We are proud to announce that today (June 8th 2010) Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.5 have been relased. The new versions come with a lot of changes "under the hood" which are not visible to the end user. Anyways - from a developers perspective - these changes were crucial to speedup further development and we are happy that we can purely focus on new features in next version 1.6 now.

The following points mark some of the most important new features in version 1.5:

Geopublisher:

• Geopublisher.exe
  For Windows users the ZIP download of Geopublisher now contains a Geopublisher.exe file. The .exe will offer to install Java if it can't be found on the computer.
• Direct import of zipped ESRI Shapefiles:
  Users can import zipped Shapefiles directly, without the need to unzip the Shapefile first.
• Import of GeoCommons metadata:
  When importing Shapefiles which have been downloaded from GeoCommons, Geopublisher will automatically parse title and attribute descriptions stored in the readme file.
• Map scale unit selectable:
  When composing maps, one can choose to show the map scale in feet & miles (US) or meters & kilometers (METRIC).
• Cleaner offline exports:
  Atlases exported for offline distribution (e.g. on a USB Stick or DVD) have a cleaner root directory. It now only contains atlas.exe (for Windows), start.sh (for MacOS and Linux), icon.gif and autorun.inf. All other files were moved to a subfolder atlasdata.
• Google EPSG:900913 is now supported
  
• Fonts: You may now add your own fonts to your atlas and use them for labelling.

The Geopublisher 1.4 software allows the creation and publication of multimedia atlases. It has been developed for users like scientists, consultants and institutions that want to communicate their research results to the general public. The primary aim is to deliver a software that reduces the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data to a minimum. Your final product will be a user-friendly atlas which can easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Besides the possibility of publishing maps with custom styles, labels or HTML as already introduced in former blog entries, Geopublisher 1.4 includes a new charting module.

The charting module enables you to create charts based on the attributes of your geo-datasets. These charts are interactively linked with your maps - for example: if you select a point in a scatter plot, the related geo-object will also be selected in your map and the attribute table. Of course this auto-selection works vice-versa, too.

Currently Geopublisher 1.4 supports two different chart types: bar-charts and scatter plots. More types will follow (Note: If you need any other chart type, feel free to contact Wikisquare and order an extension of Geopublisher.).

Geopublisher is a software to create and publish multimedia atlases and has been developed to overcome the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data. The targeted users are scientists and institutions that want to communicate their results to the general public. The exported atlases are user-friendly and can therefore easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Video

By watching the following video tutorial you will learn the steps you need to create and export a basic atlas using the free Geopublisher software. The video takes about 5 minutes and its purpose is to show the basic steps needed to create a first atlas with Geopublisher.

After four months of development, we today release version 1.3 of Geopublisher and AtlasStyler as the new stable release. A general overview of Geopublisher has already been given in an earlier post, so this post is just summarizing some of the new features that ship with this release.

New features in Geopublisher 1.3:

Bugfixes: Geopublisher 1.3 now comes with a 72h bugfix guarantee! If you find & report a bug, we promise to look for a solution within 72h!

Dans les derniers mois Geopublishing.org avait concentré ses efforts de développement sur l'application Geopublisher. En dehors des changements internes comme la commutation de la bibliothèque sous-jacente Geotools à la dernière version, le Geopublisher 1.3 suivant sera livré avec un module de statistiques, facile à utiliser, qui permet de publier d'une manière interactive des statistiques géographiques intégrées dans votre atlas numérique. Attendez une entrée de blog dédiée au sujet du feature lorsque 1.3 sera publié début Octobre.

Ainsi, quelques nouveaux features intéressants se glissent dans le dialogue du AtlasStyler SLD Editeur, en particulier dans le volet d'étiquetage. Les pages suivantes offrent un tutoriel, étape par étape, sur l'usage des nouvelles fonctions d'étiquetage comme les options nouveau placement, un effet de halo magnifique, de multiples attributs d'étiquetage et une meilleure généralisation avec l'aide d'une étiquette d' attribut de priorité .

What is Geopublisher?

Geopublisher is an atlas authoring system which allows easy publication of geo-data, documents, images, videos, and statistics in form of digital multimedia atlases. These atlases can be understood as minimal, pre-configured end-user GIS which offer selected functionality only where its meaningful.
Geopublisher provides tools for quality assurance and multilingual meta-data management. No in-depth knowledge of HTML, SLD or XML is required to create an atlas. Atlases can be directly published on CD, DVD, memory stick, external hard-drive or the Internet. The software is platform-independent and Open-Source.

Features as a glance:

Geopublishing.org software has some unique features which make it especially applicable in the fields of international research, participatory GIS, capacity building, and development cooperation. These features include:

The german IT magazine iX published an article by Matthias Lendholt about the visualisation of geodata with the OGC SymbologyEncoding standard in its 3/2009 edition, 108pp. The article is called "Topografische Punkte - Geodaten visualisieren mit Symbology Encoding" and is available at the price of 0,50€ at the heise kiosk.

The article describes the basic concepts of SymbologyEncoding and gives examples on how to write SE files manually. The only application mentioned for the creation of SLD/SE files is AtlasStyler. This encourages us to follow our belief: AtlasStyler is the best SLD/SE editor available! So if you are planning any projects where you deal with SLD/SE files - avoid prorietary software; use AtlasStyler and think about investing in a sustainable FOSSGIS project. 

Geopublisher and AtlasStyler have been presented at the FOSSGIS conference 2009.

FOSSGIS is the acronym for Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformation systems and is the leading conference on this topic in German-speaking countries. The FOSSGIS 2009 was organized by FOSSGIS e.V. together with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Wikisquare - the main service provider for Geopublisher in the  German-speaking countries  - presented the Geopublisher and AtlasStyler applications during the conference in Hannover. We got some interesting feedback from people using the AtlasStyler with different WMS servers.

Presentation slides and paper are available in German-only:

Krüger, Stefan A.; Judex, Michael and Thamm Hans-Peter (2009):

Erstellung von Multimedia-Atlanten mit dem Geopublisher. paper and slides of the presentation at the  FOSSGIS Conference 2009, Hannover, 17.-19. March 2009 (Link to all conference publications)

Sourcecode and bug trackers

For interested developers there is an English-speaking developers portal at wald.intevation.de. There you can access the source-code via SVN or report bugs and feature-request.

Ohloh

Ohloh is a webpage that features comprehensive metrics and analysis on thousands of open source projects. We are also listed at Ohloh:

Integration Server

The Hudson continuous integration server running at wikisquare.de prodives interested developers information about daily builds, test-coverage etc.

JavaDoc