noindent OpenLayers released version 2.4. OpenLayers has addressed over 100 outstanding tickets with the 2.4 release.  Release notes are available online.\footnote{OpenLayers release notes: \url{http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.4/Notes}}

