04.28.08
Posted in User perspectives at 11:22 am by Mike Pumphrey
I just wanted to give a quick hello to those in the wider world working on GeoServer. The GeoServer website recently got a bump in network traffic, and when we investigated, we saw it was directed by a group in Russia called GIS-Lab, who have an introduction to using GeoServer on their site. (Google translation)
Also, if you are a faithful reader of this blog, you’ll notice that Fernando Quadro often paraphrases some of our posts in Portuguese. There is a GeoServer mailing list in Portuguese as well. Earlier this month, the GeoServer website was “slashdotted” by Slashdot Japan regarding a company which is using OpenLayers, GeoServer, and GeoWebCache.
We currently have local translations for our web interface in Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We’re always looking for people to write more localizations as well (please see our website for information on how to localize GeoServer). We’re eventually looking to have the core of our documentation translated as well.
This is all very promising, as it shows that the need for an open-source mapping framework is a worldwide desire, transcending the boundaries of nation and language. We have set up a page denoting these international resources. If you know of other GeoServer blogs, mailing lists, or other websites that we may not be aware of, please add them to that page, as we would love to know about them.
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03.24.08
Posted in User perspectives at 10:16 am by Mike Pumphrey
Greetings all.
I am new to the GIS world. Well, not entirely. I’ve been an avid map fan since I was a wee lad, and to this day I own a small but extensive collection of Rand McNally Road Atlases. Fast forward the tape a bit, and here I am at The Open Planning Project, as an Outreach Engineer for GeoServer. However, despite some years of working in technical fields and some more years of ogling nice-looking maps, I must confess that I was and still am, shall we say, a novice to the technology surrounding GIS.
Here at TOPP, I see myself as a facilitator between those who use GeoServer, those who code/develop for it, and those who are somewhere in between. That said, I’ve still needed to bootstrap myself into being versed in the terminology. So, I picked up “GIS for Web Developers” by Scott Davis. Since then I have thumbed through a few other books and a fair chunk of online information, but by far, this has been the most helpful in getting me started.
The book follows a fairly straightforward arc, starting with a discussion of vectors and rasters. Two of my initial questions were answered quickly. The first was “where does all this data come from?” and the second, “what exactly is the data, anyway?” These may seem trivial, but it’s of course very hard to not see as obvious things that one works with as a matter of routine. (I can recall being very perplexed when I was first introduced to the Web, when trying to figure out the URL. Where was it going? What was it doing?) Although I can’t create a Shapefile out of thin air now (Adobe Illustrator for some reason doesn’t have it in its Export menu) I know that I can probably find what I need either from government websites or a small but growing community of neogeographers. As for what’s contained in the data, the answer is “a gratifyingly large amount of useful info”. The book covers Shapefiles, PostGIS databases, and other standard formats of the trade.
The discussion makes a sharp turn and delves into command-line utilities for editing and querying data inside spatial databases. Perhaps it was my background, but I thought that this topic might have sat more comfortably towards the back of the book, as it’s good information, but with a much steeper learning curve than what came before it. After delving very deep into the OGC web services, the book ends with a “Final Exam” of the complete process from non-geocoded data to spatial database to web browser. If one can follow the last chapter, one understands the relevant concepts. I think I’m nearly there.
One of the most beneficial aspects of the book was the clear definitions of terms, as the meanings of, say, DataStore and FeatureType were not intrinsically obvious to me. It was also quite nice to see GeoServer represented so favorably in the book, both from a practical point of view and as well from a root-for-the -home-team sort of way. But ESRI’s ArcExplorer is given as much treatment as, say, MapBuilder, which is nice for comparison’s sake. I have yet to spend too much time on anything past GeoServer and OpenLayers, but that’ll change in time, I’m sure.
Personally, I wished the book had delved more quantitatively into projections. However, I recognize that my interest lies mainly in the mathematics, and the tools that people have created shield the user from some of the more unseemly calculations. My coworkers have consistently said, “you don’t need to know any of that stuff,” which may in fact be true, but keeping projections as a black box isn’t quite in the spirit of the book. It’s a minor gripe, though.
