PDX OSGEO 20110525 Meeting

PDX-OSGEO OpenSourcery, NW Portland Wed May 25th, 2011

Atendance

Attending: Skip, Jeremy, Christian, Sarah, Tanya, Heather, Rob, Sean, Lynnae, Randy
Absent: No beer present :(

Rob, Christian and Heather are all working on a new small community open source GIS outreach organization check out: Geo CEG

Rob re-capped the good old days of search and rescue in the coast guard (circa 1990’s), and led us into a demo of GRASS w/ a QGIS front end…
First public GRASS release in 1991… taken over by Baylor University in 1997, now managed under OSGEO. Runs under almost everything
Nowadays GRASS does 2D & 3D Raster, and 2D & 3D Vector. Connects natively to QGIS and PostGIS
Quickie overview of setting up both permanent and project workspaces…
Rob planned out a full blown demo for June that will include a project set-up, adding demo data, analysis, cartography examples

Jeremy demo-ed an Open data project that seeks to build 3D Middle Earth data – digital elevation models, landcover, etc. (think OpenStreetMap except for fantasy terrains)
Check out Middle Earth DEM site
GEOTerraSys is the 3D renderer
Proland and Alterra are the 3D globe products used
Jeremy’s geo project for them right now consists of a 2D 1 GIG tif file created by compiling multiple maps from various sources, served up on Geoserver with an OpenLayers frontend. See: Jeremy's website
There is a work flow that uses Jeremy’s map as a departure point for eventually creating final rendered products. To check it out go to the ME-DEM.org site and look under articles --> modeling. To get a quick sense of what is happening as things transition from 2D to 3D rendered terrain, you can skim some images here: An introduction to using L3DT to model terrain in ME-DEM

Trimet open house – a couple of us attended the Trimet open house for OSM editors. They currently have 4 interns working to improve the OSM data in the Portland metro area using RLIS and high quality imagery. Improvement areas include: street data, bike data, trails and pedestrian data, and turn restriction data. Trimet is making this investment in OSM because the new bus routing software that they will be using would have charged them a per bus license fee just to use the routable base map, which would have cost them over $100k per year.
OpenBaseMap – the CUGOS folks have come quite long ways with the open base map project since last we heard about it (see Wherecamp PDX 2010 notes here: WhereCamp Notes) stay tuned to the CUGOS mailing list to learn more…