FOSS4G 2014 » Sessions

Oregon Metro’s combination of FOSS4G with enterprise in web app development

darthNachos — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 19:54:42 +0000

At Oregon Metro, we’ve developed a hybrid approach to web app development combining a variety of open source platforms including: GDAL and Tilemill with proprietary enterprise technologies such as .NET, Oracle and ESRI. This talk will cover the roles and pros and cons of the various platforms, the specific challenges faced, and some unique solutions that we’ve implemented.

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MapMint: The 100% service-oriented GIS platform

gerald.fenoy — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 14:26:08 +0000

MapMint is an comprehensive task manager for publishing webmapping applications. It is a robust open source geospatial platform allowing the user to organize, edit, process and publish spatial data to the Internet. MapMint includes a complete administration tool for MapServer and a simple user interfaces to create mapfiles visually. Its use does not require any coding and most of the mapfile parameters are supported, so the user can fully focus on the map features and not on its source code. The latter is generated using various WPS requests which are using the user’s data and settings as input.

MapMint is based on the extensive use of OGC standards and automates WMS, WFS, WMT-S and WPS. Most of the MapMint core functions are run through WPS requests which are calling general or geospatial web services (vector and raster operations, mapfiles creation, spatial analysis and queries and much more). MapMint server-side is built on top of ZOO-Project, MapServer and GDAL and its numerous WPS services are written in Python and JavaScript. MapMint client-side is based on OpenLayers and Jquery and provides user-friendly to create, publish and view maps.

MapMint architecture and main features will be introduced in this presentation, and its modules (dashboard, data, maps and apps) will be described with an emphasis on the OGC standards and OSGeo software they are using. Some short case studies and examples will finally illustrate some of the the key functionalities.

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From Nottingham to PDX: QGIS 2014 roundup

Pirmin Kalberer — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Following the long awaited QGIS 2 release, announced at FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, the project decided to switch to a regular release cycle with three versions per year. QGIS 2.2 was the first release in this cycle and already packed with many new features like 1:n relations, gradient fills, native DXF export and NTv2 datum transformations to name a few. QGIS 2.4, released in June, has one major extension in its core: multithreaded rendering. Originally developed as a Google Summer of Code project, it makes a big difference in the responsiveness of QGIS desktop.

This talk shows a selection of the latest features and gives an outlook what’s in the works for QGIS 2.6. Some interesting plugins and other news from the community will keep you up to date with the high pace of this OSGeo project.

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State of QGIS Server

Pirmin Kalberer — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

QGIS server continues to grow with an active community and expanding user base. Besides new styling features shared with QGIS desktop, new services have been added continuously. OGC WFS (Web Feature Service) and WFS-T were the first additions to WMS, recently followed by an OGC WCS (Web Coverage Service) implementation. The map service itself also got several additions besides the GetPrint request for delivering PDF outputs made with QGIS print composer. Performance and scalabilty has been steadily improved and brought to the same level as other established map servers. PDF outputs got recently support for dynamic texts and images (e.g. QR codes) and server-side GeoJSON rendering allowing redlining implementations.

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Wikimaps Atlas : Wikipedia, D3js, SVG maps for webdevs.

hugo.lpz — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 23:29:42 +0000

#Problem:
Making encyclopedic maps for Wikipedia is currently a highly manual process resulting in a poor supply of maps that is unable to meet the demand of accurate and updated maps for various projects and languages.
#Solution:
Automate the creation of SVG base maps in a well researched cartographic style using the latest and most accurate open geographic data.

#How: automatizing the cartographer’s workflow for the basemaps creation
The Wikimaps Atlas (2014) project —currently under development— is a centralized, automatized, systematic way to produce the most needed and most difficult to create base layers. The central concept is to greatly simplify the mapmaking workflow by separating (1.) the map-data script-processing to generate accurate and elegant background, from (2.) the process of map design : selecting relevant encyclopedic items and events to display and explain upon a geographic area. The job of the project members is to provide a system which will crop, slice, simplify, filter, stylize these huge GIS files in order to provide a final SVG background of about 100~500KB each which will be fine for the end users, his/her web browser, and the WMF’s servers.
#Encyclopedic maps with elegance & style
Building upon well established best practices (colorschemes) and handmade workflows refined for years by the Wikipedia Map Workshops, following the Wikipedia:Kartenwerkstatt/Positionskarten project, WikiAtlas will provide volunteer wikipedia cartographers and graphists a complete and consistent set of high quality base maps, so these volunteer graphists may focus on designing semantics layers representing and explaining a given encyclopedic topic. Following clean and standard graphic guidelines, we want these maps to be elegant, consistent, readable, accessible to the reader, altogether building a graphical identity and feel for Wikipedia and for maps on Wikipedia. We want these maps to be standalone maps, so they stay easy to edit, print, embed, and spread inside and outside Wikipedia, by editors, journalists, web-developers. We also want these maps to be well coded SVG documents, with some hidden meta-data serving as anchors, so data and interactions may be bidden to them.
#System: sources and main requirements
The system reuse existing and notable graphic guidelines (best practices), various available online open GIS data and layers from providers like Natural Earth, OpenStreetMap, NASA, GADM.org etc (public domain, CC-by-sa-3.0), as well as web oriented data visualization technologies (D3js, topojson). The system keeps relevant metadata allowing to categorize maps and conserve traces of geolocalisation, so when on commons, it in effect create the first systematic, complete, and consistent atlas of free and open stand alone maps. The Wikimaps Atlas project is to generates all the set of target maps for countries, provinces, subunits, and custom areas under request. This set being about 5.000 basemaps easy to update, a major improvement for wikipedia map resources, in terms of reliability, scope, and content management.

