[OSGeo-Discuss] designing databases, organizing data formats to work with open source and proprietary GIS
Hi all, in the near future I will have the opportunity to help design databases, decide on data formats (files data) for an international organization that wishes to be able to use both proprietary and open source based systems, mostly in web mapping solution but also possibly on the desktop. The task will be to design and organize the data stores in a way that both types of systems - open source (e.g. MapServer, OpenLayers) and proprietary systems (ESRI Arc Server) can use them well, and along the way to try to avoid too much data duplication (having to store data in multiple formats just to make them accessible) . This sounds to like a exiting useful, fun task, but given the limitations of both systems (regarding input data that might not work out of the box- namely file Geodatabases in open source solutions, and PostGIS data in ESRI products) might be not totally trivial ;) I was wondering if anybody has done work on this, has implemented systems facing the same issues or knows of projects or reports that have been dealing with similar issues. Also I anybody has comments about what data storage solution you would recommend and comments about the pro and cons of certain storage designs please send it to the list. Looking forward to hear what other have come up with. Thanks a lot Cheers Karsten Karsten Vennemann Principal Terra GIS LTD USA www.terragis.net ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] April 20th is CUGOS 2011 Spring Fling at UW in Seattle
GIS Folks, the event below is still in flux regarding final presentations and definite times subjects but I wanted to get this message out for all to know (copied from http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/CUGOS_2011_Spring_Fling): On April 20th, 2011, CUGOS ( http://www.cugos.org/ www.cugos.org, http://cugos.posterous.com/ [1]) will be holding a special all-day spring fling event at University of Washington Seattle Campus in place of our regular monthly meeting. We will provide FREE food and drinks, thanks to following sponsors: TerraGIS( http://terragis.net/ [2]), Spatialdev( http://spatialdev.com/ [3]), Zonar System( http://zonarsystem.com/ [4]) UW Geospatial Club. The basic idea of this event is to come in the morning to learn something new (tools and real workflows)... stick around and apply it in the afternoon on some semi-structured hack sessions... and then learn some high level stuff in the evening. As such, the day will be broken up as follows: * 9-12: morning session -- speed workshops * 12-1: lunch * 1-4: afternoon session -- open hacking * 4-6: dinner * 6-8: evening session -- regular meeting All skill and interest levels are welcome! -- please join us for as much of the day as you can. For more details check http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/CUGOS_2011_Spring_Fling http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/CUGOS_2011_Spring_Fling and also check back again for updates before you come ;) Cheers Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] OSGEO booth is up at AAG in Seattle
Hi GIS Folks, the OSGEO booth is set-up at AAG 2011 http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting in Seattle. Please please stop by and chat with us if you are in the areas or attending AGG. We have volunteer staffing at the booth starting tonight at the exhibit hall opening and until Friday with support mainly from the CA and Cascadia chapter of OSGEO . See you there during the rest of the week. Cheer Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Creating Value from Raster Data
This was just announced and will add to the ratser classification options in the future: RFP: Agriculture Inventory Land Use Mapping Plugin for QGIS: http://blog.qgis.org/node/147 Also Note that the solution INPE in Brazil is working on is a big effort and can be found under the TerraLib GIS library webpage http://www.terralib.org/ Also see http://www.terralib.org/php/about.php?body=ListofProjects InterIMAGE (by LAC/INPE ) http://www.lvc.ele.puc-rio.br/projects/interimage/ and ZEE - Brazilian Ecological and Economic Zoning Program (by FUNCATE based on TerraLib ) The Ministry of Environment created an Internet Portal to disseminate information related with Brazilian Amazon region. FUNCATE developed a Geographic Database, with themes as Satellite Images, Vegetation, Geology, Geomorphology, Land Use, Protected Areas, Indian Reservations, Remarkable Biodiversity Areas, and Municipalities, with associated social and economic data. Spatial queries could be applied using an Active Server Page application, driven by Terralib. http://geo.funcate.org.br/prefeituras Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Yet another charter member nominee
Hi there, me too I appreciate having being nominated as an OSGeo Charter Member ;). Ok let's include first something about my background: I've been a long time GIS user with a background in Geography and Soil Science. I am a german national currently living in Seattle USA and am operating my small GIS consulting shop. I came to the open Source Geospatial world and later OSGeo mostly because I held a position at a non-profit organization in Seattle that was called CommEn Space. At the time Tim Schaub was a colleague and spurred my interest in Mapserver and all other things related to OS GIS ...Since then I have been excited about this approach (Open Source) and made a choice for myself that this a great approach on how to do things including running a business. It makes it so much easier to indentify myself with my work and get satisfaction instead of attaching myself to particular brands and proprietary approaches. Read more of my views here http://www.terragis.net/about-terra/motivation/ if you are inclined to do so ;) I am participating in the CUGOS OSGeo chapter and involved with user training. I have been giving frequent talks about OS at the local conferences (WAURISA 2007 -20100 and also FOSS4G this year. Because my background is more of an GIS user rather than of a developer (even though I write some scripts) my perspective is that of representing the user of OS Geospatial . I am planning to start ( actually I am in then middle of) starting a new website that allows users to share their (first or second) experiences of all kinds of OS geospatial software. I would like to enhance the documentation resources especially for users in the OS GIS world and see one of the biggest challenges to provide adequate training, support and recourses such as manuals tutorials. This stems from my personal background but also the fact that software without many users will not spread around that much. I have organized several workshops for the CUGOS chapter over the last two years and I am also active teaching professional classes for web GIS and desktop GIS. Most recently my (one person) company became a collaborator of the gvSIG association http://www.gvsig.com/news/the-international-network-of-the-gvsig-association -has-been-extended-usa-japan-and-germany. I would be excited and honored to get more involved with OSGeo through Charter Membership. Cheers Karsten Vennemann Terra GIS LTD Seattle, WA 98112 USA www.terragis.net ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Commercial support (Sebastian E. Ovide)
Sure check out for example http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile Cheers Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Install gvSIG 1.10 on Mac?
