Portable GIS, the tool that Astun use for delivering training courses, has now been accepted as an official OSGeo Community Project. What’s Portable GIS? Portable GIS is a suite of open source GIS tools that can be run from a USB stick, directly in windows, without the need for installation or booting to a different operating system. It includes a full PostgreSQL database server, QGIS, Mapserver, Geoserver, Python, and a whole series of other packages, all accessible from a lightweight control panel. Basically everything you need to run an open source GIS stack, but portable and ready-configured! It was developed originally as a personal project in 2008, and has matured into a popular tool for situations such as training and disaster recovery. @archaeogeek #portablegis the only way to get #qgis running on this machine thanks from drc > attempt at postcard pic.twitter.com/MXuquLEf9a — Ant Scott (@antscott) May 11, 2014 It’s also very useful as a tool for demon...

Astun are pleased to announce that we’ve released our implementation of the Gemini 2.2 metadata profile as an official plugin for Geonetwork 3.0.x and later versions, and that it’s now available at the official Geonetwork metadata profile site metadata101.org . So what does this mean? It means that you can use Gemini 2.2 as a metadata standard within Geonetwork for creating records that can be published to data.gov.uk or for your own use. Installation is easy, just follow the instructions at the repository, making sure you pick the branch that matches your Geonetwork installation. By creating a separate plugin for Gemini 2.2, it can be used alongside other profiles such as Medin, and Gemini 2.3 when it’s released. You can ensure your metadata is stored and validated against the correct profile, and that you see the correct dropdown lists and hints when you’re creating or editing records. We’ve made sure that the validation rules align with those used on data.gov.uk, so no m...