Dear all,
We're happy to announce a new release of GeoNetwork opensource v2.4.3. This is a minor release, but with some good improvements that may be of interest to you!
Main things that have changed in this release:

- INSPIRE support, including a specific search form (disabled by default, enable in the config-gui.xml configuration file)
- CSW ISO profile updates and test suite
- GeoServer upgrade to v2.0.1 with the REST API and SLD Styler included
- Search speed improvements (more to come in v2.6.0, due in August 2010!)
- Added Portuguese language and improvements for others

The rest can be read in the changes log file.
Thanks to our dedicated developer team and supporting community! Enjoy!

http://geonetwork-opensource.org/software/geonetwork_opensource/releases/2.4.3

Or directly to the files:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/files/

If you followed a bit of geek news over the last weeks, you probably heard of two new mouses that saw daylight (yes, those that geeks use, not feed). One was released by Apple, the Magic Mouse, and one was released by an Italian company WarMouse in Orvieto, the OpenOfficeMouse or OOMouse. I have no hand-on experience with either of the two. In fact, the Magic Mouse may not even have reached the stores while the OOMouse is still in prototype (but ready to order).

The two products make me wonder where in the world we are going? I'm a (notorious!?) Apple fan, I love the simplicity where possible while I can use lots of stuff under the OSX hood for work. There you go, shoot me ;-) . I'm not a fan of their closed business model though. I love GeoFOSS and dedicate almost all my working hours to developing, promoting and selling services around it through GeoCat.

GeoNetwork opensource is at the core of the Dutch National Geo Registry (NGR), providing access to the authoritative GIS resources available in The Netherlands. The registry therefor by default also provides the OGC CSW 2.0.2 catalogue interface. This interface allows developers to build custom client applications that access and use these resources in their applications. One such client application has now been build by ESRI Netherlands for the ArcMap and ArcGIS Explorer products. The required download and installation instructions can be found here (in Dutch) and below in English.

I thought I provide an English translation for the installation instructions so that others can also benefit from this work.

We had a great FOSS4G conference in Sydney that's about to go out with a last blast of energy during the code sprint. During the week I haven't been able to closely follow what was blogged, twittered or written in the press but my gut feeling was that press coverage was minimal. Al I did run into were press releases from companies, some of them not even close to supporting open source software but still affiliating themselves to the conference. What I did find were small blurbs that collected some twitter noise and quotes that all relate to the proprietary world. My observation is that this is shameless behavior of the press, but maybe I could better describe it in terms of arrogance and ignorance. Should we open source folks start treating the press by inviting you with perks like free entry tickets, hotels and air fares covered before you'll come and see first hand what great and innovative stuff comes out of open source? Let me tell you: WE WILL NOT, NEVER! Stick to your comfortably facilitated proprietary conferences and cover those with full power, ignore what's happening on the open source side of the geospatial spectrum.

I would like to announce the release of GeoNetwork opensource 2.4.2.
This is a minor release for the project and includes a number of critical fixes to the 2.4 version. The changes are:

158: CSW harvesting. Send preferred outputSchema from Capabilties in requests
155: CSW harverting only supports 2.0.2 servers
156:Proxy server is not used for all CSW harvesting operations (also fixed OGCWXS harvester)
Fix for ticket 125: Increase perfomance of showing metadata executing increase popularity asynchronously
Fixed keyword identifier with no #. See #147.
Close existing Lucene searcher. Fixed type issue.
Case insensitive UUID handling
Fixed bad attribute name. Thanks Richard Walker.
Fixed javascript error with IE8 (#145). Thanks to Christopher and Andrew.
Fixed UUID generation when inserting metadata with option : "Generate UUID ..." (#144).
updated change log
Inline documentation

The software can be downloaded here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/

GeoNetwork opensource ( http://geonetwork-opensource.org ) is a standards based geospatial catalog application that helps people and organizations to organize and publish their geospatial data through the web. It is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world.

