We developed an application/product for managing species distribution using surveyed data of any location. We implemented it for biological hotspots in India for a client. The system has all the basic navigation tools and area/usage/application specific query tools which is the back bone of the SDMS. Developed completely using open source tools, its back end can be any spatial database including postgresql, mysql, oracle or ESRI’s Geodatabase.
Main properties are
OGC compliant solution
High end customisable queries
Opacity control of the layer
Multi GIS format support
Commercial API’s like Google, Yahoo as base layers
Search layer (vector) turn on/off
Layer manager with draggable layers
Navigation tools, overview map etc
The first website implemented over SDMS was launched by Nandini Nadkarni, member of faculty of Evergreen state college, Olympia, Washington on October 26th 2009 International Canopy congress, Bangalore, India.
Below given is a demo video showing main capabilities of the system.
Credit: Mr. Arun Sebastian – Project lead of SDMS and for this video.
Day before while in a project meeting, an interesting topic came up as my fellow mates said, It would have been better if i knew coding. I am not a coding expert, but i understand the working and can find new tools available in the (open)web, mange to install them too. But looks like its not sufficient and we need to really sit and code to understand the effort they take to develop.
Yes you are right , no matter how you get the thread or how you learn ,
Our University hosted a conference on Applied geoinformatics for Society and Environment supported by DAAD and main target were alumni of the MSc program. The program was really successful and for me it was an excellent opportunity to meet old class mates and other dignitaries in this field. I did my presentation about entrepreneurship in Geoinformatics giving a concept of what i am doing over my consultancy in India. My main idea was to give the audience about the client niche im looking fort- the research domain and how i ended up in having such a clientele. I finished of with the advantages and shortcomes of working on such a different client base.
My talk is in Youtube by Prof. Behr (Thanks to his efforts for making this conference a success and to take pain of putting these videos online) and the links are given below for you to watch.
Protocolz Techcenter is conducting a three day training program on GIS using Open Source Softwares. Training program is scheduled for 2nd, 3rd & 4th October 2009.
Venue : Protocolz Techcenter
SNG trust building
Kakkanad
Cochin – 21
Kerala
This training program in QGIS and gvSIG is organized to introduce GIS users to the basic features of these powerful packages.
Please forward this to members who are interested for this program.
For any further queries please mail me at spareeth@gmail.com
I found this MODIS images in NASA news room, which shows the Kosi river course from Nepal to Bihar , India before the flood and after the catastrophe. Its really surprising the way river changed its course suddenly and decided to take this new path which was originally its course 200 years back.
Click on the image for a larger view.
Source: NASA
This is my first post from Ubuntu OS. Yes i ve successfully installed Linux operating system Ubuntu in my laptop as a Dual bootable config. So i can switch between windows and linux now.
My long time wish fulfilled. The first experience with Ubuntu is great, no major issues till now.
Configured broad band connection too. Thanks to great blog about configuring Broadband in Ubuntu by Srikanth Perinkulam. Thanks buddy, great work. I must say it was a cake walk only because of his blog.
I feel great while browsing net in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu version -8.04
It comes with Firefox, Open office(great tool alternative to Microsoft office.).
You can order a cd or download Ubuntu from their site free of cost. If you order a cd as i did, You will get it in 6 weeks.
I did my thesis on developing a web based GIS for online digitization using OGC specifications and open source tools. Title is ‘OGC compliant solution for online digitization using open source tools’. The idea is to facilitate collaborative research in Land use Land cover change studies by giving researchers a platform to digitise training sites on satellite images in a common web platform.
The tools used are Deegree server, Mapbender and PostgreSQL. The system is empowered with the OGC specifications like WMS, WCS and WFS-T. The transactions where the user defined geometries get saved in the backend database is done using the WFS-Transaction specification of OGC.
Below given is the video of final presentation , Thanks to my buddy Gabriel Sanya.
I want to improve the system by adding more tools for image processing like histogram or scatter plot where user can analyse his training sites online. It will help small organisations to do Land cover classifications or to take part in such processes without having a proprietary software or image processing know how. I was thinking of giving services through this platform.
1) Organisations interested in doing land cover classifications or any other related task where they need to collect data from satellite images can request through the system by giving the details like study area, years of study, purpose.
2) After a request is filed, we will look for the available images and upload it into the system with associated layers if available. Then the researchers associated with the work can log in and start defining their training sites with proper attributes.
3) Once it is finished we will collect the data from the backend database and refine it and do the classification. Classified image can be published again so that they can comment on it for further iterations. Any additional services can be done on request.
I think this will work very well for organisation who doesnt want to set up a GIS and Remote sensing lab for small tasks.
Thanks to Dr Harini Nagendra for giving me this idea and her constant support.
If any of you are interested in grabbing my thesis report or any other queries , just mail me.
I admire the simplicity openlayers offers as it doesn’t have any server side dependencies. There are occasions i wish i had more tools from openlayers. Of course it offers loads of classes , we need to know Javascripting in and out in order to customise the interface. Mapfish uses an external javascript library called extJS.
Here comes the advantage of mapfish , a comparitively new release in the world of open source tools for geospatial. Mapfish provides both client and server (java and python). Client is built up on openlayers and added more functionalities. I tried out their demos , quite impressive especially the examples on geostatistics. We can use mapfish client with almost all other servers, and offers everything which openlayers has and more customised tools.
It uses the Geojson format for the geostat examples. I really liked this one and it has other potential applications like dynamic symbology . The GeoJson format is light weight and simple to handle, so quite fast in the application.
An blog on this by Bjørn Sandvik in his thematic mapping blog
I will give an example in the next post.
I would say we can compare the functionalities with that of new ArcGIS server 9.3 Javascript API.
Geoserver can serve WFS service in GeoJson format , What more can you ask for, So get ready for more applications using Geoserver and Open layers/MApfish.
Enjoy the freedom.
Has any one ever thought of getting google(or any search engine) understand your query with all your semantics. On a Geospatial perpective if you want to make a query like ‘All the Airports within 500 KM from Bangalore city’ the semantic interoperable engine will give you exact answer.
Now if you do the same query on google, it will give you all the links which has airports, 500KM and Bangalore which may not contain the exact result you are looking for. The search facility ignores ‘within’, ‘all’, ‘the’.
Semantic Geospatial web will give you the exact data set you are looking for as takes into consider all the ontologies related to your query. I am still struggling with the term Ontology, i can give you a clear idea by next post.
I found a nice article about GeoSpatial Semantic web by Jonathan Lowe of Geospatial Solutions.
Quoting him ” A semantically intelligent World Wide Web is quickly becoming reality. And the potential it holds for the geospatial practitioner may be this industry’s “next big thing.”
The above article is dated june 2005. I am surprised as i was thnking this is a recent one.
There is a search engine called swoogle that discovers analyzes semantic web documents (eg:RDF) published on web.
It is complicated and hard to accomplish ,but worth all the effort.
I am trying to learn more about semantic interoperability. Tried a lot of papers and other stuff , but i must say none of them provide a simple explanation. This is an emerging field now and not so easy to implement with much success. Crossing my fingers to see the development coming up in this field.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.