Can someone point me in the right direction here please? I'd like to install gvSIG 1.10 under Mac OSX 10.6. From doco at OSGeo project listing and at gvSIG site, the project appears to support Macs. At the downloads page [1], I only see options for Windows and Linux. I'm assuming that the Linux install will also work for Macs. Is this the case? Bruce, try the Oxford Archeology distribution of gvSIG 1.10 it is called gvSIG OA Digital Edition 2010, 1.0. and it worked on my friends Mac without any problems: ftp://88.208.250.116/gvsig-oade-2010-1.0.0-osx-installer.app.zip ftp://88.208.250.116/gvsig-oade-2010-1.0.0-osx-installer.app.zip Good Luck Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: fastest option of serving huge imagery on web map on the fly
Thanks all so far for the responses. Re: Bob I will check out your site more closely . And I will try to find out about dropping and adding pixels with MapServer (not familiar with that yet...) From: miblon In my opinion (but of course Karsten needs to answer that himself) he needs WMS as I think he mentioned before. I may be wrong assuming that mapproxy caches every unique wms request as a unique image. For this exercise I do not necessarily need WMS because I was pretty pleased with the zoomify layers in OpenLayers serves by IIPImage server. Oliver Tonnhofer wrote I don't understand that. MapProxy does cache square tiles and if 60TB are a valid estimate for TileCache and GeoWebCache, than this should also apply to MapProxy. Ok I was not yet familiar how MapProxy really works - from what I read it seemed not to store any physical tiles I thought (only the request parameters), but I guess that is wrong .. Karsten mentioned OpenLayers, so I guess tiled services like TMS are an option. MapProxy, TileCache and GeoWebCache should all be able to handle that without caching in advance. That could be a really viable option - only to cache what is needed and I guess my clients could scale up his infrastructure once more is needed then there likely would be also more customers to support that... MapProxy comes with full HTTP cache control, you can limit the resolution till images should be cached (other requests will be passed to the WMS) and if some clients require full WMS you can use MapProxy's WMS and benefit from the cached tiles. All points that are quite useful in this scenario. I think I will really need to read in details the doc of MapProxy's first to find out what all it can do... But essentially my initial quest was to find out what are my fastest options to render imagery (and best compressed raw imagery which takes up 5TB storage rather than uncompressed raw imagery (tiffs that would take up 60TB of space) and to render those on the fly which out caching anything tiles on disk That means with rendering engine which raw file format which output format what other considerations ... So if anyone has comments on that as well I would appreciate very much. Fort now I think the best bet I found was using jp2 imagery as raw input (carefully converted from MrSid to make them render fast aka following these instructions on this site : http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/), using IIPImage server and a zoomify layer in Openlayers ... Any other better (faster) options ? Cheers Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] fastest option of serving huge imagery on web map on the fly
Hi All, I am seeking some advice/ alternative ideas about the following project I am working on... I have been tasked with researching the best and fastest options serving huge raster datasets on a web map using OpenLayers o the fly (using all Open Source software). We want to serve the US NAIP Aerials in 1m resolution (which are a total of about 4.7 TB of MrSid/Jp2 data) on a interactive web map as an optional map background. The are using MapServer to serve our other (vector) data such as roads, rivers etc as WMS to overlay onto this. Of course there are many ways to go about this but one of the things we determined early on is that MapServer is too slow to serve compressed imagery such as the native MrSid Jp2 imagery on the fly for our needs. Thus, one option would be to spare MapServer from having to decompress the images. We can then also avoid having to convert them to tiff and adding overviews (using gdaladdo for example). This would also blow up the total data volume to something about 60 TB ... Thus, we are in the process of researching options on how to serve the compressed data as fast as possible on the fly and without the need for caching them on disk (that means no TileCache nor GeoWebCache should be used because that also would involve having to set up huge storage spaces ... One option I came about was using IIpimage server and this would then involve converting the MrSid all to Jp2 format. One advantage is that OpenLayers 2.9 already has natively the Zoomify layer support so that we can easily add the images coming out of IIPImage Server Zoomify + JPEG2000 server http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/ I also found that another option is the Djatoka Jpeg 2000 Image Server http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/djatoka/index.php?title=Main_Page and the J2K Tiler Renderer: http://dltj.org/article/introducing-j2ktilerenderer/. None of the above seem to enable output as WMS (correct me if I'm wrong). One draw back is that all of those above are using the Kakadu library which is great but not free for commercial use. I also wanted to research how the use of this new proxy server http://mapproxy.org/ could improve our speed in combination with e.g. IIP Image server... Anybody has experiences with any of the above or comments ? Any input what you think would be the fastest option to serve the compressed US NAIP onto a web map on the fly (without caching tiles on disk) ? Cheers Karsten ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Webinars on OS geo for local governments, schools and nonprofits?
