North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

rjhale

Chattanooga QGIS Conference Update

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So things are moving. Things are always a bit terrifying as this starts pulling together. I’ve been tossing updates everywhere – so here’s an update for the Blog.

Official Stuff

Website: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/20191000-QGIS-US

Date: October 25th 2019

So the first big thing: A Social. I’m headed down to the Tap House this week to make sure everything is arranged for a social On October 24th.

Talks

Talks are rolling in for Friday. There is still room to submit a paper if you wish. The big one is I’m hopefully (and I’m at the mercy of the internet) is I’ve got Nyall Dawson on Video from Australia speaking first.

Here are some of the abstracts that have been submitted:

  • QGIS: It’s all about Form(s) – QGIS comes with the ability to create forms to help you input data or capture data. You can build simple forms to help users avoid misspellings and help speed up data capture. You can also build forms where data entry is dependent on previous data entered as well as forms where data entry depends on other GIS data. Building Forms in QGIS is easy, powerful, and easily done if you have no programming experience. I’m going to attempt to talk you through the easiest to make forms plus one difficult form to show you how easy this can be (or hard depending on how the demos work).
  • Using QGIS with TN’s 911 Database Standard – Henry County 911 recently moved away form their COTS system and started using QGIS, PostGIS, and Fulcrum to collect and maintain the county’s 911 data. This talk covers some of the in’s and out’s of switching software, tools, and workflows.
  • EcoValuator:  EcoValuator is built on python and provides a simple means of estimating the dollar value of a study area, based on the land cover types in that study area, and on your ecosystem service of choice. This presentation will cover background information about the project, what are ecosystem services, how the EcoValuator works, challenges of using the QGIS python API, and demonstration of the plugin in action.
  • Building a cloud-based mapping and analysis solution based on Openlayers and CesiumJS. 18 month ago our team felt the need for having a next Gen cloud mapping solution. We did not want to leave it all to ArcGIS Online, so we decided to build our own. It is designed to make maps, analyze data, add custom database solutions, and to share maps and data with fellow users.Take a look behind the scene of the journey of putting it all together and learn how far we have come and what are our ideas in terms of connecting Open Source solutions like QGIS and GeoServer.

…..and more are coming.

This is the third meeting I’ve put on since 2017. All meetings are centered around FOSS4G with this being the  first QGIS focused one. I’ve had emails and conversations from all over the US on this meeting. One thing that keeps coming up is people want more open source GIS meetings. The tough part is it has to be a community run affair or someone (yours truly) jumps up and puts this together. I really need to start earlier and shoot for bigger – BUT – there’s only so much I can do. We have the FOSS4G NA meetings that are well run and much bigger – but this seems to scratch an itch. How does this get bigger? I have no idea and I’m open to suggestions.

Anyway – the clock is ticking. The more the merrier at this thing so please make plans to attend.

 

 

TN 911 Server Updates

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The TN NG911 server got an upgrade this month with some quality assurance checks. After working with Henry County for the last bit we’re into more “what if” scenarios.

  • What if we ran checks for misspelled addresses or improperly labeled addresses?
  • What if we started filling out the fields we weren’t filling with out with our ArcGIS/Geodatabase setup?

Working with Chad Howard (911 GIS Guru for Henry County TN) we’ve started playing with data problems. One thing I learned is that the amount of quality assurance checks at the county level are lacking – not because anyone didn’t want to do it it’s just hard working with a basic arcgis license to do anything significant. That’s where postgis comes into play. I’ve got a total of three checks on the addresses planned with two implemented as of right now.

What if you accidentally add two address points with the same geometry? A red circle appears in one of the layers in your database (and in your QGIS session) alerting you to the mistake. What if you accidentally misspell an address street name and that doesn’t match a street? A blue circle appears. If you look at the example it looks like someone can’t spell. Actually the old setup was adding spaces to names. So instead of “Main” you had “Main “. That’s an easy enough fix we can do in a bulk edit.

I expect these next set of checks to slowly become irrelevant over the next bit as the client takes full advantage of QGIS’s forms for data entry. Once again we’re hitting spaces as opposed to nulls in the data in 80% of the cases. We should only have 4 pre-directionals – well at most 8 –  but for this county they only have 4.

We can bulk edit the spaces away in the database. It’s nice to have this table sitting in the qaqc schema just to check occasionally but I do expect that to drift off in significance the more we use Fulcrum and QGIS’s Forms for data input. These checks check everything from street types, names, to directionals. Like I said – over time these start drifting off in significance but it’s nice for now.

Anyway – more quality checks are planned but we’re over he first hurdle to making this even more useful and easy.

Know your data: e00 Files

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Occasionally you’ll meet an e00 file.  Occasionally. It happens so infrequently you’ll probably see more eclipses than you’ll run into data in that format.You might see a bigfoot before you’ll see a e00 file. I saw one. Not a bigfoot but an e00 file. Maybe I’ll see a bigfoot soon. I have hope.

Anyway, If you were around at any point during the days of Workstation Arc/INFO (before it was called ArcGIS) you worked with coverages. Coverages were (and still are in my opinion) pretty great because you had a little bit of everything in one:

Coverage

A coverage could contain lines, polygons, tics, points, nodes, etc. If you wanted polygons you could just work with a line feature and then build it for polygons. If you had something you needed to digitize tics allowed your digitizing table a way to push that data from digitizing table to file. Nodes are vertices – but if I remember you could attach attributes to your nodes. It was fun times. Occasionally they did corrupt and much like the shapefile it was more than “one file”. You had a INFO directory that traveled with your coverage (which was a directory). Giving it to someone could get tricky.

