Photo – Addy Pope
This is the second part of EDINA’s developer review of FOSS4G 2013. This time it is Mike Gale who will be providing his opinion on what was presented.
Who are you:
Michael Gale – GIS Engineer / Member of the EDINA’s Data Team. My job is to essentially deal with the vast quantities of GIS data we utilise at EDINA. I translate, modify, split and twist the data we receive into types and formats that our services such as Digimap can then offer to our users. I heavily use the Swiss army knife – GIS command line tools of GDAL/OGR and additionally Safe FME, Shell Scripting, Python & PostGIS.
What you hoped to get out of the event?
To discover the latest and greatest ways to utilise the tools I already use. I was keen to evaluate what advances and benefits PostGIS 2.0 could offer – particularly with 3D data, LiDAR point clouds & pgRouting. Additionally I wanted to discover new ways of integrating Python into my workflows.
Top 3 things you saw at the event (not the food or beer….)
(1) Chris Tucker keynote – MapStory.org
MapStory.org is a new website that empowers a global user community to organise knowledge about the world spatially and temporally. It is essentially a social media platform where people can crowd source geospatial data and create “MapStories” with spatio-temporally enabled narratives. The best way to figure out what that all means is to check out the website!!
(2) Cartopy & Iris – Open Source Python Tools For Analysis and Visualisation – Dr Edward Campbell (Met Office)
Cartopy is a new python mapping library for the transformation and visualisation of geospatial vector and raster data. The library offers the ability for point, line, polygon and image transformations between projections and a way to visualise data with only a few snippets of python code. Iris is a python library that specifically deals with analysing and visualising meteorological and oceanographic datasets, particularly 3D and temporal data.
(3) LiDAR in PostgreSQL with Pointcloud – Paul Ramsey
PostGIS support for LiDAR data has been non-existent until now. Paul Ramsey has created a new spatial data type for PostGIS 2.0 that now offers the ability to import huge amounts of point cloud data, and additionally analyse the information with several new postgis functions. Pretty impressive.
(4) I’ll throw a comedy one in as well: “Up all night to get Mapping”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EEVYHUQlkU
Editors note: view at your own (ears) risk.
1 thing that you are definitely going to investigate further
The IRIS and Cartopy Python libraries.
Thanks Mike. I hope to add another couple of review next week. My overview, with links to as many reviews as i could find, can be found HERE.