Hi Charlie, I would be interested in this. Here is a rundown of the what I have been doing over the last year and a half: In 2008 I thought that training and support for OpenSource GIS was lacking in many ways - especially in resources dedicated to users (and not only developers). At the same time I am running a GIS consulting business (see below) and thought about the opportunities in teaching OS GIS. Thus I started into this by asking questions on GIS email lists to find out what people thought about the idea (background is that there a couple of companies offering OS GIS seminars in the US but those where pretty costly, mostly on-demand and there where (and still are) almost no scheduled training options...). I was encouraged by the feedback from various folks and convinced that there is a demand/need/interest in this and announced 2 free 90 minute webinars about OS web GIS Interoperable Web GIS Solutions with Free and Open Source Geospatial software in the Fall of 2008. The first webinar I announced on 2 general (not OS GIS or vendor specific) GIS mailing lists local to Washington and Oregon State - and within 3 days the 40 free slots where taken. After this webinar was successful I announced another one on Linked-in in the GIS group and again the seminar was full within 2 days (international crowd this time). This encouraged me to start offering a commercial version of the seminars as a 3 day (in person seminar not web) on a regular basis (2-3 times a year)- you may compare website below for more information (I don't want to make this into too much of an advertising here but to give a flavor what was done one can check there). I am very in general interested in education. Regarding OS Geospatial components I am specifically excited about resources that focus on the user perspective (which is lacking). If there is interest I could assist, contribute, cooperate on (or offer) some free webinars for the purposes outlined by Charlie below. Two more notes: CUGOS put on a half day seminar Introduction to Open Source GIS - A Practical Approach (presented by Michael Gerlek, Karsten Vennemann, Aaron Racicot, Dane Springmeyer) at WAURISA 2009 http://www.waurisa.org/conferences/2009/Workshops.html and will offer another one this year Open Source Tools for Spatial Analysis and Geoprocessing on the Desktop (A general introduction and overview about the tools covered in this workshop will be followed by examples illustrating the use of desktop utilities based on the OGR/GDAL2 libraries, PostGIS (the open source spatial database) and gvSIG (a desktop GIS) for spatial analysis and geoprocessing. During the workshop participants can use a live DVD with their own laptop to go along with some of the exercises.) http://www.waurisa.org/conferences/2010/Workshops.html Cheers Karsten Karsten Vennemann Education contact CUGOS (Cascadia chapter OSGEO) www.cugos.org Principal, Terra GIS LTD Seattle, USA www.terragis.net Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:15:00 -0500 From: Charlie Schweik cschw...@pubpol.umass.edu Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Webinars on OS geo for local governments, schools and nonprofits? OSGeo colleagues, I was recently contacted by Ann Deakin, a Geosciences faculty at the State University of New York - Fredonia campus. She is also on the board of directors of the NYS GIS Association and the chair of their education committee. She was asking me about the possibility of offering a webinar to their members (and anyone considering getting into GIS) on open source GIS. This sounded like a really good idea to me, as a possible new (?) way of promoting OSGeo technologies. I'm wondering if anyone has already done this kind of thing? Would any of our knowledge experts out there be willing to do such a webinar? (If so, let me know in what area) If we can get something like this designed, we could either do it first working with Ann and the NYS GIS Association, or perhaps try and scale the webinar up to a larger and more international crowd. Reactions welcome! Charlie Schweik OSGeo education chair ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
