vmx

2012-06-16 22:35

The OSGeo Code Sprint in Bolsena/Italy was great. Many interesting people sitting the whole day in front of their laptops surrounded by a beautiful scenery. This year I spent most of my time on GeoCouch, CouchDB, Couchbase, deegree, Imposm and GeoNetwork.

Already on the first hacking day we had a result, a Couchbase backend for the deegree blob storage. This means that you can now store your rich features (e.g. from INSPIRE) in Couchbase and serve them up as a WFS with deegree. In case you wonder what rich features are, it's the new, shiny and more descriptive name for complex features.

In the following days I worked together with Oliver Tonnhofer on a CouchDB/GeoCouch backend for Imposm. You are now able to store your OpenStreetMap data in CouchDB and make queries on it through GeoCouch. I've created a small demo that displays the some data import from Andorra with directly with MapQuery, without the need of any additional server/service. The CouchDB backend should be easily adaptable to Couchbase, if you want to help, let me know.

I've then spent some time on the GeoNetwork project and helped translating the language file to German. I cleaned it up a bit and fixed major wrong translations. It's not perfect yet, as I've only spent little time on it, but at least it should be way more understandable (and sadly less funny) than the original version which was generated by Google Translate.

When it was time for presentations, I give a quick overview over the Couch* ecosystem. From CouchDB to GeoCouch, BigCouch, PouchDB, TouchDB (TouchDB-iOS, TouchDB-Android), Couchbase Syncpoint and Couchbase. You can find the slides as PDF here.

On the last day I've spent my time on polishing GeoCouch a bit and getting it ready for the Couchhack in Vienna. I've backported all changes from Couchbase to the CouchDB 1.2.x branch and also ported the geometry search into an experimental branch. You can now search your GeoCouch with any Geometry GEOS supports.

The event was fun as always and I also get to know some new people (hello B3Partners guys). Thanks Jeroen from GeoCat for organizing it, and thanks all other hackers that made it such a awesome event. Hope to see you all next year!

Categories: en, GeoCouch, CouchDB, Couchbase, conference, geo

2012-05-06 22:35

I surely enjoyed the WhereCamp EU in Amsterdam, but I didn't realise that I gained so much from it, until I told friends about it. Hence it's time for another blog post about one-dimensional mapping, psychogeograhpy and geo yoga.

The sessions

The topics of the sessions at there WhereCamp EU where widespread. I normally enjoy technical developer focused talks the most, but this time it was different. It was such a great mixture from developers to mapping people that lead to broad variety of talks. Here are my favourite ones.

One-dimensional maps

It started with a historic abstract about one-dimensional maps, which was already interesting by itself. I really got the point, why such maps make sense. Sorry for the lack of more information about it, I should probably ask Laurence Penney for a blog post on this topic.

The final goal of his endeavors is having a nice app for mobile devices, that shows your way to a certain location as a simple list you can scroll through. No panning or zooming would be needed, it's just a simple list that includes everything important you might see, together with simple explanations where to go. It's not about being super precise, but about being simple. An explanation like "cross the park" is easier than a detailed explanation of all the crossings you might hit while walking through the park.

Psychogeography

The talk about Psychogeography from Tim Waters was an eye-opener for me. If never really thought about the impact of geography on the psych. You should really talk with Tim about it, or visit a talk from him if you get the chance. His slides are available on slideshare.

I've recently read a blog post from Chris McDowall about An exercise in getting lost which fits nicely into the topic of psychogeorgaphy.

Canvas for map visualisations/analysis

I've already known the nice demo created by Steven Ottens with Leaflet and the Canvas element. His talk gave lots of background information how he did it and what can be done with the Canvas element. For example displaying a heightmap from a line you draw on the map, all client-sided.

Earthwatchers

Another nice presentation came from Geodan about saving the uranguton by satellite. The project is called Earthwatchers. There you can take the responsibility of a part of the rain forest on Borneo and monitor it for deforestation.

There are plans to have an HTML5 based interface (instead of the current Silverlight one. Given that it is a Geodan project, I hope they'll use MapQuery for it.

Geo yoga

At the end of the WhereCamp, there were some lightning talks, one of the most fun ones was by Tim Waters called geo yoga. You can find pictures at the official geo yoga website. It is all about pantomiming places (e.g. countries.)

My session

My session was about MapQuery, I've already blogged about it last week, hence here's the link.

I planned for another one for Sunday, which was a Q&A about all sorts of Couch things. It would have taken place on the couch in front of one of the rooms. I'm not sure if people didn't get where it was supposed to take place, or were just not interested in the (Geo)Couch topic.

Conclusion

The whole WhereCamp EU was well organized and the crowd was very diverse, all you need for a great unconference. Hope to see you all next year wherever the camp might be.

Categories: en, geoyoga, psychogeography, conference, geo

2012-04-28 22:35

It's still early on the first day of the WhereCampEU 2012, but as my first session (MapQuery and other web mapping clients) took already place, it's time to put up the slides.

It was interesting to see, that most people in the audience have already used OpenLayers, but very few of them Leaflet or other mapping libraries. What made me especially happy was, that after my session many people want to have a closer look at MapQuery.