So what if you wanted me to send you a coverage? How do I get to you an INFO directory (full of data files for everything in that workspace) and your specific coverage (full of more files)? Maybe you just wanted streams or roads or buildings? That’s when you created this wonderful thing called an e00 file. You executed a command that I can’t remember which was probably called export and dumped your data to an e000 file. You would then issue an import command to ingest that file. This was pretty common 20 years ago.

…..and you’ve never seen an e00 file. They are still around. Last week I had a link going back to a USGS/State of California website talking about earthquake faults. There was e00 data provided for download. So what did I do now that I’m not actively in the ArcGIS world?

I re-discovered a tool I had forgotten about at http://avce00.maptools.org/. I won’t go through the entire process of getting that tool to work but I had packages for Ubuntu and they have precompiled binaries for Windows.  One command from a terminal (no gui here) avcimport county.e00 <insert random name here> (Example: avcimport countye00 randy) and you have a coverage again. If you use the open data source manager with QGIS and select directory you can open the coverage.

If you don’t want to deal with another program – GDAL to the rescue. On a wild hair I actually just typed the following: ogrinfo -so -al county.e00. I got this back in return:

I now know from looking at the info I’ve three layers in the e00 file: Lines, Points, and, Polygons. Whether there is data in the layers is another question.

One more run: ogr2ogr <directory_name> county.e00 (which I actually ran ogr2ogr randy2 county.e00) and I received a directory full of shapefiles. Which I know I’m probably going to get some truncation but I can at least see what’s in the file.

Success – a format which seriously hasn’t been used hard for 20+ years can still be cracked open and data extracted. That should rate pretty high on the list of things that are awesome. Resurrecting old data from the mid 90’s is a glorious thing.

Now to go find a  bigfoot………

 

 

Stu

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It takes me longer to process things these days. I’m quite happy with maps and data – but processing the deeper things that tend to creep into life and set things in a slightly different direction. The short story is Stu has moved into the great beyond.

Which I know – it’s a cat. The world has a ton of cats…..but……

Stu made an appearance in what I would call “my dark period”. I’ve got a good 5 year record of being horrifically grouchy from 2009 to 2014 due in part to a divorce and my absolute refusal to deal with things that were bothering me. I am male and we fix things by grunting and/or standing in the woods. Neither of which helps matters on a large scale or small scale.

My neighbor appeared at my doorstep with a flea covered kitten who should probably have been dead. He was bathed and the story was “I’ll come back for him”. She never did. I called and yelled “I don’t need a stupid cat”. Which ended up being his name: Stupid. I took great delight in vet notices coming to the house addressed to the cat that said ‘Dear Stupid it’s time to come back to the vet”.

If I was late in feeding him he had a habit of completely destroying a loaf of bread. Why bread? Why lay on the ground clutching the loaf while biting it and kicking it? Why not my pillow? Why not anything? A loaf of bread isn’t much but to go and buy 4 loaves in 4 days was a bit annoying.

Pets die. It’s a fact of life that we have them for a short period be it 10 years or sometimes 20. Sometimes a lot less. Post divorce I found myself sitting at home a lot staring at my cableless television and the cats would line up one by one and sit with me. I may have entertained some conversation with them. It was much more pleasant talking to them than to people. When I made a move to Athens Georgia I found that I spent a lot of time sitting staring at my cableless television and they would all line up for more conversation. Flash forward and I’m back in Chattanooga and Stitch passed. That hurt. Then Miso who was older than everyone went. That hurt more. I enjoyed a three year vacation from death until this year.

Last year Stu got sick. I waited too long to take him to the vet. The diagnosis was one of two things. One thing can be beat. One thing cannot. One round of meds and he was almost new. Life got settled back in and off we went. Then he got sick again. I spend a lot of time these days saying “cancer” due to some family issues. Finally a few weeks ago they confirmed yes it was and he had a month. He made it 6 days. My assumption was and is that he was waiting for me to get home since I was traveling. Stu had horrible separation anxiety. If I left the house he would get agitated. It was to the point I joked about taking him with me just to keep him happy.

Anyway – cremated. He sits on my shelf with all the others. These days I sit and get phone calls and social media reports from friends. So and So almost had a heart attack. Hey <fill in the blank> died. It’s annoying. It’s life. When you get older that just becomes a thing you have to deal with. I’m going to take a break for a bit from pets. I have one last cat and she remains well fed and comfortable until she’s gone. Then I stop for a bit. Maybe a dog. Maybe nothing.

Stu you were an absolute pain from day one. I miss your noise and weirdness.

 

QGIS Meeting – October 25th 2019 Chattanooga TN

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It’s happening. Finally. This was a bit more painful to get going than I had anticipated. I spent a lot of time over July tracking down a spot. Usually I have someone jump up and go “HERE” or you have that one bubbly friend that knows someone that knows someone with a space. Chattanooga has a lot of meeting space – but since I didn’t want this to be $200 bucks a person I had to work at it. Maybe it’s my lack of connections here in town or maybe it’s just the town – it’s hard to pull off a tech meeting in this city. I HAVE HOPE THOUGH.

Date:

October 25th 2019

Location:

Chattanooga TN

Address:

Chattanooga State Technical Community College

Allbright Omniplex Building

4501 Amnicola Highway

Chattanooga TN 37406

Cost:

Presentations:

We are seeking presentations centered around QGIS. Are you using it for work? Fun? Humanitarian Relief? Drones? Whatever – just use QGIS somewhere in your workflow.

Website:

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/20191000-QGIS-US

I’m working on a more informative website – it will be up shortly.

I’m also working on discounts for accommodations.

Anyway – it should be fun and informative. I have the chance to pull off some workshops if you want. Right now I have my hands full but speak up and lets see what we can do.

I hope you show up!

 

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