North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

FOSS4G

A tale of two FOSS4G meetings

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In the Spring of 2017 I had a small FOSS4G meeting in Knoxville TN and the general feeling after it finished was “When are we doing this again?”. So the conversation started and surprise – we had two meetings.

The first meeting happened in Knoxville on August 13th 2018. We had 9 presentations. The big headache I had with this meeting is it all comes down to sponsorship. I wanted it cheap – but I didn’t want to do in the hole again to do this. So we had sponsors. We also had a $10 dollar charge that could be offset with a scholarship if needed.

We had right around 50 people and covered everything from postgis tricks to measuring vegetation in the Great Smokey Mountains with LIDAR.

The second meeting was in Huntsville Alabama on August 14th 2018. The GIS Association of Alabama stepped forwarded and covered all the expenses. There was no charge for this one.

Fifty people came from the North End of the State to hear about QGIS, working with FOSS4G tools, and Jupyter Notebooks.

So what is the point? Actually is there a point? I sat around most of the day playing with how I wanted to summarize these two meetings. Meetings like this are hard. You have catering, a worry no one will show up, and a bigger worry no one will come and speak. We gave close to 100 people a chance to see something different. Which was double of what we did last year.

When I first started going to GIS meetings back in 1995 it was exciting. People would get up and speak and we’d all compare notes and figure out that we were all wrestling with the same problems. We were writing AMLS and buying workstations and digitizing old maps. Everyone had some sort of ESRI based user group. Maybe they were Intergraph. Maybe they had bought other software.

Flash forward to now and I’m consulting and not working for the Feds. User group meetings have morphed into these multi day extravaganzas that meet in your area…possibly not. You have to budget time and hotel reservations and it’s just a pain. So you end up not talking to your fellow geo people….or as we saw over the last two days people with specialties where geo is another trick in the bag.  Of course there is twitter and slack and facebook and linkedin and 100 different ways to talk to one another. What if you don’t?

So lets have a meeting centered around FOSS4G……or meetings. They don’t have to cost much. Maybe they cost $10 a person. Maybe they are free.  For Knoxville I poured about 2 to 3 hours a week over the course of 3 months…so about 40 hours. It wasn’t that hard – get a few people together and it’s less difficult. Find a low cost/free location. Huntsville had theirs in a courtroom. Knoxville had theirs at the University.

So in 2018 – I would like to get people together to talk about FOSS4G. Maybe you have a friend with a commercial solution in place for his organization. Maybe they have nothing. I think ESRI owes a large part of their success from the early days of getting people together to talk. We can do the same for QGIS/PostGIS/Geoserver/GDAL/etc. It’s a big world out there – you can mix and match about everything. I may not be able to make a North America Meeting (FOSS4GNA). Maybe these smaller meetings can scratch an itch for people and I can do that instead.

There’s no one to tell me I can’t. So what am I going next year? Workshops and a meeting in Knoxville. It sounds like the same thing will happen in Huntsville.

QGIS 3.2: Metadata

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On the heels of the “document your data” post  I’m about to turn my writing towards QGIS 3.2.

One of the things you should worry about with your data is documenting. Why did you do what you did with attributes and fields? Amazingly enough – most of my clients don’t know or just go “OK” and add whatever they think they need. They are busy. Busy people sometimes don’t slow down enough. In the case of your data – slow is better.

Which brings us to – Metadata. I don’t know the current state of metadata in the world. I searched the internet. My eyes went crossed as I read things and I restarted this post.

If you look at 2.18 (Current Long Term Release), metadata in QGIS looks like this:

 

qgis 2.18 metadata

Not bad considering the this is a newer development in the life of this Open Source Desktop.

If you take a look at QGIS 3.2:

qgis 3.2 metadata

You can write metadata. You can save it. You can reload it for later editing. This was a funded feature for QGIS by Arpa Piemonte ( The Italian EPA – which I would assume is comparable to the US EPA) and implemented by North Road. How excellent is that? Actually – very excellent. Imagine if my fellow users here in the US pitched in for development? Good things will happen.

So my next go around I’ll most likely be using this feature for documentation. For fun I might document parts of the current project and see how it blends with the FGDC Metadata standards.

Any documentation is better than none – so write!

Rolling out QGIS/PostGIS Part 1: Document

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I hated putting Part 1 up there. I start a lot of Part 1 posts and never get to Part 2…..I’m planning on this being a multipart post. After a while of screaming ‘hey why don’t we put QGIS everywhere’ I had a client decide to replace ArcGIS as their primary GIS. We were working along with QGIS/PostGIS/Fulcrum/ArcGIS and it finally got to a point to just switch. I’ve done a lot of QGIS installs and a lot of ArcGIS installs and enough PostGIS/PostgreSQL installs It doesn’t worry me – what does worry me? Data.

