This post covers the necessary steps to use osm2po on Windows. Osm2po is both, a converter and a routing engine. It parses OpenStreetMap data and makes it routable. While osm2pgrouting seems to be limited by the amount of memory that is available on your system, osm2po is able to convert large sets like europe.osm. It generates SQL Insert scripts for PostGIS, compatible with pgRouting and Quantum GIS.
To get started, download osm2po and an OSM binary file like e.g. austria.osm.pbf. Extract osm2po and you’ll find the .jar file together with the tool’s documentation (German only though).
PgRouting is great. But (Yes, there is always a “but”.) those queries are not easy to remember. That’s why I started work on a pgRouting GUI today. It’s actually a QGIS plugin which I’ll call “pgRouting Layer” and it is based on Pablo T. Carreira’s “Fast SQL Layer” plugin which can execute arbitrary SQL statements against a PostGIS or SpatiaLite database and add the results in a map layer.
This first prototype supports pgRouting’s shortest_path() function as described in “A Beginners Guide to pgRouting”. Once supplied with the necessary information about attribute field names, the plugin allows you to route between pairs of nodes. For convenience, the resulting layer is named after its start and end node.
some shortest paths using "pgRouting Layer" plugin
Besides normal routing capabilities, I’d like to develop this plugin towards a user friendly tool for catchment zone analysis. If you are interested in teaming up to work towards this goal, let me know.
You probably know this video from my previous post “Tweets to QGIS”. Today, I want to show you how it is done.
After importing the Twitter JSON file, I saved it as a Shapefile.
Every point in the Shapefile contains the timestamp of the tweet. Additionally, I added a second field called “forever” which will allow me to configure Time Manager to show features permanently.
A "forever" field will help with showing features permanently.
To create the flash effect you see in the video, we load the tweet Shapefile three times. Every layer gets a different role and style in the final animation:
Layer “start_flash” is a medium sized dot that marks the appearance of a new tweet.
Layer “big_flash” is a bigger dot of the same color which will appear after “start_flash”.
Layer “permanent” is a small dot that will be visible even after the flash vanishes.
styling the tweet layers
We’ll plan the final animation with a time step size of 10 seconds. That means that every animation frame will cover a real-world timespan of 10 seconds.
We configure Time Manager by adding all three tweet layers:
Layer “start_flash” starts at the orginal time t. Layer “big_flash” gets an offset of -10 seconds, which means that it will display ten seconds after time t. Layer “permanent” gets an offset of -20 seconds and ends at time forever.
Layers can be timed using the "offset" feature.
Finally – in Time Manager dock – we can start the animation with a time step size of 10 seconds:
Use a time step size of 10 seconds so it fits to the offset values we specified earlier.
Besides watching the animation inside QGIS, Time Manager also enables you to export the animation to an image series using “Export Video” button. Actual video export is not implemented yet, but you can use mencoder (Windows users can download it from Gianluigi Tiesi’s site) on the resulting image series to create a video file:
Colorbrewer is a great resource for visually pleasing gradients that can be used for mapping. It was already possible to use color brewer ramps in QGIS but it was necessary to create the ramp with the final number of classes in mind.
Creating a Colobrewer ramp
That’s why I sat down and created continuous ramps from the Colorbrewer data:
When giving presentations using a computer that’s not your own, trying to show video clips can end badly. It’s much safer to use animated GIFs instead. Luckily it’s easy to convert videos to animated GIF on the command line using mplayer:
The Viennese tree cadastre “Baumkataster” contains all trees growing on city property. Amongst the attributes you can find the tree species and year of plantation as well as the diameter of it’s crown.
Using the crown diameter, we can create a foliage map of the city of Vienna. (Note that trees on private ground are missing.)
trees in Vienna scaled by crown diameter
Here’s a high-resolution version of the map: PDF (10 MB)
The tree cadastre is still under construction. If you miss a tree, let the OGD team know.
The latest development build version of QGIS contain a great new feature: Expression-based labeling, brought to you by Nathan.
QGIS new labeling dialog is extended by a new expression builder that facilitates building your own expressions using layer attributes together with various functions for data manipulation:
expression builder with function help
Thanks to it’s preview ability, it is easy to see how changes affect the final label output:
combine fields and follow changes in preview
For an in depth introduction into this new feature, check Nathan’s blog and enjoy!
“Rectangles ovals digitizing” plugin by Pavol Kapusta adds editing tools that make it really easy to create rectangles, squares, circles and ellipses. These are the tools provided by the new plugin:
The function with the glorious name “find_node_by_nearest_link_within_distance” is part of pgRouting and can be found in matching.sql.
“This function finds nearest node as a source or target of the nearest link”
That means that we can use this function e.g. to find the best road network node for a given address.
The function returns an object of type link_point:
CREATE TYPE link_point AS (id integer, name varchar);
To access only the id value of the nearest node, you can use:
SELECT id(foo.x)
FROM (
SELECT find_node_by_nearest_link_within_distance(
'POINT(14.111 47.911)',
0.5,
'nw_table')::link_point as x
) AS foo
This is a follow-up to my post “Google Maps”-Style Road Maps in QGIS and an answer to @mattwigway’s comment about how to create styles for e.g. US interstates.
interstate example map
To create a style like this, you can use the “Marker line” feature. The marker can be built using a blank SVG shield and additional text markers to add the road number on top.
creation of the interstate shield marker
This marker line can be put “on central point” to only show up once along the road.
creation of the interstate style
You can find interstate and other shield style on e.g. Wikimedia Commons. With Inkscape, you can remove the number and thus create a blank marker template.
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings 
