PerryGeo

For the last year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of working with the MarineMap Consortium. We just learned yesterday that the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution awarded MarineMap the “Innovation in Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution”.

I joined the team after the launch of the South Coast of California site which was already widely recognized as a successful decision-support tool for marine spatial planning. We’ve since been working on version 2 of the MarineMap tool which is deployed currently for the North Coast of California in support of their Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process.

It’s been a tremendous challenge to bring a new version of the software to life and have it meet and exceed the standards set by its predecessor. It has also been tremendously rewarding and having our work recognized at this level is a great honor. It’s nice to know that the tools we’ve developed have been so helpful and instrumental in the marine planning process along the coast of California. Looking forward, I see MarineMap growing beyond a tool for a specific purpose (supporting the MLPA Initiative) to a robust framework for developing web-based spatial planning tools for all sorts of environmental applications, both marine and terrestrial. And this award confirms that we are already heading in the right direction. Very exciting news!

I don’t know how I let this gem slip past my radar for so long. It was only via a post by Dr. JTS himself (aka Martin Davis) that I saw a screenshot of JTS TestBuilder and decided to check it out.

I was actually just talking with someone about a tool that could provide simple visualization of WKT geometries; JTS Test Builder does that and much more.

You can input geometries (graphically or by well-known text) and compare two geometries based on spatial predicates:

Do overlay analyses with the two geometries. Note that you can see the result as WKT below.

And there are a host of other spatial operations to generate geometries using buffers…

… convex hulls …

This app provides a very nice and user-friendly way to quickly and simply explore and test geometric operations. To try it out, download JTS and unzip the contents somewhere. If you’re on windows, the .bat file is provided. If you’re running anything else, you have to cook up a shell script that will set up the environment and run JTS TestBuilder:

JTS_HOME=/usr/share/java/jts-1.11
CP=$CLASSPATH
for i in $JTS_HOME/lib/*.jar; do CP=$i:$CP; done
java -Xmx256m -cp $CP com.vividsolutions.jtstest.testbuilder.JTSTestBuilder $*