Way back in 1995 I was working for the Federal Government doing commercial mapping and the one thing I took for granted at the end was “the data dictionary”. We would work a project and at the end one of the guys would sit down and crack open a spreadsheet program and document every layer we had made and why we had made it. I guess sometime in 1996 or close to that we had FGDC metadata roll out and to be honest I don’t remember if we continued on with the Data Dictionary or dove into the FGDC Standard.

The client had a file based Geodatabase they had been working out of for a good while. It was functional. It had domains and subtypes and all the things you would hope a properly built ESRI file based database would have. The one thing it didn’t have were “reasons”. As in “why is this field here and not here and why is this here?” There were a lot of domains. Not so many subtypes though.  Apparently there had been somewhat regular revolving door of consultants. Everyone added their spin on things and here I sat….adding my spin…or should I say changing it all. So that started a whole list of questions which ends with me writing everything down in Google Docs. Yes – 22 something years later I built a data dictionary to describe all the attributes and columns.

Domains
Domains in ArcGIS

If I look back at my time for data conversion and banging my head on the wall – 60% was asking “Why?”. Then documenting the responses. In some cases we just had to accept “that’s just the way it is” and in others I was able to trim some bloat out of the database. I still think there needs to be a second round of trimming on this database.

So I’m going to spend some time talking about this move. Then talk about QGIS 3.2 because that came out – and there are things in that release that make me want to upgrade them off the LTR right now. For those of you not familiar with QGIS once a year you get a Long Term Release. It’s awesome because “things don’t change” – it’s stable. So we have it in enough places it’s going to sit until October at least.

Part 1 for all of it’s rambling ends…or starts right here: Document the data. Sit with the GIS person and ask why to the point you’ll get on his or her nerves. Your default answer to everything should be “delete”. Except you don’t. Use  ArcGIS because there are going to be a few things you aren’t going to find talking to anyone.  Once you’ve written everything down you can think of then you can start. Take the goofiest layer you have and move it into PostGIS. Check it. Double check it. Check it again. Check Field Lengths. Check Date Fields. Check to make sure someone hasn’t “shapefiled” your data and you’re left with “descriptio” vs descriptions.

Example – this database had two fields that completely baffled me: Location and Place. Location was for “where” the data resided as in an address. Place was a placeholder for notes. I had no clue. Luckily the client was patient as I asked more and more questions. Note the screen shot.

QGIS Screenshot

The other reason I’m writing this all up here – I think this is about to be a service: Migrate over to a free and open source server that is commercially supported for clients that can’t afford all the licensing that comes with an ESRI option. Of course I don’t want to call it an ‘open geo suite’ since that name has been used. I don’t plan on making downloads. My one big heartburn was I didn’t load geoserver for them – I couldn’t justify the overhead and banging my head on Windows Server more plus they had a bare bones server. Being able to edit the data was more important than pushing services out. Maybe later – but for now – They are editing and making maps and making decisions based off where we are.

 

 

Southeast FOSS4G Knoxville Updates

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FOSS4G Logo

First off – Tickets are live.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/foss4g-knoxville-2018-tickets-47279397952

There is a charge this year to help with lunch and parking. Last year lunches were about 6 dollars and parking was 5 dollars. The fee plus sponsorship money should help with everything remaining balanced. If the fee is an issue – please let me know and we will work something out.

Sponsorship:

Right now we’re at $300 dollars promised and I have $100 of that in my hands. If you want to sponsor – it’s not that glamorous of an affair – we’re not having vendor booths but we will give you all the recognition we can before the event , at lunch, and as it ends. We’re attempting to start a FOSS4G movement in this area and so far it’s working. I’ll probably have a cut off for donations because I don’t want to make money off this – this is a break even affair.

Speakers:

Right now we’re at 2 speakers and about 3 more have promised to come and speak. So – please – if you want to hang out with your peers. We’re Shooting for 20 minutes and 5 minutes for questions. Which should give us room for about 14 or so speakers. Maybe a hair more or a hair less. I haven’t worked that schedule out yet – BUT I’m getting there.

Email List:

To help with keeping people informed  we have an email list and you can add your name to get updates. I’ll also be emailing the OSGEO US, OSGEO Discuss, and Southeast OSGEO lists also as this develops.

Wiki:

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/20180813-knoxville-foss4g

 

Please come hang out in Knoxville August 13th 2018 and enjoy the group. Last years even was fun and packed with a ton of information.

 

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