North River Geographic Systems Inc

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Recap of the TNGIC Conference of 2022

Back on Feb 12th of 2020 I was sitting in Virginia at a conference going “Yeah I dunno – this whole virus thing sounds weird”. Two years later I was walking into Montgomery Bell State Park at the first in-person conference I’ve been to since Feb 12th 2020. I can be and usually am gloriously wrong. Covid was slightly more than weird. Sometime last year I declared “I think in person conferences are done”. That’s not the case either.

I could tell you a lot about the conference: Talks about geo, software, trials and tribulations of the last 2 years. I’m not. I needed a break. I checked out for most of the conference. Normally I hate going to Montgomery Bell but this time it was different. It’s 5000 acres of State Park and it’s pretty nice and quiet. So all those emails I had to rush down to my room to deal with was me sitting on the balcony not answering email. Take that College kids who wanted to know about GIS from a professional. That’s how I do it.

So what stuck out for me in this conference – the discussion of the “conference”. In general everyone was pretty happy to be in the same area and trading notes and talking (possibly trading covid – we will know shortly). There was talk of working remote which a lot of people had done for 6 months at least. Some still were remote. Some were never going back in the office.

If you divide the group into thirds here is how it felt to me:

  • The last two years of being remote wasn’t any fun.
  • The last two years of being remote was awesome.
  • In person is good. Remote is also good. I’m not committing to anything.

How did I conduct this scientific poll? Walking around talking to people.

I fall into the last “non-committal” group. Why? The 2021 FOSS4G meeting – the amount of knowledge coming out of that recorded for the masses was incredible. …but….it’s hard to get nuance if you’re not talking to someone face to face. So – in person is better….BUT……I attended one conference in Britain “live”….so remote……

One person had rigged up his camper trailer to allow him to travel and work. One other person I spoke with had done quite a bit of traveling while remote. One person I spoke with went home for a few months and then were back in the office because – the whole reason they were there was the job was the site and the site was the job. Remote didn’t work for them.

One email this morning announced a new discord server for a user group. Another group has slack. Another still relies on email. People as always are making the best out of what they know even if it doesn’t work for everyone. I sorta hate slack and love email. There’s a whole group younger than myself that loves Discord. Email is still the lowest common denominator for about everyone. Communication – it’s a little bit complicated.

Anyway – it’s still weird out there. I look forward to it remaining weird moving forward. Do conferences go back to “normal” – I sort of hope they don’t continue like it’s 2019. Viva Remote. Viva in person.

The TN 911 Project

So next week is the TN GIS meeting at Montgomery Bell State Park. Which will be the first conference I’ve walked into in 2 years and 2 months. I’m doing two things while I’m there – well three:

  • Walk a lot
  • Teach an OSM workshop
  • Give a talk on the 911 project.

So – the 911 project. I actually haven’t said much about it in a while. Well…..it’s gotten interesting.

Back in 2000 I did a talk on PostGIS day about how this had worked and by that point the project was about 2 years old. At that point I had talked to a lot of people in TN on the project and the general feel was that this was a lone wolf project – in other words no one else would want to use it. Plus I was getting a little anxious on how to grow it. I was even advertising it as a “server” – which yes it’s all housed in postgresql/postgis with QGIS as a front end.

So I did something weird and tossed it up on github and started working on it. Cleaning up code. Issuing tickets to myself and generally working. Out of nowhere Kyle Snyder came in and cleaned up some code. Now there’s two of us “doing things”.

So what’s the point? Well the point is I hope more counties in TN actually use it. I’m going to discuss it next week and show a running example. Basically at this point we just about have the TN NG911 standard 95% “running” as published in the manual. Hopefully by next week we have some instructions. I’ve got a few menus set up for QGIS. You get a ton of flexibility “out of the box”. Plus all this cleanup is going to be good for Henry County as I’ll use it to update what they have after some more testing.

The next big thing is I’ve been experimenting with PyQGIS and the discussion between myself and Kyle has been “what can we offload to QGIS and what does postgis do better?”. Do we set up QGIS to do address ranges on roads? Maybe we set up some pre-address or auto-addressing. Possibly that’s a processing toolbox thing. What if we work it all out and leave it as a PostGIS script? We’ll figure it out.

Anyway – It’s pretty exciting. It is a bit messy currently. Kyle’s teaching me about Github Projects. I’m explaining my insane ideas. We’re pushing and pulling all that we can. It is nice to dump all this out into the open for everyone to pick at – maybe someone else in the 911 “address maintenance space” finds it useful.

Need some help? Yell.

Exploring QGIS April 27th-28th 2022

So NRGS has a Exploring QGIS class coming up on April 27th and 28th of 2022. This is a gentle introduction to the the best FOSS4G desktop software you’ll ever use.

