North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

Tennessee

2018 TN Eastern Regional GIS Meeting – September 13th 2018

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This free  forum is intended for GIS users and anyone interested in the GIS Profession.

September 13th 2018
8:00AM – 4:00PM
Eastman Lodge
Kingsport, TN

Event Details and Registration will be available at:
http://www.tngic.org/2018-regionals.htm#2018east

Keynote Speaker
Stacey Whaley – Sevier County GIS Director

Pre-Forum Classes September 12th , 2018
• Lidar Workshop (September 12, 2018, 1:00 PM – 4:30 PM) – Paul Dudley, State of Tennessee
• GPS Data Collection w/ Mobile Devices Workshop (September 12, 2018 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM) – Cliff Hoeffner, Duncan Parnell
• ESRI ArcGIS Pro Workshop (September 12, 2018, 9:00 AM – 12:00 Noon) – Ian Feathers, ESRI

Pre-Forum GeoCaching Event and Picnic Social September 12th , 2018

This Forum is Sponsored by TNGIC  and hosted by NetGIS.

Southeast FOSS4G meeting

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Emails are going out to people and the gears are slowly starting to turn.

Last year several of use got together and held a FOSS4G “mini event” in Knoxville TN. It turned out pretty well with about 50 people coming from as far as 5 hours away to join in the fun. I think we had about 10 or 11 presentations – too many to be honest but I didn’t want to turn anyone down. We ran the event for free and if I remember (I’m not looking up the costs) the entire event ran something like 600 dollars. We had 4 sponsors (including myself in that one) and overall it rocked.

Two things:

  • I’ve had a large number of people ask “Are you doing this again?” and I had a blast doing it. Sooooooo – the answer has turned into “YES”. Granted I don’t run meetings like this for a living but everyone enjoyed themselves and the true spirit of Free and Open Source software for GIS was there. Yes it’s happening.
  • The big question is where and when. I’ve had offers of moving this to Chattanooga. I’ve had offers of Knoxville again. I’ve had other offers outside of my normal area. So I’ve got to decide and go “IT’S HERE” and we crank this up again. FOSS4GNA got in the way for spring so we’re gonna have to push this off a bit.
  • OK this is a third thing. I will probably charge just a wee bit for this one. Why? So we had something like 50 register. 5 dropped. 5 walked up out of nowhere. I bought food for 65 people so some left with an extra sandwich shoved in their pocket. If I run this for $10 bucks a piece people are likely to show up and it gives me a bit more money to play with to do things like deal with parking or snacks or fly someone in for the event. Yeah I said it. Fly someone in.
  • Fourth thing – workshops? I’ve debated some educational opportunities for this event – except that drags it into multi-iday. I’m OK with multi-day if it remains fun.

That was four things – you might wonder how I write blog posts and the answer is pretty much unedited most of the time.

So anyway – I have no clue what to call this gathering. Don’t really want to give it a name. Are un-conferences a thing still? Where conferences? Anyway – more news will be coming and if you want to help track me down and we’ll make this a thing for 2018.

 

 

Fulcrum Community and Hurricane Irma

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As of Saturday September 9th 2017 the graphic from the National Hurricane Center looks like:

For those of you in the path who are going to have immense fun with high winds, flooding, and possible flying houses carrying a small girl and her dog – Sign up for Fulcrum Community!

Fulcrum (http://Fulcrumapp.com) is providing Fulcrum Community Free to people dealing with Hurricane Irma. If your organization/group whoever needs a data collection app to use during this event all you need to do is download Fulcrum and request access.  It was (and still is) deployed for Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

Request Access Here: https://web.fulcrumapp.com/communities/hurricane-irma/?_ga=2.247777031.1408167726.1504721105-337609111.1500995109

Fulcrum runs on iOS and Android devices. Data (shapefile, File Based Geodatabase, PostGIS, excel, etc) can be retrieved from their cloud and used in any GIS Platform you might have (I use it with QGIS and feed the data live into there). It can also be pushed into any online accounts you might have (from Carto to ArcGIS Online).

It’s preloaded with:

  • Urban Search and rescue App
  • Disaster Shelters assessment App
  • Public Assistance Applicant Damage Report App
  • Individual Assistance for Inundation App
  • Aid Facility App
  • Hurricane Evacuee Info App
  • Wind Damage App
  • Damage Inspection App

Once again – It’s Free. Fulcrum has made employees available to help you with data collection.

Good luck to those of you dealing with the Hurricane.

Class, GRASS, and LAS – LIDAR in TN Part 3

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And now for Part 3.

So something exciting happened. If you’ve been keeping up with the TN GIS Data site you’ll notice a lot more data has been released in uncomfortably HUGE zip files. I downloaded two counties worth and have been exploring the data. In the meantime I started getting a few emails of “hey we’re getting data on a hard drive”. The cool thing with that is I received a tile from a county and it’s in LAS. If you read through some of my other rants I’ve been annoyed by the fact this is in zlas format. If you do some digging on zlas it’s more or less ESRI going “Hey we’ve made a format that only we use” and you have to unlock it to make it useful by anything else. We’ll – the counties are getting unlocked data. Victory.

BUT – there’s one more Problem. In all my examples I’ve been using GRASS. So I tried to pull the data in and nothing good happened. Actually – nothing happened. It was then I started learning about liblas and the LAS Library Versions. The short story is GRASS will read the 1.2 LAS Version. The data provided by the state is in 1.4. So you can’t automatically use GRASS to do anything with the data.

EXCEPT PDAL TO THE RESCUE! Probably the one thing I’m learning is I’m not short on tools to use with LIDAR. I’m up to: GRASS, PDAL, SAGA, and LASTOOLS. I will spare you all the information on how to get PDAL – read about it on the website. For those of you on Windows: if you have QGIS from the OSGEO Network Installer, you can download PDAL painlessly and be quite happy. As I’m running Linux on everything I grabbed a copy and compiled it and have it locally. I’m also quite happy with that.

So the one thing you need to know is this: pdal translate inputlasfile outputlasfile . Issue that command from the OSGEO window. Something wonderful happens – you get a LAS file v 1.2 you can run through GRASS.

You can do things like making a map of the intensity values:

Or a hillshade for posterity:

To get from an LAS file to anything above is about 10 minutes. Maybe 12 minutes. I’m running this on a laptop with a lot of RAM – but I could do this on a much lower end machine.

I’ve covered GRASS and LAS….Oh Class! Read your metadata. If you read Part 2 above you’ll notice there is a change in Classification with the new data:

Classification Value
Unclassified 1
Bare Earth 2
Low Noise 6
Water 9
Ignored ground 10
Bridges 17
High Noise 18

…and there – I finished my horrific joke of LAS, GRASS, and Class. I’m not explaining it.

It’s happening. LAS files for TN are out and about. My first thought is what can I do with this….my second is what are you TN Citizens going to do with it. My first two requests have been:

  • How do we get Tree Height?
  • Can we see Archaeological sites?

So – my next goal is to process A LOT of LIDAR at night. I’m going to set up a process to fix the format (unfortunately the data on the States website is still zlas), fix the library version, and then process a lot of data. Overnight? During the day? Who knows.

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