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An Efficient Python-based Application for Forest Classification and Vitality Mapping

gideon.tetteh — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 19:07:48 +0000

An analysis and understanding of forest dynamism over time gives one insightful information on when and how to react to these changing forest trends. For many years now, stakeholders in forestry have used remote sensing for various applications such as the management and assessment of the health of forests, as well as the analysis of forest changes over time. This research delved into the development of an application, chiefly based on Python and its default and external libraries, for forest classification, change detection and time-series analysis, in order to be able to remotely assess the vitality and/or defoliation of forests over time. The developed tool follows a modularized approach such that it contains individual tools for Co-registration, Radiometric Normalization, Classification, and Time-Series Analysis. The tool was developed making use of Python Open Source libraries namely Tkinter, GDAL/OGR, NumPy, SciPy and Scikit-Learn. Tkinter was used in creating the graphical user interface (GUI) of the entire application, GDAL/OGR was used for reading and writing of raster and vector data, NumPy and SciPy were used in the numerical and scientific analysis of the arrays generated from the images, whiles Scikit-Learn, with its Classification and Regression Tree routine, was used for image classification.

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The unrelenting progress of design in open source

saleiva — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:50:07 +0000

Open source geospatial is in an Enlightenment era regarding design; many teams are breaking away from tradition and embracing simple, clean, and usable interfaces. For a long time though, open source geospatial software, and geospatial software in general, seemed to pay little attention to the knowledge of the design community. Here, I will discuss why design has taken a backseat for such a long history and what is suddenly changing that brings it to the forefront. I will also talk some about the design decisions that have gone into the CartoDB user interface and many of the mapping options we help our users find. This talk will focus both on the history of design in open source geospatial software and where it is heading in the future. We will also talk about how design itself is inherently open and how we are working to improve open source software design through our own contributions and through this discussion of our process.

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Mapping in GeoServer with SLD and CSS

andrea.aime — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:49:26 +0000

Various software can style maps and generate a proper SLD document for OGC compliant WMS like GeoServer to use. However, in most occasions, the styling allowed by the graphical tools is pretty limited and not good enough to achieve good looking, readable and efficient cartographic output. For those that like to write their own styles CSS also represents a nice alternatives thanks to its compact-ness and expressiveness.
Several topics will be covered, providing examples in both SLD and CSS for each, including: mastering multi-scale styling, using GeoServer extensions to build common hatch patterns, line styling beyond the basics, such as cased lines, controlling symbols along a line and the way they repeat, leveraging TTF symbol fonts and SVGs to generate good looking point thematic maps, using the full power of GeoServer label lay-outing tools to build pleasant, informative maps on both point, polygon and line layers, including adding road plates around labels, leverage the labelling subsystem conflict resolution engine to avoid overlaps in stand alone point symbology, blending charts into a map, dynamically transform data during rendering to get more explicative maps without the need to pre-process a large amount of views. The presentation aims to provide the attendees with enough information to master SLD/CSS documents and most of GeoServer extensions to generate fast, appealing, informative and readable maps.

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“Sliding” datasets together for more automated map tracing

Paul Mach — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:48:25 +0000

Importing new/updated geometry into large dataset like Open Street Map is tricky business. Features represented in both need to be detected and merged. Often times editors are asked to completely “retrace” over updated maps as automated methods are unreliable.

While a 100% accurate merge is impossible, it is possible to auto create a best guess and let the user refine from there, eliminating as many manual, tedious steps as possible.

Slide is a tool designed to solve this problem and works by iteratively refining roads, trails and other complex geometries to match another dataset, where the features are correctly mapped. In a single click one geometry is “slided” to the other, eliminating hundreds of tedious clicks.

The form of the new dataset is flexible. It could be an updated representation of roads such as the new TIGER database, a scanned historical paper map, or a large collection of GPS data points like the 250+ billion made available by Strava, a fitness tracking website.

Overall, Slide is designed to leverage what we already know, collected in various datasets, to speed map tracing. Map editors should be focusing on higher level challenges and not just retracing over another dataset.

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Data.gov/Geoplatform.gov CSW implementation through pycsw and CKAN integration

gcpp.kalxas — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:47:42 +0000

This presentation will discuss the implementation of the CSW endpoint using pycsw within the Data.gov infrastructure (architecture/enhancements/testing/deployment) and CKAN, which powers Data.gov.

CSW (Catalogue Service for the Web) is an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specification that defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other potential resources.

Data.gov provides access to its catalog via the CSW standard for both first-order and all metadata for harvested data, services and applications. Data may be referenced from federal, state, local, tribal, academic, commercial, or non-profit organizations. The first-order CSW endpoint provides collection level filtering of all metadata records. The all metadata CSW endpoint provides all levels of metadata at varying levels of granularity.

Any client supporting CSW (desktop, GIS, web application, client library, etc.) can integrate the Data.gov CSW endpoints.

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