Pacific Geospatial Conference is a new super conference combining three previously separate ones:
Pacific Geospatial Remote Sensing Council’s Pacific GIS&RS User Conference,
OSGeo Oceania’s FOSS4G SotM Oceania Conference, and
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s HOT Summit.
Bringing together remote-sensing and GIS practitioners, open-source enthusiasts, and the OpenStreetMap community, this gathering should make for a varied range of talks.
The conference will be hosted at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji and feature talks and workshops, a women’s session and a poster competition. Registration is set to open on 1 August; abstracts are due by 31 August, although submission has yet to open.
Update: The call for presentations is now open. Submit either an abstract for a 15-minute presentation or a five-minute lightning talk via the online form.
“Landsat’s Enduring Legacy: Pioneering Global Land Observations from Space,” a book covering the history of the Landsat program, is now open access and available to download for free.
From the book’s preface:
The basic purpose of the […] book is to document and explain salient aspects of the first fifty years of Landsat activities and operations, so that current and future generations can comprehend both the qualities and vagaries of the Landsat observation record.
Almost all authors were involved in Landsat at some point, some of them for decades. The book is based mainly on archive material and accounts from scientists and engineers involved in the early stages of the program — this should be an exciting read.
Not surprising at all. The impact of the change is marginal, maps aren’t exactly a core feature of GitHub.
As part of the transition, custom icons and formatting of features in geojson and topojson files will no longer be supported.
Not just icons and formatting, it seems GitHub chose the nuclear option. There are lines and polygons alongside points in this dataset, but only points are visible on the map. Plus, it doesn’t show anything in Safari.
Saman Bemel Benrud, previously a designer at Mapbox, reflects on his time at the company. It’s a tale of what happens when a company accepts big VC money. The priorities shift from solving relevant problems to making money.
Even if you’re a lowly designer or engineer, you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises.
What other choices do companies have when they build geo-data products and compete with Google? Maybe they can grow slower, don’t sell solutions that aren’t yet available, involve employees in decisions, or accept and support unionisation efforts. The company still has to make money, but it might feel different to the people building the product. There must be a way to build a sustainable business that doesn’t involve VC funding.
Is it latitude, longitude or longitude, latitude? Everybody has an opinion, no one knows. It doesn’t matter — as long as you know what the application or library you’re working with requires.
FlipCoords flips coordinates in the appropriate order and provides the result copy-paste ready in various formats, such as arrays, tuples, URL parameters or JSON objects. Very handy if you ever need to hard-code coordinates.
Mapbox GL JS’ latest release (v2.9.0) adds a new globe projection, which enables presenting web maps in a way that allows viewers to interact with geographic data much like you would interact with a physical globe.
This new projection displays the map as a 3d globe and can be enabled by either passing projection: globe to the map constructor or by calling map.setProjection('globe'). All layers are supported by globe except for Custom Layers and Sky.
The globe projection is a continuation from custom projections, which were introduced a couple of months ago and, for the first time, allowed creating interactive web maps using projections other than Web Mercator. While custom projections were ideal to present data restricted to countries or continents and without the hefty distortions that come with Web Mercator, the globe projection allows to do the same but on a global scale; ideal to present global data sets like visualisations of climate change.
Felt, a new web-based map editor, launched in public beta last week.
Felt isn’t just another web GIS; it’s a tool for collaborative map-making. You can drop pins (even using emojis as markers), plot routes and highlight areas on the map and can annotate all this with text, notes and images. But there aren’t any features typical for professional GIS software, such as editing attribute tables or capturing complex geometries and valid topologies. However, Felt supports importing data from various formats (KML, KMZ, GPX, and GeoJSON) and exporting maps to GeoJSON.
This is a tool for anyone to create maps, whether they have prior knowledge in GIS or not. It’s designed for citizen engagement and participatory mapping; it’s for communities, not professional surveyors. Quite similar to the work around participatory mapping that groups like UCL’s ExCiteS and Mapping for Change do.
I like the simplicity of Felt. It focuses on a well-defined use case and is well executed. Much thought went into Felt’s design; the routing tool is a great example. Wherever you click, it snaps to the closest road and automatically calculates the route between two points, so you don’t have to add nodes to follow bends or turns at every intersection. By holding the Shift key while drawing, you can also draw segments that don’t align with the road network.
The team behind Felt found a gap in the current product landscape and is addressing the need nicely. I’m curious where they will take the $15M Series A funding.
Placemark have released a neat map-data conversation tool that transforms data between pretty much any geo-data file format. Upload files or paste text, convert and then download the converted data in no time.
In the course of implementing lots and lots of file formats in Placemark, we’ve ended up with some great, reusable tools. I figured it’d be pretty useful to just let anyone use those things, on a convenient drag & drop (or click, or paste) page. I hope it’s useful. Happy Friday!
This list will go out of date, but right now - you can convert:
Tom MacWright explores whether newer geo-data formats, like FlatGeobuf, Zarr, GeoParquet, Arrow, or COGs, are useful for applications making frequent updates to the data.
The post dives deep into some of the characteristics of these data formats, including compression, random access, and random writes, and concludes that they are optimised for reading data and that the benefits for writes are limited:
I like these new formats and I’ll support them, but do they benefit a usecase like Placemark ? If you’re on the web, and have data that you expect to update pretty often, are there wins to be had with new geospatial formats? I’m not sure.