Here’s how it’s going to go:

  • Software: QGIS 3.22
  • Location: Virtual
  • Dates: April 27th -28th 2022
  • Two days from 12 to 4 EST
  • $175 – Register here!
  • Certificate for all attendees
  • Because it’s been just a bit – 20% off with Code QGISRocks

So what do we cover? A little bit of everything from the interface to processing, to editing, to making a map. It’s all recorded. It should be fun. Bring other data. Bring Questions. Bring a good sense of humor.

Can’t afford a ticket? Gimme a shout!

Come take a class and support the QGIS Project! To date we’ve pushed about 980 dollars US back to the QGIS Project.

QGIS: Functions, Forms, and Processing

Here’s another update on training. It’s been a bit since I’ve rattled on about the “Part 2” class of QGIS. It took me a whole to digest training and where I wanted to go with this after teaching it last fall.

Almost 6 months ago I had taught the inaugural QGIS “Advanced” Class. It was a bit rough around the edges as all first classes are – it took about 12 hours and I went “That was not as good as it could be”.

What did I have right and what did I have wrong and how could this all blend together tighter with The Exploring QGIS Class? What I did realize is I had sort of missed the point with the functions and expressions portions. That left the rest of the class uneven. Functions/expressions in QGIS have this amazing amount of flexibility and I wasn’t explaining it well.

Functions and expressions:

  • Present in Field Calculator
  • They Can be used in Processing tools
  • Functions and expressions Can be used in Forms.
  • Field Calculator edits. Editing makes use of forms. Editing can make use of processing tools.
  • Again in Layouts.

The class isn’t solely about functions and expressions – but it’s a common thread I inadvertently wove through the class. I went back and removed more than I added. Each section references the previous material. It’s a slow dance showing you how you can work with data in QGIS.

I end this whole thing with SQL. SQL? Yes and I really don’t want you doing anything but listening at the end and seeing how that section replaces a model we built in the processing tools sections. All that leads to………Part 3. Every good story these days is in threes.

Part 3 is QGIS and PostGIS. Class 2 ends with the first chapter off the next class. That class will start off with SQL, morph into Virtual Layers, pushing your data into Postgis, working with the database, and finally closing QGIS and just using PostGIS.

Three classes that take you on a data-centric journey. I do realize I’m missing Cartography. I’m missing 3D visualizations. That does bug me a bit – but I do want to push this idea of a data centric workflow. Get your data right and the maps will follow. Well – sorta follow. Cartography and Visualization is an art and science unto itself and I’m not ready for that at the moment. People are doing that much better than I could hope to achieve.

The intermediate class will be taught three times this year. I’m setting up the eventbrite pages now. When it’s live I’ll make a small announcement. Show up and take a class. Every participant creates a donation back to QGIS.

QGIS, 3DEP, and You

I did a demo the other day for some foresters and I almost wanted to walk into traffic by the end of it. Not because of anything with QGIS and LiDAR – but I think I finally got “Virtual Fatigue”.

Part of the demo worked amazingly well. If you’re not familiar with TN’s LiDAR Program most (I think all) of the state is covered in free LiDAR. Yes Free. You can grab a county’s worth of LiDAR data and get to work. Here’s the other thing you need to know – it’s in zLas format. Yes – zLAS – the most annoying of the formats. I have to uncompress it using LAS Liberator. Then there is about 20 minutes of hoping I’m not at the corner of 4 tiles. It’s painful.

PDAL has been the engine that has been making LiDAR viewable in QGIS for a couple of versions now. I don’t tend to use it a lot (because I don’t do a ton of work with LiDAR) but when needed it it’s invaluable. For me the entire crunch of doing anything with lidar has been:

  • up to a 50 GB Download for an entire county
  • Conversion from zlas to laz
  • Define the vertical and horizontal projection of a tile using PDAL.

For the demo I wanted to do something “lidar” for a group of foresters to show them that FOSS4G works and we’re not just some weird hobby. I knew PDAL was being used on the backend of the USGS LiDAR Explorer but had not used it.

You can select an area (this is only for the US) and ONLY GET THAT AREA. I picked a pine plantation that had been partially thinned. I select the area using the interface. Choose my download format and PROJECTION PARAMETERS and then something cool happens. I generate a PDAL Pipeline JSON file and from the command line:

pdal pipeline process.json

I drag and drop the output of the above process into QGIS:

My life just got a lot easier and my blood pressure dropped like 10 points. LiDAR in TN is no longer a multi-hours scripted affair full of yelling. It’s literally pick what you want and then do the thing you want to do. QGIS gets easier. GRASS gets easier. Probably easier for the ESRI users also.

Anyway – check out LiDAR explorer from the USGS (especially if you’re in TN). It’s worth a few minutes of digging to learn about this tool.