Archives for 2015

Ilwis and QGIS

November 24, 2015 by Martin Schouwenburg 2 Comments

Filed Under: Communities, ILWIS Tagged With: ILWIS, ilwis-Objects, QGIS

Last week there was a QGIS course at our institute. Since the Ilwis-objects work consumes all my times these days, I didn’t attend myself. I did, however, find it interesting to hear what others thought about it. After all, why are we building Ilwis-objects if a big, successful open source package exists in the same niche? Good question, but then again why is Volkswagen building cars when Toyota is doing the same? Functionally, they are the quite similar, aren’t they? They have four weels, an engine and some controls. No need for others…more >

Modelling scenarios

November 10, 2015 by Martin Schouwenburg 2 Comments

Filed Under: Communities, ILWIS Tagged With: ilwis-Objects, Ilwis4

One of the new things in Ilwis4 is the modeller. The modeller is a complex set of tools that tries to “model” the behaviour of dynamic spatial systems in several conceptual layers. In a crude way, one could say that it is a GUI for the script. This is essentially true, but it doesn’t do justice to the whole idea behind the modeller.more >

SmartSensorEditor – editor for standardized sensor metadata

October 30, 2015 by JanaKlemp Leave a Comment

Filed Under: 52°North, Communities, Sensor Web Tagged With: Metadata, NEXOS, Sensor Metadata, SensorML, smartEditor, SOS

I completed my external semester at 52°North on October 2, 2015. During this internship, my task was to gain experience in software development by developing a metadata editor for standarized sensor metadata. Please see my initial blog post for more information. I fulfilled this task by implementing an editor based on the smartEditor project and built a prototype which enables the editing of the metadata language SensorML. This prototype is called SmartSensorEditor. Currently, this editor supports several elements of the SensorML description language.more >

Which Format?

October 29, 2015 by Martin Schouwenburg 4 Comments

Filed Under: Communities, ILWIS Tagged With: ILWIS, ilwis-Objects, Ilwis4

In ILWIS 3 we had a lot of hassle with imports and exports. ILWIS 3 had its own format and everything had to be converted to this format or exported from ILWIS 3 to be usable in another package. Though there was a ‘use-as’ method (for raster), which basically used the data in its orignal format, it had its limitations. Furthermore, there was always lots of work involved (for the programmers) in getting a format ‘correct’. The documentation of formats is often mediocre, so a lot of guessing about how to interpret a certain format took place. The usage of the GDAL library helped a lot, but the implementation of a new format was still a hassle. And then there were the service/remote data sources, which play an increasingly important role these days. ILWIS 3 wasn’t built for those and supporting them was like trying to teach a turtle to fly.more >