The largest trade fair Intergeo started today in Karlsruhe, Germany. GIM mentions the presence of OSGeo and it's highly dynamic companies in the Open Source Park explicitly. Read more: International flavour of Intergeo. I'm leaving for Karlsruhe this afternoon, getting excited already.

Today we made a bug fix release that fixes some issues found in the 2.4 release of 21 July 2009. You can find the new release at https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/.

The changes are:

- Corrected Dutch translation
- Fixed force rebuild index on startup.
- Fixed hardcoded english strings in javascript. Use the translate(tagName) function and the js attribute in loc file now.
- Added login support for CSW operations from CSW test page to easily test transactions.
- Translation fix. Thanks Jean Pommier.
- Added doc to disabled caching and use Saxon.
- #141 Fixed XSL compilation error for RSS services (due to additional bracket). Thanks to Roger and Jean.
- Fixed typo in codelists (#140).
- Fixed category search menu. See #139
- Fixed keyword autocompletion. Thanks Richard Walker. #134

Dutch version below.

This is good news for the Dutch community: The standard work on "producing open source software" is now translated in Dutch and available online in the form of PDF files at Open source-software produceren. The translation was financially supported by SURF en Kennisnet. The original book can be found here.

Goed nieuws voor de Nederlandse open source community: het standaard werk "Producing Open Source Software" is nu in Nederlandse vertaling te lezen via Open source-software produceren (PDF formaat). SURF en Kennisnet hebben de vertaling financieel mogelijk gemaakt. Het origineel is in print te koop of hier online te lezen.

We're proud to announce the release of GeoNetwork opensource 2.4.0. This is a major release for the project.

GeoNetwork opensource (http://geonetwork-opensource.org) is a standards based geospatial catalog application that helps people and organizations to organize and publish their geospatial data through the web. It is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world.

Important improvements have been made to ease of use, advanced metadata editing, performance and interoperability making it one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced geospatial metadata catalog available on the market today.

The software provides an easy to use web interface to search geospatial data across multiple catalogs, combine distributed map services in the embedded map viewer, send annotated interactive maps to friends by email, publish geospatial data using the online metadata editing tools and optionally the embedded GeoServer map server. Administrators have the option to manage user and group accounts, configure the server through web based and desktop utilities and schedule metadata harvesting from other catalogs.

Here's an interesting comparison on the different spatially enabled databases currently on the market. I unfortunately missed details on what e.g. ArcGIS server adds to Oracle Spatial. But maybe that would also require discussing what GeoServer or uDig add to PostGIS. Anyway, a nice product overview to start off with.

"Geo-databases are the ‘spider in the web’ in these developments. (Open source) geo-databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL open up perspectives in such developments, also in less developed countries. Today the functionalities for information management are so comprehensive that their representation within a Product Survey template such as that used over recent years in GIM International is complex. For example, subjects like ‘spatial indexing’, ‘optimising approaches’, ‘spatial joining algorithms’ and ‘topology management’ may relate to very sophisticated approaches not easily condensed and described in a survey matrix box. In my first Product Survey on RDBMS in 2002 I observed that spatial-data management was traditionally supported within GIS environments. Integration with other datasets has to be organised within such environments with the aid of complementary architectures. As more and more support for spatial-data management becomes available in RDBMS, direct integration with other datasets may be organised in an increasingly flexible way. This allows for fast data access, easy product development, avoidance of duplication of spatial data etc. Five years on, a set of mature geo-databases is available on the market, and a product like PostgreSQL has, of course, a much longer history. Thanks to OGC, developments have been rapid.

This Product Survey is based on information provided by geo-database suppliers; it is not a benchmark and it is not related to any assessment. A new series of features on geo-databases in GIM International would be a better approach to further introducing the functionality, applications, references and integration in geo-spatial data infrastructures. All Geo-database suppliers are invited to contribute their ideas."