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Author Archives: underdark

Browsing Spatio-Temporal Data With QGIS Time Manager Plugin

By
2010-09-30
GIS, QGIS, spatio-temporal data
1 Comment

The aim of Time Manager plugin for QGIS is to provide comfortable browsing through temporal geodata. A dock widget provides a time slider and a configuration dialog for your layers to manage.

a wildlife telemetry dataset managed by Time Manager

Time Manager filters your vector datasets and displays only features with timestamps in the user specified time frame.

two views of the scenery, using a two-days time frame

Give it a try! The project website can be found at http://anitagraser.github.com/TimeManager/.

Firefox Plugin “WMS Inspector”

By
2010-09-27
GIS, OGC

I just stumbled upon the following handy Firefox plugin:

WMS Inspector provides a set of tools for integrators and developers that work with the Web Map Service (WMS) standard. It aims to ease repetitive tasks like debugging requests or checking which individual services are used from an online mapping application. It also focuses on provide a user-friendly output of the different services’ capabilities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/91406/

A Comparison of Google, Bing and Yahoo! Maps

By
2010-09-16
GIS
1 Comment

Justin O’Beirne from 41Latitude has compiled a thorough – and not that “brief” – comparison of Google Maps, Bing Maps and Yahoo! Maps:

FOSS4G 2011 in Denver

By
2010-09-16
GIS

Now that FOSS4G 2010 is over, we’re looking forward to next year. The free and open source GIS community is going to meet in Denver from September 12-16, 2011.

Visualizing Networks – Flow Map Layout

By
2010-09-16
Network, Visualization

I just stumbled upon this interesting piece of code for visualization of network flow on gis.stackexchange.com: It’s called “Flow Map Layout” and was developed at Standford University (project page).

Flow Map Layout

Flow Map Layout mapped on a globe

The corresponding paper describes the methodology and shows interesting example uses.

The Search for OS GIS Supporting Discontinuous Projections

By
2010-09-10
GIS

Discontinuous or Interrupted Projections like the Butterfly Map are certainly exotic. But does that also mean that there are no open source GIS supporting them?

Butterfly Map example

This question on gis.stackexchange.com is awaiting an answer :)

Update:

Using Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) it seems relatively easy to create a map showing an Interrupted Sinusoidal Projection. Here’s an example out of their manual (PDF, page 121):

World map using the Interrupted Sinusoidal projection

World map using the Interrupted Sinusoidal projection

Online Workshops from FOSS4G 2010

By
2010-09-08
GeoServer, GIS, OpenLayers, PostGIS

For all of us who couldn’t attend FOSS4G in Barcelona this year there are some of the great workshops available online:

Calling GRASS Functions Inside a QGIS Python Plugin

By
2010-09-07
GRASS, QGIS

You can call almost any function in Python, using “grass.run_command(“function”, ….)”.

For your inspiration, you find GRASS Python scripts in their SVN.

QGIS Now Supports Non-spatial Tables!

By
2010-09-02
QGIS
5 Comments

Great news everyone: Since revision r14172, QGIS supports non-spatial tables! This means you can finally load your CSV files directly into QGIS and work with them, e.g. use “Join by attribute”.

Loading the CSV file is performed using “Add Vector layer”. (Yes, the terminology is a little confusing here.) The resulting layer will be shown in the legend list and the content can be view via attribute table.

Great work Marco!