North River Geographic Systems Inc

Geospatial Problem Solving

ESRI

Know your data: e00 Files

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………

 

 

Georgia URISA Luncheon May 2015

Date: May 12, 2015
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Location: ESRI
3650 Brookside Pkwy # 450
Alpharetta, GA 30022

Modeling Highway Traffic Noise with GIS

Starting with the enactment of the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act of 1972, traffic noise has been an important consideration in the planning and construction of transportation projects. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) established and maintains a national policy that provides guidance for both predicting and mitigating traffic noise impacts. The FHWA also developed the Traffic Noise Model (TNM), a sophisticated noise analysis tool required nationwide for analyzing traffic noise. As a supplement to the TNM and a data management framework, GIS plays a valuable role in traffic noise analysis. This presentation will discuss the practical application of GIS for highway traffic noise impact analysis, including the custom tools, techniques, and methodologies employed to facilitate and manage the process as state and federal policies continue to evolve.

Brandon Batt, Edwards-Pitman Environmental

Brandon Batt is an air/noise specialist and serves as the head of GIS at Edwards-Pitman Environmental (EPEI), an Atlanta-based consulting firm. In his seven years at EPEI, Brandon has specialized in providing GIS and other technical solutions for a variety of disciplines in the firm, including the air/noise, archaeology, ecology, historic architecture, and NEPA groups. Brandon completed his undergraduate degree in 2007 at the University of Georgia, and completed his graduate degree through Penn State’s MGIS program in 2014. Brandon is a self-taught developer, and enjoys employing code and technology in providing solutions for EPEI as the organization continues to grow.

Luncheon Overview: Luncheons are held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month unless otherwise noted. They are intended to provide a social and friendly atmosphere for learning about the successes of our members and to provide opportunities for networking. All are invited to join and students are especially encouraged! You’ll earn 0.1 conference attendance points towards your GISP Certification by attending each luncheon.

Agenda: Meetings are orchestrated according to the following agenda:

11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Lunch and Networking
12:00 p.m. – 12:10 p.m. – Announcements
12:10 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. – Presentation
1:10 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. – Discussion

Cost
Member Pre-Register and Prepay (ends Sunday, May 10th at 11:59 pm): $12.00
Member Pre-Register and Pay at Door / Walk-In: $15.00
Non-Member Pre-Register and Prepay (ends Sunday, May 10th at 11:59 pm): $15.00
Non-Member Pre-Register and Pay at Door / Walk-In: $18.00
Register Now!

ESRI OSGEO Lidar and things

I would go into greater detail but I’ll just let you guys read along. I think I can do this in Three links with three small summaries. Full disclosure – I don’t work with lidar data – but I work with a lot of GIS data and your data format is important. Your software is important. I’ve run into this more than once where a client gets lost through salesman double speak:

From Rapidlasso: http://rapidlasso.com/2014/11/06/keeping-esri-honest/

So Rapidlasso has a lidar format – LAS. It compresses. It’s open. Rapidlasso also publishes software that makes use of the format. Almost everyone uses it. There’s an open source library to help you along. Except ESRI forked it back in late 2013 or early 2014. When the fork (Named zLAS or Optimized LAS) happened like any good software company they started getting clients pulled into the format and moving forward. Which more or less isn’t cool. Taking an open format and closing it off isn’t a good thing. Especially when you the practitioner of GIS doesn’t take the time to get informed.

Finally from OSGEO: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter

OSGEO Finally threw in and went “We’ve got a standard, quit naming your stuff like it’s approved by the working group, and keep your data open.” To me is a bit like talking to a wall but at least someone went on the record and said something. I’m also surprised at the continued silence of ASPRS in all of this. Does the letter do anything physically – well no – but it does show a group of people aren’t happy. Are the unhappy people ESRI users? More than likely not but it is a list of people with interest in the technology and the format.

ESRI responded: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-April/014141.html

In general – We support open standards and sorry not sorry. No mention of backing down or doing something different. Which is to be expected at this point – they need to sell software to you, the practitioner, and the only good way you do that is to control quite a bit of the market (disclaimer: I use ESRI Software) which they do.

So – what can you do? Sign the letter from OSGEO. Inform yourself. Salesman are everywhere and just be aware if you ask the advice of a salesman you’re going to get a lot of advice that may not be good for your organization. If you’re a 100% ESRI shop and you’re never gonna change – don’t worry about it. Continue. If you’re shop looking to grow and branch out – you might want to watch learn a bit more about all of this stuff.

Nothing is Bullet Proof.

So way back in the day when I actually went to church, about the only thing that ever stuck was “You aren’t promised tomorrow”. I always like that one idea that it might all just blow up today and that’s it. Lends a bit of excitement to it all.

