The week of the 4th to 8th of June 2018 was the 11th annual Geonetwork Codesprint in Bolsena, coordinated by GeoCat . As in previous years, the Geonetwork developer team took over an ex-convent , just outside the small town of Bolsena, on the side of the lake of the same name, about 135km north of Rome. View Larger Map At Astun we've always had a firm belief in contributing back something to the open source software that we use, be that by sponsoring or providing enhancements, fixing bugs, or getting involved with conferences and hackathons. Due to the work we've been doing supporting and extending Geonetwork for our local Government INSPIRE metadata portal , for the Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure portal , and with DEFRA, this event seemed like a good opportunity to meet the core developers face to face, to learn something new, and perhaps assist with some development. I went along with no fixed expectations of what would be involved, or what I could contribute....

Last month, a handful of us from 'operations' attended the AWS Summit to keep up to date with what is going on in the Amazon Web Services world.  We've shared our reflections in this Blog and linked through to videos or slides of the sessions where we can. What is the AWS Summit? Amazon run a series of global events in major cities around the world getting to each one every couple of years; 2018 was London's turn. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud hosted computing platform, that Astun use for pretty much everything.  Our own cloud products and services such as iShare in the Cloud, Astun Data Services, Geonetwork / INSPIRE are all hosted there.  Even if what you use from us is exclusively deployed on your own premises, all of software development and most of our internal IT is done in the AWS environment.  It is critical to our business.  If you think that we are putting all our eggs in one basket, it is worth remembering that AWS is a $22 billion p.a. ...

QGIS 3.0 was released in February , and although it's labelled an 'early adopter' release, with the long term release (LTR) available in October, there's plenty in it to excite not just the early adopters, but the rest of us too. We've had a chance now to have a good look at it, kick the tyres a bit and see what everyone has to say about it, so here are our thoughts. There are a few big steps forward - for example 3D support and multiple map canvasses - and while many of the other changes are relatively minor on their own, put together they represent a major leap in usability and effectiveness. There's been work on consolidation, upgrades of core packages, efficiency and speed improvements, resulting in a slicker, easier to use and more tightly integrated application. You could say that the 'easier to use' bit is the best thing about QGIS 3.0 - and when you think about it, that's not a description that could be applied to most application upgrad...

A look back at FOSS4GUK 2018 Dan @ormsbydaniel1 The whole event was great and I'm really glad I managed to go.  One person I was chatting to during one of the coffee breaks told me they were just so struck by what a friendly event it was compared to conferences they had attended - and I couldn't agree more! For me though, that manifested itself in the open and transparent way that the speakers and delegates shared their knowledge and expertise, with a real willingness to help others.  It really brings it home that the thing that is as amazing as the technology aspect of FOSS, is the real community of people who are working on it and with it. In terms of talks and workshops (aside from all the fantastic Astun-led sessions 😊 which were great), other highlights for me were the sessions by Ross McDonald ( @mixedbredie ) and Tom Armitage ( @MapNav_Tom ), both of whom did great workshops and presentations around routing and cartographic visualisation; I used...

Introduction I recently had a need to debug an issue that a customer was having, but it seemed as though it was related to their data. I had two options, take a copy of their data and configuration files and set them up in my development environment, or find another way. "The Other Way" What I really needed to be able to do was to return specific responses to certain requests, but allow other requests to go through unhindered, thus spoofing the client into believing I had the customer's data set up. That's when I remembered that Telerik Fiddler can be used as a proxy and has something called an AutoResponder which sounds like it could do what I wanted. AutoResponder The way the AutoResponder works is by matching the URL with a known string, and then performing an action if it matches (see the AutoResponder documentation for more info). This could be as simple as returning the response from a file, setting a header, or performing a redirect. The benefit...

We've been exploring  Apache Zeppelin  as a way of providing a powerful and flexible analytical interface for  Geonetwork  and are pleased to announce beta integration with the Geonetwork login credentials. Astun use Geonetwork 3.2 as our metadata portal, supplying metadata to local authorities and government bodies, for both INSPIRE and Enterprise use. A question our customers often ask is which metadata records are the most popular? Our Enterprise customers also have more detailed requirements, such as discovering which metadata records have been started but not finished, how many have been published and so on. Geonetwork itself provides search and content statistics, but only to users with Administrative rights, and it's not always straightforward to extend these to include new search options. Enter Apache Zeppelin! From the blurb: Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables data-driven, interactive data analytics and collaborative documents with...

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...