PerryGeo

In case you missed the fantastic Chicago public radio program last night on This American Life, the NPR-syndicated show did an entire program on “mapping”. It goes well beyond the idea of simply mapping our physical infrastructure and really opens up the idea of mapping to the widest possible definition; using all our senses to create a multi-dimensional representation of our world. Within the vast experience of life, mapping is described as the abstract process of summarizing and synthesizing a singular slice of that experience.

The show is available as a stream and is really worth a listen this weekend.

P.S. The title of this post comes directly from a quote by Denis Wood, the author of The Power Of Maps and geographer who is mapping some non-conventional aspects of his neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. The first and arguably most interesting portion of the show from a geographer’s standpoint.

It just keeps getting easier and easier to get a fully functional open source GIS workstation up and running thanks to Ubuntu. The following instructions will take your vanilla installation of Ubuntu 7.10 and add the following top-notch desktop GIS applications:

• Postgresql/PostGIS : a relational database with vector spatial data handling
• GRASS : A full blown GIS analysis toolset
• Quantum GIS: A user-friendly graphical GIS application
• GDAL, Proj, Geos : Libraries and utilities for processing spatial data
• Mapserver : web mapping program and utilites
• Python bindings for QGIS, mapserver and GDAL
• GPSBabel : for converting between various GPS formats
• R : a high-end statistics package with spatial capabilities
• GMT : the Generic Mapping Tools for automated high-quality map output

While this is not a comprehensive list of open source GIS software, these packages cover most of my needs. If you want to live on the bleeding edge and have to have the absolute latest versions, you’ll be better off installing these from source. But for those of us that want a stable and highly functional GIS workstation with minimal fuss, this is the way to go:

1. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources and make sure the universe and multiverse repositories are turned on. Close the window and the list of available software packages will be refreshed.
2. Open up a terminal (ie the command line) via Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type the following:
   

   sudo apt-get -y install qgis grass qgis-plugin-grass mapserver-bin gdal-bin cgi-mapserver \
   python-qt4 python-sip4 python-gdal python-mapscript gmt gmt-coastline-data \
   r-recommended gpsbabel shapelib libgdal1-1.4.0-grass

   The sudo part indicates that the command will be run as the administrator user, apt-get -y install is the command telling it to install the list of packages and answer yes to any questions that pop up.

3. There is one package that is worth upgrading to the latest and greatest - Quantum GIS. The latest version (0.9) is due out very shortly and has the ability to write plugins using the python programming language. A big plus!

   Download the latest build from http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/testbuilds/qgis0.9.0.debs_ubuntu_gutsy.tar.gz and extract it ( right-click > Extract Here ). In the directory you’ll see 4 .deb files, only 3 of which you’ll need unless you plan on doing any development work.

   Double click libqgis1_0.9.0_i386.deb and you’ll get a message saying an older version is available from directly from ubuntu. We already know this so just close and ignore it. Click Install Package and wait for it to complete then close out.

   Repeat for qgis_0.9.0_i386.deb and qgis-plugin-grass_0.9.0_i386.deb (in that order).

And there we have it, about 15 minutes depending on your internet speed and you’ve installed a high-end GIS workstation built completely on free and open source software.

With the release of QGIS 0.9 imminent , I decided to install in on Windows XP and noticed that the geocoding plugin was failing… sure enough I had hardcoded linux temporary directories. So I reworked the python code to determine the temp dir in a more cross-platform way (using tempfile.gettempdir() ) and it works fine.

The update can be downloaded here.

Assuming you’ve installed qgis in the standard location, just unzip this into C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS\python\plugins (windows) or /usr/share/qgis/python/plugins (Linux) and you should be good to go. Note that you’ll have to create the “plugins” directory if it doesn’t exist.

CTech has announced that the next version of it’s flagship software package, EVS (Environmental Visualization System), will take full advantage of multiple processors.

My experience with EVS is mostly in the realm of 3-dimensional kriging and geostatistics. Given the amount of data crunching involved, it’s always been sluggish when dealing with a non-trivial amount of data. Nothing is more frustrating that seeing one of your CPU cores cranking away while the others sit idle! But some users are reporting that the new multithreaded modules get nearly linear performance increases when adding more processing cores.

CTech is certainly not the first scientific/geostats application to go parallel. But it is the first program that I personally use on a regular basis that will take advantage of a multi-processor system. I hope this marks the beginning of an industry trend in that direction.