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GDAL2Tiles Summer of Code Project
posted by Satri
on Monday August 27, @11:19AM
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from the all-good-things-you-can-do-during-summertime dept.
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st_0x0ef writes "From Berkaoui blog : "[...] Tiling and speed have always been issues with Internet Mapping — especially with Raster Images. Just recently Klokan Petr Pridal described his Summer of Code project as being able "to allow easy publishing of raster maps on the Internet. Your raster file (like TIFF/GeoTIFF, MrSID, ECW, JPEG2000, JPEG, PNG) is converted into a directory structure of small tiles ( TMS compatible ), which you can just copy to the webserver. Simple webpages with viewers based on Google Maps and OpenLayers are generated as well — so anybody can comfortably explore your maps on-line and you do not need to install or configure any special software (like mapserver) and the map displays very fast in the webbrowser. [...]"" See also this informative OSGeo wikipage on the project.
Related Stories
Industry: GDAL / OGR 1.4.1 Released
[+]
The GDAL-Dev list indicated GDAL/OGR 1.4.1 has been released. From the announcement: " This is a "Stable Branch Release",
which is something new for GDAL/OGR. That means it contains virtually no
new features, but it does contain all important bug fixes since 1.4.0. It
should be possible for anyone using GDAL/OGR 1.4.0 to upgrade to GDAL/OGR
1.4.1 with a minimum of concern of new bugs or disruptive changes." Here's the overview of changes. GDAL/OGR is arguably the most important geospatial open source software, being used by numerous open source geospatial projects and proprietary projects including Google and ESRI.
Industry: OSGeo Welcomes 16 Students to the Summer of Code
[+]
chorner writes "This just in via Frank Warmerdam: 'OSGeo has selected sixteen students to participate in development efforts spread across the GDAL, GRASS, GeoTools, PostGIS, uDig, and GeoServer projects as part of the Google Summer of Code for 2007.
Google is providing funding for the selected students, while the
project communities are providing mentors to assist the students. A
full list of students, mentors and planned developments is available
at:
http://code.google.com/soc/osgeo/about.html
OSGeo thanks Google for it's support of this great program, and looks
forward to the participation of these students in our community.'"
Raster Image Pyramids Tips
[+]
Using pyramids for raster geodata can radically improve load speed. All Points Blog offers several informative comments on raster data pyramids. From comments: "Databases are not inherently more efficient than files, particularly when the files in question, images, have a great deal of internal structure. You don't need a spatial index to do random access of small chunks of large images, the "square grid" nature of the image itself provides a built-in indexing mechanism. [...] You must choose between the options carefully : pre-calculating avoids completely to set up a application on your server, since you just have to distribute resulting files. This has a huge impact on server deployment costs, maintenance and hardware requirements. The downside is that generating the whole pyramid is a big process and let you to manipulate an horrible amount of files." See also related stories.
Industry: OSGeo Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2008
[+]
Hamish writes "Good news from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation: 'OSGeo is pleased to announce that Google has accepted OSGeo as mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008 program. This program provides funding for students to work on open source projects under the support of experienced mentors. The projects participating through OSGeo are
OpenLayers,
GDAL,
GRASS,
Mapbender,
Quantum GIS,
MapServer,
GeoServer,
GeoTools,
uDig, and
OpenJUMP/Degree.
Students interested in participating can find more information on OSGeo project ideas here and more information about the program as a whole here.'" See the story below for OSGeo's projects within Google's SoC 2007.
Students interested in participating can find more information on OSGeo project ideas here and more information about the program as a whole here.'" See the story below for OSGeo's projects within Google's SoC 2007.
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Why not just build it in?
(Score:1)( http://www.vizure.com/ )
Re:Why not just build it in?
(Score:3)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
Re:Why not just build it in?
(Score:3)( http://www.vizure.com/ )
As far as I know, I can't just take a TIF or IMG file, drag it onto GE and have it display in the correct location. I knew they used GDAL previously, but I always thought it was for preprocessing imagery with their enterprise version or maybe pro product.
While it's nice of GDAL to preprocess the imagery using gdal2tiles, it defeats the purpose for users who have gigs/terabytes worth of data to sit there and be forced to pre-process before visualization. GIS users don't want to have multiple copies of their data laying around, since that leads to version chaos (my opinion). Especially if the data changes on a daily basis due to editing.
Either way, what I am asking for is the ability to drop files into GE without having to use 3rd party apps and just have them work. Regionate them on the fly. Seems easy enough, since I wrote an app to do this : http://lennoxsoft.com/index.php?option=com_conten
While it won't eliminate the needs for apps such as gdal2tiles or many of the other tile apps out there, it will help out GIS users and hobbyists to load up their data into Google Earth to do more than just see what the latest feature they added to it does.
Just my two cents...could be completely wrong
Re:Why not just build it in?
(Score:3)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
Meanwhile, in your list your mention several webmapping tools, but you haven't mentioned the open source GeoServer [geoserver.org] which is very easy to setup (don't even need Apache if you don't want to and no need to be root and runs on any operating system) and can output to Google Earth and tile most geodata formats.
However, I'll stop there because this is clearly out of my area of expertise
Re:Why not just build it in?
(Score:3, Interesting)( http://www.vizure.com/ )
I've built a tiled grid viewer
(Score:3, Informative)http://leopold.sage.wisc.edu/ [wisc.edu]
It's written entirely in PHP, and you can share any raster map solely with the use of PHP with GD enabled. (which is often the default in shared hosting environments) Because it's still in flux I don't have much for examples, but here is my mapping package documentation:
http://pricepages.org/dist/SMapDoc/SMap/_SMap.php
And here is the source itself:
http://pricepages.org/dist/SMap.tgz [pricepages.org]