I get up one morning after a several meetings with a client and shuffled over to the email and pop it open and get the “We need to talk about the Google Maps Engine Option….” email.  My clients are wonderful and different. Some days I do get a bit troubled when you read about (insert giant company here) and they’ve just landed the (insert number with multiple 0s after it). I want the small clients though – I enjoy those because we can do amazing things with tight budgets most of the time. Of course it would help if they were flush with liquid cash.

The worst job I think I ever did was for a client that had made a lot of phone calls and talked to some salesperson and bought about 40k of software. I got a call to “make some analysis” and it was pretty bad because they really had bought about 37k worth of the wrong software. I made it work. Once they had signed off on it I ran. That’s been close to 4 years ago and it still bugs me. The software they have bought if they are even still using it has flipped multiple times – I’m not even sure if it’s still offered as a desktop product.

The last client I picked up is starting at 0. I made the decision to go with QGIS for starters. Once we figure out what they want/need then we start looking at other options or we keep running with QGIS. The one thing we had sorta decided was this was probably going to roll into Google Maps Engine. Luckily we’ve both been a bit slower than normal.

I get up one morning and Google Maps Engine is no more. It’s Dead.  Luckily one of the person’s helping on this job is AppGeo. We talked. There are options for moving forward. There are a ton of options.

There are two that stick out:

I went to go meet with another prospective client and the last words out of our collective mouths were “I’m not worried about Google going anywhere”. They won’t. Their products might though. Google Wave. Google Buzz. I’m slightly concerned about Google Plus.  Google Maps Engine has another year of life support. I think since my career in this field has started I’ve learned AML, Avenue, some VB, ArcPy, Python, and last night was Python for QGIS/Plugins, and I’m just now dipping my myself into Spatial SQL with PostGIS up to my eyeballs.

It’s the problem with the giant companies. You aren’t a priority. Your money is though. You might get billed for a lot of software for someone making a sales quota. The software might just die off one day..or Change. It’s a lot of the heartburn I have on ArcGISOnline. I’ve hardly ever offered that as an option because you get too invested too quickly. Maybe one day I will – who knows. I hate to toss someone off to that and then there’s suddenly a change….and I’m left going “Well – you know – that’s just (fill in the blank) software company”.

I’d rather the process be bullet proof. Build a process so flexible off standards that it can’t die off easily. With my forestry client I’ve developed a process that’s fairly bullet proof. I need to explain it better and write directions but we’ve not had any problems over 2014 with data if we stick to the process. They are happy. I’m happy. Their clients are happy. I get paid.

So what am I doing? Looking at both options. Right now I’m leaning to CartoDB because it’s simple and powerful and I think it fits with the requirements of the client. I can explain it. ArcGISOnline is an option – but I got a bit turned off by the sudden Google/ESRI Love fest. No matter what – it’s the clients decision at the end of the day. I’m just providing a path and options for them to get what they want and not promising 40k worth of software in the interim.

Nothing is Bullet Proof….or promised. Poof. Dead. This software is no more.

Georgia URISA Luncheon February 2015

Location: Date: February 10, 2015
Time: 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Location: NEI
4275 Shackleford Rd., Suite 175
Norcross, Ga. 30093

REGISTER: HTTP://WWW.GAURISA.ORG

Server GIS and the Web

The Internet has changed nearly everything. While most GIS practitioners may be comfortable with desktop GIS tools, there is increasing power available via GIS servers and GIS web services. In this presentation (originally developed for a “GIS 101” course at Columbus State University) David reveals how server-based GIS is used to power two very different applications: a high-volume road conditions reporting web application (for a state DOT out west) and a simple web application to assist amateur radio contesters who operate mobile.

Biography:  David Rush, Rushtone, LLC
David calls himself a GIS Software Developer and works for Rushtone LLC out of Columbus, GA. He’s been writing code for one thing or another for 25 years (and in 5 different time zones), and applying those skills to the GIS world for 15 years (and counting).

Luncheon Overview: Luncheons are held on the 2nd Tuesday of every month unless otherwise noted. They are intended to provide a social and friendly atmosphere for learning about the successes of our members and to provide opportunities for networking. All are invited to join and students are especially encouraged! You’ll earn 0.1 conference attendance points towards your GISP Certification by attending each luncheon.

Agenda: Meetings are orchestrated according to the following agenda:

11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Lunch and Networking
12:00 p.m. – 12:10 p.m. -  Announcements
12:10 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. -  Presentation
1:10 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. -  Discussion

Cost
Member Pre-Register and Prepay (ends Sunday, February 8th at  11:59 pm): $12.00
Member Pre-Register and Pay at Door / Walk-In: $15.00
Non-Member Pre-Register and Prepay (ends Sunday, February 8th at 11:59 pm): $15.00
Non-Member Pre-Register and Pay at Door / Walk-In: $18.00