Live GIS GSoC 2015

Open Source Geospatial Notebooks

About

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Lubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around. It provides pre-configured applications for a range of geospatial use cases, including storage, publishing, viewing, analysis and manipulation of data. It also contains sample datasets and documentation.

This GSoC 2015 Idea will focus on the development of a cross-projects python library with the aim of bridging together the several software libraries already installed on the live through the use of the Jupyter notebook server [1] in a series of "topic-oriented" geospatial notebooks. This work will not include only python libraries, thanks to the recently added support for different type of kernels like R and Bash Octave and more, it is now possible to include in a notebook any command line tools installed on the live. With a strong focus on the "educational" side of the OSGeo-Live, this idea will improve substantially the users experience in having access to many tools under the OSGeo umbrella. The OSGeo-Live user will learn how to bring all this software together as well as learn how to process geospatial data using other standard scientific tools for data exploration. Each notebook will guide the user on how to build new information from the dataset already available on the OSGeo-live disc.

The "topic-oriented" notebooks can include :

• I/O raster and vector data (import export between several formats, subsetting, sql query)
• Raster vector reprojection
• Access to web resources using OGC standard (WMS, WFS, WCS trough CSW catalogs)
• Raster algebra (single array operation, filtering, band merge, band-ratio, time-series)
• Satellite derived product (working with landsat, image enhancements, bande merge, pansharpening, mosaic .. )
• Time series of gridded data
• Intro to geostatistics
• Simple web-gis products (publish result of processing in projects based on js library like openlayers, leaflet and similar)

...

Part of this idea is to :

• Develop topic oriented geospatial notebooks
• implement a software library written in python, to simplify the usage of geospatial data inside the notebook. Providing wrapper function to assolve general tasks like I/O, Database connections, map display using gui widgets and rich text for data documentation and report building.
• Reorganize the way how python libraries are installed on the live, packaging each project that is missing a proper debian package, to be upload on the debian gis repository
• Revisiting and upgrading existent OsGeo-Live Quickstart documentation for each project involved in this idea

This idea integrates several projects such as GDAL, GRASS, OSSIM, R, OTB, Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, R, owslib, netcdf4-python, pycsw, openlayer/leaflet/cesium, qgis-browser, gmt, postgis, in addition to the python specific projects (e.g. fiona, shapely, geopandas, scikit-image, pysal, cartopy, iris, and more). Generally each library that has python bindings and or is accessible from the command line.

[1] http://jupyter.org/

Student

• Massimo Di Stefano <epiesasha AT me com>

OSGeo Resources

• http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2015_Ideas

• UbuntuGIS packaging: http://trac.osgeo.org/ubuntugis/#Packagers

• 2013 .deb packaging project: http://trac.osgeo.org/ubuntugis/wiki/Proposal

• Debian GIS packaging policy

Mailing lists

• OSGeo-Live
• UbuntuGIS
• Debian GIS
• Debian Mentors

• OSGeo-Live ideas in GSoC 2015