Digital Geography

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…

Maps Marker – WordPress Map Plugin

What if you want to build your own webmap on your WordPress blog without any knowledge about javaScript, frontend web development and geojsons? You can use a plugin! In this article I’ll give you a short introduction about “Maps Marker”, a popular tool to create webmaps within seconds. First I’ll show you how to install Maps Marker, after that we create a first webmap with a test marker.

How to start with “VANE language” API – MODIS example

If you are reading this post – you might know something about satellite imagery. This is a valuable source to power quite a lot of analytics and monitoring applications. In this post I’d like to give you an idea of how all this Big Data stuff can be obtained and processed online, using the single API called #VANE language. What is VANE? The VANE geospatial platform, that’s coming out of the Beta now, is a new project we started at Openweathermap, relying on our expertise in providing well-designed APIs for weather data which is widely used by devs community. The…

Vagrant: Setup and Share your Digital Geo-Lab

In one of my last posts I described the installation of a git server to improve collaborative work in closed environments. But developing solutions can be a pain in the axxxx if you need deal with user/OS dependent issues all the time. So let me introduce you to Vagrant: Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments.

Description code for article “Using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for Detection of Burned Areas”

I want to continue my article “Using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for Detection of Burned Areas” (link) and describe in detail script for detection burned areas. I decided to post here code of this script with comments, shchems and illustrations of wotk this scrip Link to script on Google Earth Engine This script shows two variants for detection burned area: Calculating spectral index NBR for before and after forest fire images, download on your computer and compare these scenes in software using function change detection. Calculating spectral index NBR for after forest fire images and select burned areas using threshold. My…

Off Topic: self hosted GIT-server with Bonobo

This might be a bit off-topic for some of you but it was on my desk recently. Furthermore I think this might be interesting for GEO/GIS folks as well: host your own GIT. With GIT your efforts on working together on documents or solutions might be a bit easier. Normally we use GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git or version control repository and Internet hosting service If you don’t know what GIT/GitHub is about: But what if you have just limited access to the outer world in terms of policies, compliance or just a “bad feeling” in storing/sharing your data,…