North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

Tennessee

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.

Fidget Spinning and OpenStreetMap

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Yeah – It’s been a while since I’ve talked about OSM. I’ve been busier than normal – and it’s a good thing. I don’t have a lot of time to “learn” or “play” with much of anything. I’ve helped a bit with the MapLesotho  and I’ve done a few other special projects but I’ve more or less just been hands off with OpenStreetMap.

So with what little bit of free time I’ve had I’ve popped open JOSM and started moving roads to their “close enough to right” location using the BING imagery in East Tennessee. It’s fun work if I get a spare 30 minutes and can make some quick edits. I call it my fidget spinning for a mapping guy.

It’s amazing how bad the roads are…and the major water bodies. There are some major roads which have been corrected. About all the residential roads haven’t. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to name a lot of the roads. It’s slowly getting fixed. Overall East TN is much improved but it needs more improvement.

In all of this I’ve had a couple of people want to get involved – so I’m slowly dragging them into the OSM world. I’m a bit torn as I’m hesitant to say “join the mailing lists”. As I haven’t and won’t.

The big thing I did notice – Digital Globe Imagery. In JOSM/ID you have access to it. It’s newer in many cases than the bing imagery – although the resolution isn’t as good. Except – I can live with that because I’m finding new building construction. I’m finding new road construction. So my edits will be more current.

Bing

Digital Globe

Of course I need to get back into some form of community involvement. At one time I had a blurb on my business website on OSM and how to get involved locally. At some point we started a Facebook group that has fallen into 3 years of no posts. Soooo – it’s starting back up as a place to post information. Maybe at some point I’ll also find that wiki page I started and add to it.

Adventures in LIDAR and GRASS in Tennessee: Part 2

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Sometimes it takes a while to follow up on a blog post. A while back I wrote more or less “I got me some LIDAR what can I do with it?”. Well…..

First I need to learn about LIDAR and at some point (probably during Part 3) names will be named. There have been several people in the FOSS4G world helping me move along and learn.

Second thing I needed to do was ask questions. I asked a lot. I learned:

  • TN has been participating in 3DEP. So this LIDAR Data (as well as several other products) are coming from that program.
  • I need to read metadata.

So when I left you on my original post I was importing LIDAR into GRASS and somewhat failing miserably. After reading the metadata the point data was classified as follows:
Class 1 = Unclassified. This class includes vegetation, buildings, noise etc.
Class 2 = Ground
Class 7= Noise
Class 8= Model Key Points
Class 9 = Water
Class 12=Overlap Points (high scan angles)
Class 13= Bridge Deck Points

So this gets a little bit easier. Using v.in.lidar I can now build a DEM and pull the values coded for bare earth straight in.

Selection_030

Hillshaded for posterity:

Selection_031

Once I started “playing” fun things started happening. I know this isn’t 100% right because I have more to learn. What if I import LIDAR data coded as vegetation and subtract that from the DEM. I have Vegetation height. With the Ortho image I can shove more knowledge toward my foresters. I also have some negative values I’m going to investigate.

Selection_032

You may be going “Well that’s great you’re sitting here doing crap anyone can do”. Possibly. For a small entity with limited budget you can whip out GRASS and start doing things. This was a 10 minute endeavor for one tile. I also generated slope and I’m working on building a solar radiance map of the area. Now I want to process the entire county for elevation. Can I? I will also dump this out to QGIS because I can.

The big kicker in all of this THIS IS FREE DATA. Well – except for the zlas problem.  State of TN – take the lead and open the format for the users. Switch to las. 

So what am I doing for Part 3:

  • Upgrading GRASS to 7.2 (I’m running 7.0.4)
  • Count LIDAR points on the ground – the metadata claims one point per meter.
  • Will someone give me the RAW data? I’m attending a conference where people of influence will be – I’m going to ask.
  • UAV?
  • Building Height with elevation above ground?

I have a lot to learn and I am by no means an expert. LIDAR started getting popular about the time I walked out of my federal job and I never have clients that go “We’ve got this data sitting around”. I’ve never had to deal with it but now that I have a source to work with there’s a lot I can do. I have a community of people that will answer questions when I have them. Never stop learning.

Anyway – Part 3 is coming and it won’t take months for me to get to it.

 

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