Main Page

NOTE i just moved this site to a new ip address. So if you were trying to reach mapserver.wildsong.biz you might end up here instead for a few more hours.

Sorry about that.

--Brian Wilson 10:58, 16 December 2005 (PST)

I am using this site to track various interests and projects, but if you want to, you are free to add content and comment on anything you see here. To make comments, use the "Discuss this page" link at the bottom of each page.

--Brian Wilson 18:50, 28 November 2005 (PST)

 

Weblog

Recognizing that a weblog might have some utility, I have decided to try out Sy's template driven approach.

Maps!

Corvallis area

City of Corvallis Parks
Paul, here are your Corvallis Airport area maps

Coastal Oregon

I've been preparing maps for my personal use on trips to Coastal Oregon. Yet another work in progress. I have 5 maps here so far.

Sonoma county

CDS Wireless Network I plan on putting these static maps into Mapserver any day now...

Projects

Magnavox GPS reference station (fondly known as MX-9212 or "The Blue Box") Now you can read satellite data from the MX-9212

Web-based map viewers

Feature list for mapserver viewers
Test projects: 1. SWF viewer 2. Orthoviewer

GIS projects, mostly for City of Corvallis

ArcGIS
MapServer iMap
Corvallis Mapserver project logbook
ArcIMS + ColdFusion + MapOptix
ArcPad including notes on PDAs

Using ArcMap as a front end to ArcIMS and/or Mapserver

ArcMap to ArcIMS: Jeroen Ticheler's script MXDtoAXL downloaded from http://arcscripts.esri.com/ -- this works quite well but breaks if version > 9.0 (There is another MXD converter on arcscripts by Mark Andrews. He provides only a snipped of VB and no instructions. Since we are not ArcObjects geniuses, Kevin and I are sticking to Veroen's program.)

ArcMap to Mapserver Still looking into this. On possibility is avein. See also this page.

Here is the ArcXML Programmer's Reference Guide. To tweak ArcIMS servers and viewers you really need to know ArcXML. It's used for ArcPad configuration too.

Here are a few notes left over from a paper I wrote on Archaeology for a GIS class.

GoogleEarth

Some issues to think about

What are people doing for revision control with spatial data? I know ArcSDE has some form of versioning but have not had time to read up on it yet. ArcSDE costs money, uses expensive RDBMS as a backend, and I don't have access to a copy right now so I am not motivated.

Seems like a vector-based revision control system would not be impossibly difficult to implement. You could keep it in a spatial database and query on changes. "Show me all changes to the parcel database in the last 6 months". Rasters don't really get editted in GIS systems; either you have a new ortho photo or you don't, so storing the entire copy of each raster is not so bad. A query is "Show me the photo for this area for 1996", not "show me what changed between these two photos".

I talked with Toshimi Minoura yesterday and he said that there is a school in Germany that has been working on this problem (esp as it relates to editing and updating databases) for many years.

How can we best apply Flash to online cartography? The apps I have looked at so far use it for the user interface. It's regarded by some as an improvement over Javascript because the two predominant browsers have independently developed versions of Javascript that work differently, whereas Flash plugin comes from one company so it's more consistent across browsers and platforms.

We could also use it directly in the maps. For mapserver, see Flash support in Mapserver

Server side vs client side user interfaces for web mapping It's not really a matter of 'versus' rather than 'where do we draw the line?' Some things HAVE to be on the client. Others can be implemented in either place.

For significant work such as editting and updating we still need a desktop app. Web mapping should be used more for display and simple analysis, with a desktop app communicating with central data stores as the model for editting and advanced spatial analysis.

Fuzzy thoughts -or- Who gets to decide where the shoreline is, and why isn't it fuzzy?

For georeferencing historical maps, can we use a fuzzy confidence overlay to indicate what areas of the map look good spatially and what ones don't?

Fuzzy GIS articles

GIS-based fuzzy c-Means clustering analysis of urban public transit network service: The Nanjing City case study

Integrating exploration dataset in GIS using fuzzy inference modeling

Stuff to look at in more depth

Refractions developed PostGIS
Manifold GIS software
Remote sensing
GRASS Open source GIS software
Elkhorn Slough Wireless Project Spring 2003 CSU Monterey Bay project
Clipping orthophotos Process used in CDS Wireless project

Cartography

To learn more than you could want to know about color and shading on maps, visit these sites.

http://www.reliefshading.com/ has articles by Bill Patterson of the National Park Service on producing 2d and 3D maps using natural colors.

http://shadedrelief.com/ has lots of information on shading techniques and very interesting articles about cartographers.

Geobuzzword Compliance section

ACSM ASPRS: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
AGU: American Geophysical Union
SAF Hydrophiles Oceanography Geology Hydrology Forestry Biometrics
SCGIS Society for Conservation GIS
SAS

Electronics

File:Bfd background.gif Yellowstone Weatherstation

WiFi -- WRT54GS project

GIS/GPS links

Contacts

Data sources not for the whole world, just the parts of it that interest me.

The GIS/GPS tools page has information on obtaining and using GIS and GPS tools.

The Community Portal has more links to other places.

The NGA Map Rescue program

Web site content management

Mediawiki

I am currently using the stable version of Mediawiki which is the software used for the Wikipedia. At home I am running the development version downloaded from CVS.

Reasons I like Mediawiki: It is easy to install. It is easy to customize. It is easy to learn. It is very well supported and has a large user community.

Mediawiki extensions

There are maps in the Wikipedia, so I should really look at the wikimedia extensions for GIS and maps first.

Drupal

For a while I was convinced Drupal was the best CMS so I started writing this Beginner's guide for Drupal. I stopped working on it when I quit using Drupal. (Which was almost immediately...) I am leaving the page here because I might revisit it at any moment.

Other

I might revisit Zope and Plone instead. The only reason I am interested in plone right now is because of plonemap. The plonemap server seems to be down right now so I can't even research it. (29-Nov-2005) Later for this...

XML and the weather

The National Weather Service has a (relatively) new service providing forecasts and updates in XML and RSS formats. I have been running a screen scraper that I whipped out in perl to insert the weather conditions into my personal web page. Converting this to use the XML feed would be a good first XML project. Weather reports via XML