Open Source GIS solutions gain more and more attention in the Geoinformation sciences community over the past years. Now there are numerous usable and stable Open Source libraries and tools for spatial data management, customization and visualisation available. Open Source in general has a very strong relation to topic of Interoperability and Open GI Standards (e.g., Standards specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)).
The OpenRoutingService.org initiative has worked on the OGC Specification “Open Location Services” (OpenLS) Before the implementation of OpenRoutingService.org several other services based on open standards have been realized. In near futures these implementations should be available at http://www.freeOpenLS.org.
Since April 8th of this year OpenRoutingService.org is accessible online. The services uses free geodata from OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and provides routing functionality based on the OGC LopenLS Route Service Specification. The plan is to provide routing based on OSM also for other software systems or as web service. Currently the service is enhanced in case of functionality, because until now it is limited to Germany. The area of Germany in OSM covers more than 600.000 streets, which must be transformed into topological graphs for the routing module. During this transformation more then 1.3 million features are generated.
They have tested the performance with different routing-libraries (geotools, pgrouting) and algorithms (Dijkstra, A*).
One further interesting feature of OpenRoutingService.org is the “Avoid Area” function. Here the user can enter an area (e.g, dangerous area), which is excluded in the routing process.
[via: Zur Kopplung von OpenSource, OpenLS und OpenStreetMaps in OpenRouteService.org (Neis, P., Zipf, A.)]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Will it be the next step in HCI after multi-touch?
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Dave Bouwman has done an informal “2008 Geospatial Developer Survey“. 320 people took the time and have completed the survey. He has now published some results.
I’ll sumerize some interesting points:
The role of people, who participated:
His statement:
The split across titles was somewhat interesting - almost even between “Analysts who write code”, and those who consider themselves “GIS Software Developers”, with “Software Engineer” trailing slightly. I see this as a progression from “getting things done” coding towards more “built to last” coding.
Primary Development Language:
The idea of this question was to get a feel for what you most commonly work with. “.NET” was the prominent platform with a 61% share.
Here is how the “other” broke out by count of times they were mentioned. As Dave I’m also surprised that there are still people using VB6 and VBA.
Use of ESRI products:
This is an interesting resut showing the dominace of ESRI in the GIS community.
Link: http://blog.davebouwman.net/2008/05/27/GeospatialDeveloperSurveyResults.aspx
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
The first map (Figure 1) shows the amount of research done in different fields. Medicine and Molecular & Cell Biology is very present in this map. But also the Geosciences area is not so small. Computer Science and Geosciences together are the foundation of GIS.
Figure 1: (Click on the map to enlarge)
If we also consider other sciences like Operations Research we are dealing with Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS). For example if we combine Geosciences with Mathematics we are taking about Geocomputation. And there a lot of other disciplines which can be compined with Geosciences.
Figure 2: André Skupin, In Terms of Geography, 2005
This map (Figure 2) is a visualization derived from more than 22,000 abstracts submitted to the Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers during a ten-year period from 1993 to 2002. The methodology is centered around the representation of each document as an n-dimensional vector of terms. These vectors are used to construct a neural network model of the geographic knowledge domain using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The neural network model is then transformed into two types of information: (1) a landscape in which elevation indicates the degree to which a single, focused topic is addressed; and (2) multilevel text labels associated with regions in the visualization. The final rendering was executed in standard geographic information systems (GIS) software.
[via SciMaps.org]
Recent Comments