Case Studies

Using GRASS GIS to Calculate Potential Global Solar Irradiation Using Canopy Heights as a Base Elevation Layer to Assist in the Landscape Scale Characterization of Aquatic Habitats

Session Type: 
Poster
Presenter(s): 
Doug Newcomb, Department of Interior- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Water temperature variation  can have a significant impact on freshwater aquatic communities .  Elevated temperatures can lead to differences in predator/prey relationships and mortality in relatively non-mobile classes of aquatic species such as mussels.  Using native 64-bit GRASS 6.5 on 64-bit Centos Linux, a previously generated 18.2 m (60 foot) forest canopy height grid for the State of North Carolina ( 17237 Rows and 45102 columns )  was used as a base elevation layer for calculation of  18.2 m total irradiance ( Watt hours/square meter/day) grids generated for all 365 days of the year using the GRASS r.sun command.  Daily data was aggregated by month and for the year using r.series.  Output annual and monthly irradiation data was overlaid on rasterized 1:24000 scale USGS Quadrangle hydrology line work to quantize solar irradiation input to streams and rivers in North Carolina.

An existing 6.1m (20ft) bare earth elevation grid for North Carolina was generalized  to 18.2 m (60 foot) and used as a base layer for calculation of statewide 18.2 .m total solar irradiation grids using  r.sun for 12 days (1st day of each month) to compare to daily irradiation totals calculated using the canopy height layer as a base layer.

Speaker Bio: 

Doug Newcomb - B.S., Geography,  MA ,Geography has been  employed as an IT Specialist/Hydrologist for the U.S. Department of Interior for the past 21 years.

Developing an Open Source Geospatial Solution for the Telecommunications Industry

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Mr Scott Stewart, NBT Solutions
Mr Sean Myers
The recent focus on broadband capabilities in the United States has facilitated the expansion of new fiber networks, equipment, and access services such as VOIP, hosted solutions, and internet services. With these new assets and services in place, telecommunication companies are eager to find new clients that are geographically positioned to take advantage of their company's fiber assets and services.
 
Over the past two years, NBT Solutions has been developing a location-based web application that is helping fiber network providers identify customers that could potentially use their assets and services; quickly estimate costs for establishing service to new clients; and providing marketing and sales people with access to data and information about the overall fiber network. The application was built entirely with open source geospatial software and databases including: Map Server, Open Layers, GeoWebCache, and PostGIS. In addition, NBT Solutions used the open source framework MapFish for building the application. The application is provided to clients using a Software as a Service model and is being deployed using a reserved instance on Amazon EC2 servers.
 
During this presentation, NBT Solutions will discuss why we decided to build the application using  open source geospatial tools, including the value it provided the client; how we decided on each component to use; and the overall development process. Within the paper and during the presentation we will elaborate on what we perceive to be the strengths of this open source solution, some of the issues we needed to overcome, workarounds that were required, and our plans for adding more functions to the application.
 
Speaker Bio: 
Mr. Stewart is NBT Solutions Lead Programmer. He is a well-versed technologist with 15 years of professional experience in a wide variety of fields including database design and implementation, data quality and assurance, scientific data processing and production, smart card development and integration, public key infrastructures, cryptography and web services architectures.
 
Mr. Stewart has delivered data management solutions and applications for various state and federal government entities including NASA, NOAA, and the States of Virginia and Hawaii. He also has extensive commercial software product development experience, coming from his years as a senior software engineer for such companies as 3GI, RSA and GuardianEdge.
 

He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. He currently resides in historic Williamsburg, Virginia 

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Thu, 09/15/2011 - 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Room: 
Tower Court B

Why Your Product Sucks

Session Type: 
Lightning Talk
Presenter(s): 
Mike Pumphrey, OpenGeo

Your software is great, but your product sucks.

Great software is useless if it can't be used. If people have trouble finding, installing, learning, or running your software, then your product sucks, no matter how awesome the software is.

Do you want to increase adoption of your software? Do you want it to succeed in the "marketplace" (even if your software is free of charge)? Do you want to interest people who aren't software developers? Good. First, you need to make your product not suck. This talk will show you how.

Speaker Bio: 

Mike Pumphrey oversees the often-neglected gap between software developers and end users, and spends much of his time trying to increase the usability and reduce the learning curve of software.  He is the author and maintainer of the Windows installers for both GeoServer and the OpenGeo Suite, as well as the author of the SLD Cookbook, a reference of helpful code samples for using SLD to style WMS-based maps. 

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Wed, 09/14/2011 - 4:50pm - 5:20pm

Opticks: Releasing a government tool to the open source community

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Trevor Clarke, Opticks
Kip Streithorst, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

Opticks is an open source ELT designed for analysis of imagery, video, spectral, SAR, thermal, and other spatiotemporal data. Opticks was originally developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies corp. for the US Air Force. In 2007, Ball and the USAF released the core ELT and a number of plug-ins as open source software. This is one the first US department of defense sponsored tools to move from the closed source government domain to the unrestricted open source. This presentation talks about our experience with the process; what went smoothly and what caused delays. We will also discuss some of the latest developments in the military open source world.

Speaker Bio: 

Trevor Clarke is a software engineer at Ball Aerospace & Technologies. Trevor has a masters degree in computer science from RIT and is a core contributor to Opticks.

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Room: 
Tower Court C

Managing Large Amounts of U.S. Army Imagery Data: Recommendations for Improving FOSS4G Imagery Solutions

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Kristofor Carle, Syncadd Systems Inc. (US Army Contractor)

We will present a case study of our implementation of cached imagery services and imagery management into Army Mapper, the U.S. Army’s enterprise GIS supporting the overall management and resourcing of Army installations worldwide. We will explain why we chose ArcGIS Server over FOSS4G solutions and provide technical recommendations for improving FOSSG4 software in this area. Army Mapper requires a global cached WMS that can be updated in real-time. It must support a wide range of sensors, formats, and projections. We will outline the requirements and scale of Army Mapper and discuss the workflows we evaluated for tools such as MapServer and TileCache.

Speaker Bio: 

Mr. Carle is a GIS Software Developer for Syncadd Systems Inc. In addition to GIS, his interests include transportation operations and networks, social networks and mobile communication, simulation and modeling, cloud and grid computing, data warehousing and visualization. 

Schedule info

Time slot: 
Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Room: 
Tower Court C
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