I have long lived in the desktop realm of ESRI, and expect ESRI products to be a part of my workflow for a long time to come. But, the time has come to delve in deeply with Quantum GIS. I’ve read from many sources that it has come of age as a desktop GIS. I tried it 4 years ago, along with its competitors in … Continue reading Using Quantum GIS for real work…
I recently gave a talk on a really interesting project I’m working on, and in the process of talking to a non-technical crowd introduced Open Source using some of my favorite (borrowed) phrases, i.e. “Free not as in free beer, but free as in freedom, free as in ‘free puppy’”, which resulting in a surprisingly satisfying chuckle from the audience. What’s great about the project … Continue reading Independence– Free as in Freedom
I just can’t seem to get away from Bash. One day I promise to do the same work with Python, but for now, the following will take your directory of 3-band imagery, extract the first band, and if it succeeds, delete your original file. Seeing as I had almost 300GB of imagery, and very little space left, this kind of housekeeping was necessary (my other … Continue reading Reprocessing imagery with GDAL and BASH — and then cleaning up afterward
Just pretty pictures today. Continue reading Cartographically Pleasing Vegetation Boundaries– with PovRay, PostGIS, and LiDAR
In a previous couple of posts (this one, and this one), we dealt with point rotations, first with bounding box searches, and then with nominal use of operators. First we create a function to do our angle calculations, then use select to loop through all the records and do the calculations. Within our function, first we find our first (in this case) five nearest streets … Continue reading Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator (part 2)
My favorite cartography book is Eduard Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation. A few years back I picked this book up (translated to English) from ESRI press for $75 if memory serves me. Now it can be gotten for much cheaper. Imhof spends a lot of time on feature simplification and separation, a problem which keeps me up at night. For example, if you have a lot … Continue reading Going deeper into web cartography: future=past? (and Swiss cartographic genius)
A perennial favorite on this blog is “GeoServer and efficient delivery of raster data (image pyramid layer)“. I am neither the last nor the first authority on this topic (check the GeoSolutions blog for authoritative work on GeoServer and raster, also look to the GeoServer documentation), but I’ve had some good experiences with serving rasters in GeoServer, especially using image pyramid layers Read the original, … Continue reading GeoServer and efficient delivery of raster data (image pyramid layer) (update)
I can’t remember if I posted on this, but there is a cool demo of a GeoExt multipage print here: http://dev.geoext.org/sandbox/pgiraud/playground/print-multipage/geoext.ux/ux/MultiPagePrint/examples/MultiPagePrint.html Definitely an interface for advanced users, but nice nonetheless. Continue reading GeoExt/Mapfish MultiPage Prints
In a previous post (I feel like I say that a lot), I wrote about rotating address points to match nearby roads in replicate the effect of USGS quads that represented small buildings with little squares that followed the nearby road alignment. The function was effective: but deadly slow when applied to all 500,000 address points. And so we iterate. First, I’ll show you our … Continue reading Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator
I said it in the title, I’ll say it again, SLDs are not just for ugly maps. I’ve heard from several professionals in this geospatial sector that CartoCSS is so cool– “look at the great cartography you can get out of it”. And, truth be told, creating a standard for cartography that aligns so well with existing web development standards is a brilliant way to … Continue reading Advanced Cartography in #GeoServer– #SLDs can make for very pretty maps
Smathermather's Weblog 