Paul Shapley's Open Source Geospatial Blog

Don't forget the dates...17th-21st September 2013 East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham. This event is directly following on from the AGI Conference. http://2013.foss4g.org/

Now that OSGIS is an acceptable alternative to proprietary offerings we need to be aware of 'the other' tools and libraries that rarely get a second look against the likes of QGIS, Geoserver and PostGIS. I'm referring to Cameron Shorter's excellent OSGEO Live DVD, a ready compiled .iso image which can be copied and run from a usb drive or DVD and used without installation on the host computer. It is worth checking this presentation for a comprehensive selection of Open Source Mapping Tools. http://live.osgeo.org/

Hope someone was lucky enough to get along to this weeks fully booked AGI Cymru Open Source event in Wrexham sponsored by Astun Tech and Dotted Eyes. Hope i wasn't the only AGI Cymru member to miss this one along with a 'no show' for the GeoDATA 2012 Seminar in Wales. At least we won the Grand Slam!

Some examples using the r.mapcalc module in Grass GIS - reposting soon

A Simple Tutorial On GUI Programming Using Qt Designer With PyQt4

There are advantages for using raster data over vector, any 'continuous' varying coverage is far better displayed as a raster or (pixel grid). The height data I'm using is low resolution lidar. One advantage of converting from raster to vector is that you can add columns to your data attribute table for further analysis at a later date. You can do some of this analysis with the GRASS Module (r.mapcalc) if you wish to stay with raster data. Step 1.      Open the GRASS Mapset which contains your lidar (raster) grid data (as above). Step 2.      Load your small area of data onto the QGIS canvas (above). Step 3.      In the GRASS Module List search for 'r.to.vect.area' , 'INPUT' file = 'testascii' , 'OUTPUT' file = 'testascii_vectorised' . I've always found it useful to name the output files with some indicator to which module or description was used to produce it. Step 4.      When ...

I  recently downloaded around a 1000 Arcinfo Ascii Grid files and wanted to import them into Grass GIS. My first thoughts were to use the 'r.in.gdal' module wxGUI (of course) but this wouldn't allow me to import all the files in one go. Then i tried the 'r.in.arc' module but again this only seemed to want one file at a time. Thanks to Markus Neteler for this solution...The 'GDALWARP' utility!. Step 1. In the command line navigate to the folder containing your '*.asc' files.   Step 2. Type the following: gdalwarp --config GDAL_CACHEMAX 8000 -wm 8000 *.asc mosaic.tif The processing of each file should follow this format on the command line as above. Job Done. An image entitled 'mosaic.tif' will have been created in the same directory. Step 3. Simply import the 'mosaic.tif' into Grass GIS. Apply your own colour table as necessary.  

Looking forward to a new update of an old favourite. http://geospatialdesktop.com/