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Showing posts from 2014

Happy New Year

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Lidar Sources (UK Commercial and Free)

I'm always looking for UK free LiDAR sources on the web. Some of the useful (sometimes non-free) ones I've come across are listed below. https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/research/landscapes-and-areas/aerial-survey/archaeology/lidar/ english-heritage - the light fantastic data.gov.uk/dataset/lidar-digital-surface-model vterrain.org/Locations/uk/ lidar-uk.com https://www.geomatics-group.co.uk/geocms/ geomatics-group uk catalogue shapefile Andrew Richman Presentation https://www2.getmapping.com/Products/LiDAR http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/7f1280cf215da6f8001eae5c2f019fe8 http://www.lidar.co.uk/ http://www.lidarbasemaps.org/ http://lidar.cr.usgs.gov/ If you know of any more please let me know so i can make this a definitive UK listing for Commercial and Free Sources of LiDAR.

Grass 7 Beta 4 just announced.

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Hope you are having a great Christmas. Just wanted to remind the Free and Open Source Geospatial Community about the Grass GIS 7 (Beta 4) release of a couple of days ago. My apologies if this has been copied to social media sites but worth mentioning non-the-less. As a huge fan of this workhorse of a product it has some major new enhancements and features in order to bring it more in line with the rest of the wxPython Geospatial Community. Have a look at the following link: http://grass.osgeo.org/news/39/15/GRASS-GIS-7-0-0-beta4/ Below is a quick example (exported as an animated gif) of how easy it is to produce a series of raster map overlays onto some base lidar data (using the 'r.lake' module and the new animation module) in order to get an idea of the effects of rising river water levels over a thousand year period as a result of global warming at the current sea level rise of 3mm per year (for this demo no other environmental factors have been taken into account).

Is technology getting in the way of the main objective? That server is down again!

Have you noticed what has happened to GIS in the last five years? It has become a mammoth task to do (essentially) the same thing that we were doing fifteen years ago. That is to disseminate data for users to use and manipulate, only now the technology is so much more complex that potential new users have not only lost interest but the costs and workloads have escalated out of all proportion requiring an new intermediate breed of specialists and consultants each with their own idea of what the end user 'really' needs based on solutions which previously worked for financial, banking and payroll systems. If I want data I don't care how I get it and in whatever format is available in so long as I can 'find' it, 'download' it and 'translate' it, tools that are present even in the most basic GIS package. Now I cannot 'find' it unless I know the correct search term and the correct 'Portal' I cannot 'download' it unless I re

Processing Landsat 8 bands in Grass GIS

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QGIS seems to get all the attention these days and perhaps rightly so. Grass on the other hand shows no sign of waning in the 'SAAS' world, if anything it has a continuing loyal bunch of users but in South Wales (UK) it is the outsider, it has an odd non microsoft like non-conforming interface. If you listen to the I.T departments it is too difficult for users to grasp, has an old fashioned command line and odd sounding module names like "i.fusion.brovey". Two years ago i would have walked the other way but since version 6 and a Python GUI there really is worthy alternative. As with anything considered 'too' difficult for newcomers (fed up with 'newby') the long nights spent trying to grapple with 'mapsets' and 'regions' will eventually give way and reward you with the power and control over your work flows, customisations, alternative's and options in fact the Grass complexity hides a very simple no nonsense 'frill free'