Fall 2009 GIF Geolunch Series Schedule Posted

The fall 2009 Geolunch series at the Geospatial Innovation Facility has been posted!

The GIF and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) host a weekly GeoLunch seminar series offering interesting talks, group discussion, and show-and-tells - all invloving geospatial theory, research, and application!

GeoLunch occurs throughout the academic year every Friday, 1-2pm at the GIF 111 Mulford Hall Conference Room.

See the schedule here!

Awesome (and useful) Mashup Example

We've all seen numerous examples of "mashups", or webmaps containing information from multiple resources, in the past year. Of course, I'm a big fan of the mashup... I'm also a big fan of finding a great mix between form and function, as anyone who's involved with cartographic design can attest to. This mashup appears to have captured this essence quite well, combining simplicity, good cartographic design and decent ergonomics. It's also open source! Oh, and did I mention that it's highly useful?

http://sanfrancisco.crimewatch.org

...and for you East Bay-ers

http://oakland.crimewatch.org/

Fall 2009 GIF workshop schedule posted

The fall 2009 workshop schedule at berkeley's geospatial innovation facility (GIF) is posted! There are several new workshops scheduled, including:

• Intro to Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Social Science Focus;
• Intro to Open Source GIS: Working with Quantum GIS (QGIS);
• Intro to Agent-Based Modeling: Using GIS data with NetLogo; and
• Intro to LIDAR applications in Remote Sensing.

Check out the website!

New 'Map Illustration' Software for Mac Users

Mapdiva, LLC has just resleased its map illustration software Ortelius^TM  for Mac computers. It's only 30Mb to download a free 31-day trial version, and for now they're offering an 'Introductory Price' of $79 (versus $99) until the end of September. An Education Edition is also available only $39 (after Sept. 30 willl be $49) for currently enrolled students with a valid .edu address.

Note that the company states, "Ortelius is designed for cartographic output as the end product, intentionally not a GIS system, though the Professional Edition with add more GIS-type operations to the currently available tools. On a general note the Standard Edition is likely to fall short in some aspects for hardcore geographers and GIS users; the Professional Edition is intended to provide many more GIS features." So some users may want to wait for the Pro Edition for increased functionality.

From The Map Room

When good maps go bad - cartastrophe blog

I am not a fan of blogs soley created to bash others' mapping and webGIS work without offering any constructive critisism or at least offering examples of the author's own work. You know who you are. But this one seems to provide good examples of common map mistakes with helpful reference to cartographic theory (and has a clever title).  I will likely use some of these examples in my class.

Using LiDAR las files in next eCognition version

via Andreas Lang at the Definiens Community

Can we load and process LiDAR las files in Definiens eCognition (Developer or Server) directly?

The new Definiens software will have two ways for handling las files via converting them into rasters directly in the Software:

• a raster driver for loading and visualizing these kind of images (with an appropriate dialog for setting the resolution for converting the point cloud to a 2D raster) using the driver the user can see the intensity data and select an appropriate subset;
• an algorithm for converting the existing loaded image layer (las file) into a feasible layer with appropriate data of intensity, elevation, class or number of returns for further processing with much more functionality for filtering:
  
  • By Return (All/First/All)
  • By Classes
  The user can also select the kind of calculation for a raster cell value (Average, Minimum, Maximum, Median, Most frequently. value).

Offset points in ArcMap

Working with GIS, everyone encounters those problems that he knows there is a solution to, but he has no idea how to fix. Dealing with overlapping points has been a persistent example of such a problem for me. The other day, I was working with a file that contained several points with identical locations. In this case, the precise location of the points was less important than depicting the number of occurrences in the general region. I still wanted to show points on the map and did not want to show the number of occurrences in an enclosing polygon. Therefore, I needed a way to spread my points out.

After briefly scouring the ESRI site I found this guide for separating points based on labels. Essentially, this documents gives instructions to remove the symbols for the points in question and to enable the labels, but replacing the label text with symbols. Now symbols for the points show up where the labels would normally appear. I used this in conjunction with the labeling tools in the Maplex extension in ArcMap to gain a little more control over how the labels would be dispersed and to provide more offset.

This solution is only appropriate in certain scenarios, but it is a quick fix to a problem that I frequently encounter.

Does anyone else use a different solution to this problem?

ASPRS board approves LAS 1.3 specification

The American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) is pleased to announce LAS 1.3, a new release of the open file format for lidar data storage and delivery. ASPRS has been maintaining and updating this widely used specification since its inception at the beginning of this decade.

The 1.3 release adds support for waveform encoding of laser returns. The encoding of this new data extension is optional, allowing LAS 1.3 to be used as the specification in normal multi-return delivery products.

“ASPRS has been very proactive in accommodating the rapid advances in LIDAR hardware technology with frequent updates to the LAS specification,” said Jim Plasker, Executive Director of the ASPRS. “This latest update allows lidar system vendors to store waveform information directly in the LAS file. This new capability offers exciting opportunities for developing advanced algorithms for application areas such as urban modeling and forestry. Over 50 hardware vendors, software developers, production companies and commercial/government agencies participated in the development of this latest version of the specification and thus we expect that it will be rapidly adopted for both exploitation and data delivery.”

The LAS version 1.3 specification was approved by the ASPRS Board of Directors on July 14, 2009 and is available for immediate use. The full specification can be downloaded from the ASPRS website at http://www.asprs.org/society/committees/standards/lidar_exchange_format.html

Definiens community site launched

At our Definiens workshop today, Juan mentioned that the Definiens community website has been launched in the last month. Definiens is one of the few comprehensive segmentation and classification software solutions targeted for high spatial resolution imagery processing.  I've used the software for mapping tidal wetland sites, and for mapping dead crowns in oak forests.  The community site includes lots of information on shared codes, videos, demos, and discussion.  Since the software is so comprehensive, and has so many possible options, it can be difficult to become an expert. I personally like to know the "choice domain" within which I am working, so learning Definiens places me somewhere on the edge of my comfort zone. But with this, especially the rule set sharing, I think I can get stuck in. Thanks Juan!

The GIF is one of 7 Centers of Excellence for Definiens; other sites include:

• University of Calgary
• Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas
• The Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL), University of Vermont
• University of Wales, Aberystwyth (lovely place - I did my junior year abroad here)
• Centre for Geoinformatics, University of Salzburg
• Charles Darwin University, Australia

Get those roofs fixed: El Nino is coming!

From NASA Image of the Day: In July 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center reported that ocean temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific had shifted into El Niño—anomalously warm—conditions. El Niño conditions are evident in this sea surface temperature anomaly image based on data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on July 26. THe current data are compared to long-term average temperatures (1985-1997) measured by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers that have flown on several NOAA missions.

In this map, places where temperatures were near normal are cream-colored, places where temperatures were warmer than normal are red, and places where temperatures were cooler than normal are blue. An area of dark red occupies the eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecaudor (north of Peru), indicating temperatures were much warmer than average. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, ocean temperatures around Indonesia were slightly cooler (light blue) than usual.