All in all, I found this a great book with which to get started. While not trying to hide from the jargon, the reader isn’t bogged down with so much granularity that the plot is lost. That’s a sweet spot that most technical books miss. I’m no expert, and won’t be for a while, but at least I feel like I know what questions to ask. And knowing how to ask the right questions is so much more difficult than finding the answers.
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01.07.08
Posted in User perspectives at 3:30 pm by Chris Holmes
Though I admit the name made me a bit scared, Andrea Aime pointed out a really nice use of some of our favorite platforms in the ‘WarViews’ project. No, it’s not some geolocated remote missile camera, it’s a project by the International Conflict Research (IRC) group at a Swiss university that attempts to show more clearly the link between geography and conflict.
It complies several GIS datasets of conflict, and shows them on a static map built with OpenLayers, as well as a really nice use of GeoServer’s Google Earth time support to demonstrate the events over time. I just wanted to point out their great work to everyone, go and have a play with what they’ve built. It does a great job of showing how you get multiple output options with GeoServer, and can point users to appropriate clients that take advantage of different features. If another researcher wanted the actual GIS data they could easily point at the WFS and get the raw GML or Shapefiles of the data.
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07.10.07
Posted in User perspectives at 11:31 am by Chris Holmes
Mick Wilson, who I had the pleasure of meeting while I was doing a fellowship in Zambia, has been doing some great blogging lately about the progress in building a Spatial Data Infrastructure in East Africa. His latest entry talks about a hands on training they ran, setting up GeoServer with PostGIS, uDig and qGIS. It sounds like it was quite successful, and it’s really great to see GeoServer being used to help build capacity and give people the ability to share data. We’re hoping to get feedback from his group and others on how to run such a training day, as it sounds like a great way to share skills and spread knowledge about GeoServer and the SDI stack around it. If you’re interested in running your own training day or have done so in the past, please get in touch.
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07.02.07
Posted in User perspectives at 10:22 am by Chris Holmes
Mike Frumin, who has been actively working with GeoServer and OpenLayers the past few months, has just released the culmination of his work for the Regional Planning Association. In his write up on his blog he includes a number of pictures that were generated by GeoServer, and links to a really nice OpenLayers application, as well as the same information in Google Earth. Both made extensive use of GeoServer, with some custom processing for a couple things that were pushing the envelope (that we hope to completely support in GeoServer eventually), including KML customization and SLD extensions. Read his post, it’s a great demonstration of using maps to tell a story, and we’re excited that they’re powered by GeoServer.
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05.16.07
Posted in User perspectives at 1:10 pm by Chris Holmes
Theodor Foerster, of 52North and ITC, has been leveraging GeoServer in his work on generalization of geospatial data using the new Web Processing Service specification. He recently posted some nice new work, including updates to the Web Processing Service web app, as well as a new WPS client written as a plug-in to uDig. Awhile ago he also did some prototypes of integrating the WPS with GeoServer, making the WPS a datastore that could be served out as WMS and WFS. It’s great to see new open source tools being built that can use and leverage the work we’ve done with GeoServer. You can see his work in action, with GeoServer, in the screencast that he’s also posted.
Eventually we’re hoping to be able to offer some integration between GeoServer and his WPS work, possibly as a plug-in to GeoServer that makes it really easy to install both, and to do common data configuration through our web gui. In the past we’ve also talked to the FROGS WPS community about possible integrations as well. Since we’re evolving GeoServer to be a platform it makes a lot of natural sense to be able to bring WPS in to the mix, in some form. It looks like the FROGS people are also leveraging Spring, which may help compatibility as well (we haven’t talked to them for awhile so I suppose we can just cross our fingers that they’re looking at what we’ve done). So if anyone has the time or the money to get a WPS integrated with GeoServer, let us know, as we’ve got some great pieces to work with.
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