Digital Geography

QGIS 3 officially released

On 24th of February, the QGIS developers have officially released QGIS 3 (codename “Girona”). It is the third major version of the free and open source cross-platform GIS software. In this post, I want to tease you with the most important infos and installation instructions.

Short Announcement: OpenWhateverMap

Choosing a basemap for your cool web map is always crucial for the style and perception of your map. A colorful basemap like watercolor might be stunning but also interfering with your data visualization. In contrary a grayish basemap might look a bit boring but your data visualization will be crucial. If you’re unsure and a playful type of developer: Use OpenWhateverMap!

ArcGIS Online (AGOL) for free: The Developer Way

You might have heard of ArcGIS Online (AGOL) already: ArcGIS Online is a complete, cloud-based mapping platform. Make and share beautiful maps, and do everything in between. It’s possible only with ArcGIS Online, a scalable and secure software-as-a-service hosted by Esri. But as there is nothing for free in this world the usage of ArcGIS online with all capabilities (batch geocoding, hosted feature services, app creation, etc…) will cost some money, aka credits, as well. If you use the developer program of Esri you can use almost everything from AGOL as you will receive 50 credits for free every month!…

Service Areas, Traffic and QGIS

Our author Riccardo recently published an article on GeoNet where he described the traffic aware analysis of service areas (isochrones) in ArcGIS Pro with the analytical support of ArcGIS Online. I searched for a way to do something similar in QGIS. So let’s follow the white rabbit.

Short Announcement: Your Input is Needed… A Readers Survey

We are always looking for new ideas, tutorials, work flows, solutions. Unfortunately we were not able to write so much in the past for our beloved blog Digital-Geography.com. Therefore I am asking you today: What do you want to know, read, see, be advised on in the future? Take this short survey as a starting point so we can gather your ideas and write about the stuff you would like to read in the future.

Create Bounding Boxes without Desktop GIS

Bounding boxes are crucial for a lot of geospatial projects: wether you need to limit the extent of your web mapping application or need to cut your research data to the area of interest, bounding boxes are used everywhere. Here is a nice little tool from Klokantech that helps you generating bounding boxes in a variety of formats in your browser, without even opening your desktop GIS.

Short Announcement: Retro View of Mankind’s Habitat / Pastvu.com

Once in past there was a project called Panoramio were you uploaded your photos of landscapes or places around the world and it was explorable via a map. This was a great tool to digitally visit your next destination and wander around this beautiful planet. The project/service itself is not longer available. But there is pastvu.com which offers another approach: upload historic images and place them on a map.

OpenRouteService API: A Leaflet example for Isochrones

The page OpenRouteService.org is a very easy to use website which provides routing from A to B via C. It also allows to choose between different routing types for trucks, pedestrians or bicycles and isochrone analyses based on time and distance. In this article I would like to show you, how to embed the OpenRouteSevrice API into your very own Leaflet based webmap.

Donut Polygons in QGIS, ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro and geoJSON

Donut Polygons were the nightmare in first GIS courses. At the very moment I can’t remember why but the concept of an inner and an outer part makes total sense in the real world (house with a patio, lakes with islands, Rome with the Vatican City) yet the creation of those was never the covered in the basic “how to edit”-classes. So how can we create them with QGIS, ArcMap as well as ArcGIS Pro and geoJSON? In this tutorial I will cover this basic task.

Short Announcement: PlayMapsCube using Three.JS

We all played around with this little thing: wood labyrinths with one or many little balls called a “Ball-in-a-maze puzzle”. The goal was to find a path through the labyrinth so the ball was not trapped by the holes in the board: Google leveraged the idea itself and made a funny little game PlayMapsCube out of it to communicate the ideas and logic behind one of its main products: Google Maps.

A Digital Earth: the Potential of Data Brokers

Introduction In my previous two posts I introduced the Cloud based data broker technology ERDDAP and demonstrated how one can use it to obtain geo-spatial scientific environmental data: Access sensor data on an buoy located in the Irish Sea . Get and display weather forecast data from the Global Forecast System (GFS). The use of data brokers to unify data catalogues is an approach taken by both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the USA (ERDDAP) and the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observation (GEO Discovery and Access Broker). In this post I discuss the potential impact of this type…

Short Announcement: New Sentinel Cloudless Atlas

Mapbox created a cloudless Landsat map in 2013. That was a huge step for all the webmapping enthusiasts as we got a composit image of the world with stunning ground resolution and still cloudless! Now EOX, a company based in Vienna, provided a similar product called Sentinel Cloudless. And it is “for free”.

Supporting humanitarian logistics with OSM in a more sustainable way: New Disaster OpenRouteService for Africa, South America and Indonesia

Recently HeiGIT @ GIScience Heidelberg released a dedicated stable disaster versionof OpenRouteService (ORS) to support humanitarian logistics within specific regions of catastrophes with data from OSM in a more sustainable way. Since his start in 2008 OpenRouteServivce had been spontaneously applied for specific real world disaster cases already numerous times, for instance during the earthquakes in Haiti 2008 and 2010, in Nepal2015, and in Equador 2016. Yet this always involved manual effort to set the system up for the specific disaster which costed time and manpower. For this reason this was only manageable for specific larger disasters. In order to provide this…