VistSOS Data Visualization Framework

This wiki will be in continous change specially during the summer 2016. If you have any suggestion, complain or idea that you want to share, please write me felipe07 at gmail dot com.

Welcome. This is the wiki of Vistsos: The istSOS Data Visualization Framework project.

Introduction

Proposal summary

In order to extent the available characteristic offered by the istSOS server, I propose the use of an open source Javascript library for the implementation of VistSOS: the istSOS Data Visualization Framework. The proposed solution shall allow users of the istSOS ecosystem to configure, customize and include a wide set of chart, bar, grid and map visualization types in their websites. The framework will offer complete support for the connection of the visualization widgets with multiple data-exchange formats like CSV, TSV and JSON. Considering the real-time nature of the data sources the framework will support the generation of real-time visualization widgets specially crafted to improve the readiness to display data of this kind. The framework shall be implemented with robustness, reliability and customization as its core development principles. Recommended practices for software development like Version Control Systems use and continous testing will be followed.

Schedule

• May 28: Designing the file format, XML Metadata formats(KML, TMS XML files, MS Virtual Earth, ...?) which will be supported have to be chosen and tested with their respective viewer applications, sample map is published.
• July 9: Alfa version of GDAL Driver for Tile Structure Writer is uploaded into official SVN.
• August 20: Final version of the driver as well as gdal2tiles utility are uploaded and reviewed.

Competitors

Proprietary applications like: Arc2Earth have similar functionality. Several (mostly proprietary) generators for Google Earth tiles were mentioned on http://www.ogleearth.com/.

Microsoft Research project MapCruncher also generates tiles, but with metadata only for their MS Virtual Earth.

Zoomify could be now used as tiling program for SuperOverlay in GoogleEarth with free ZoomifyerEZ and generator ZoomifyKML (which I created as a part of my Master Thesis).

What new functionality this project brings

Clean open-source implementation of tile structure export. Any application which uses GDAL library will easily be able to export files into a tile structure. Supplied utility gdal2tiles will convert any supported file format with georeference into tiles, it will also allow batch mode processing of files.

GDAL is strong library for processing maps and large raster files, including reprojection, so any already georeferenced maps could be easily converted for simple on-line publishing on a webserver without special server requirements (like MapServer is). Advantages of this approach are described in TMS Specification.

Reader could be implemented later, which will (with support on the side of UNM MapServer) allow to access published tile structure using WMS standard, where UNM MapServer will act as a proxy.

Who will use results of this project

Several organizations and individuals who handle processing of maps.

Institutions which will use the 'gdal2tiles' utility from this project, as I am cooperating with them:

• Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic
• Historical institute of Czech Academy of Sciences
• Czech National Library
• National Library of Scotland
• University of Connecticut Library (with their grant "Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Set of Austro-Hungarian Topographic Maps, 1877-1914", cooperating with New York Public Library, University of Connecticut Library, and Library of the American Geographical Society. It is a grant about building a scalable workflow and toolset for map libraries to add cartographic content to the Web.)

Student's Biography

My name is Klokan Petr Přidal, I have finished Master degree in Applied Informatics at Masaryk University in Brno, now I am in the first semester of postgraduate study of Cartography at Czech Technical University in Prague. My Master thesis subject was "Processing and Digital Publishing of Historical Documents" (PDF of thesis in Czech).

I am familiar with open-source projects. I have experience with Linux/Solaris system administration. I like Python language, but I have also used other languages (C language, PHP). I have supplied some patches into Gnumeric (#330129, #334257). I founded a http://mplayerosx.sf.net/ project and I also won a competition in programming application for Mac using http://dictosx.sf.net/ (Objective-C). My primary desktop is Gnome and Linux, but I also use Mac, Windows and Solaris. I did programming for all of these platforms (mostly smaller projects).

I am interested in historical cartography, I have several presentations about old maps and free software. I made a czech web page about it at http://www.staremapy.cz/ and registered domain http://www.oldmapsonline.org/ (which is not in use yet).