So here they are the slides from my quick introduction into MapQuery.

Categories: en, OpenLayers, MapQuery, conference, geo

2012-01-06 22:35

The CouchDB world is currently full of “The future of CouchDB” blog posts. It started with the blog post from Damien Katz the creator of CouchDB. Of course people were also concerned about the future of GeoCouch. No worries, it will be good.

The future of Apache CouchDB

The reactions were quite different. People who are not deeply involved with the CouchDB community think that this means the end of Apache CouchDB. My reaction was positive, I tweeted:

“It’s good to see the Damien is so open to [the] world”

The reason was, that for me it was pretty clear that it would happen, and I was just happy that Damien officially made the cut.

The reactions from CouchDB community members where pretty much what Till Klampäckel describes in his blog post. You could see it comming after Couchbase announced that they are not the CouchDB company and that their product won’t be Apache CouchDB compatible.

I agree with Till here, the way Damien wrote his blog post, isn’t the best imaginable. For outsiders, it really seems to be the end of Apache CouchDB, but it is not. For me it just shows, why foundations like the Apache Foundation are such a great idea. Even if the original creator leaves the project, it still lives on.

Apache CouchDB has a lot of contributers and the mailing lists and IRC channel is busy as always. That CouchDB has a future is also shown by the blog post from Cloudant. They will keep supporting Apache CouchDB.

The future of GeoCouch

After this quick recap what happened so far, it’s time to talk about the future of GeoCouch. As you may know, I work for Couchbase on the integration of spatial functionality into their product.

Currently the overlap between Apache CouchDB and the version Couchbase uses internally is still quite huge, but it will diverge more and more in the future. Thus it will get harder and harder to maintain a single version that supports Apache CouchDB and Couchbase.

The good news is, that GeoCouch is pretty much a data structure only. It's an R-tree that stores JSON documents. This can easily be used by CouchDB and Couchbase. Perhaps small wrappers will be needed, but those should be minimal.

The easiest way to understand how the future looks like is in a small illustration:

This means that the majority of the devlopment I do for Couchbase will also improve the GeoCouch you can use for CouchDB.

Conclusion

The future of all three, Apache CouchDB, Couchbase and GeoCouch looks bright.

Categories: en, CouchDB, GeoCouch, Erlang, geo

2011-09-20 22:35

The FOSS4G 2011 is over now. Time for a small report. The crowd was amazing and it was again the ultimate gathering of the Free and Open Source for Geospatial developer tribe. Solid presentations and great evenings.

My talk: The State of GeoCouch

I'm really happy how my talk went, I really enjoyed it. The were lots of people (although there was a talk from Frank Warmerdam at the same time) asking interesting questions at the end.

The talk is not only about GeoCouch but also gives you an overview of some of the features it leverages from Apache CouchDB. In the end you should have an overview why you might want to use GeoCouch for your next project.

You can get the slides right here.

• The slides (download optimized) as PDF (licensed under CC-BY-3.0-de).
• The slides with comments as HTML (licensed under CC-BY-3.0-de).
• The slides with audio. It’s the recording of the actual talk at the conference.

Other talks

I was happy to see that there was another talk about GeoCouch. Other talks I really enjoyed were:

• CartoSet, a new FOSS to create highly visual geo portals: So many true things were said, e.g. get the data from the customer first, before you start building anything.
• Introduction to OpenSource WebMapping: Beyond Google Maps: A very nice introduction off the full stack for web mapping. From the database, over the server to the client. It's for people that have no clue that they could have maps on their own infrastructure.
• Comparing GeoExt, MapQuery and Legato from a technical and collaborative point of view: A good comparison between GeoExt, MapQuery and Legato. I especially liked the “Bodo”-test.
• Beyond vectors: Adapting remote sensing research for environmental monitoring with open source hardware and software: Citizen mapping the BP oil spill with balloons and kites: Kite and balloon mapping is just awesome. It's kind of the OpenStreetMap for raster data.
• GeoGlobalDomination: The Musical: One of the highlights was the GeoGlobalDomination musical. Grab the video while it's hot.

And of course there were also great talks from in the plenary sessions from Paul Ramsey about Why do you do that? An exploration of open source business models and Schuyler Erle's so funny lightning talk about Pivoting to Monetize Mobile Hyperlocal Social Gamification by Going Viral

Code Sprint

At the code sprint I was working on MapQuery together with Steven Ottens and Justin Penka. Steven was working on TMS support, Justin on a 6 minutes tutorial and I on making manual adding of features possible.

The OpenLayers developers did the migration from Subversion to Git for their development. OpenLayers is now available on Github.

And luckily there was a fire alarm in between to take a group photograph.

Future of the FOSS4G

I really hope there won't be a yearly FOSS4G conference for the whole of the US. There should be regional events, as I think one big one would draw the attention away from the international conference. Why should you fly to Beijing for the FOSS4G 2012 if you can meet the majority of the developers in the US as well?

Final words

The FOSS4G was great. It was organized well and people were always out in the evenings. The only minor nitpick is that many people working remote had the city of their company in the name badge and not the one they live in. It seems that the original for you had to fill was confusing. So for next year it should perhaps say “Location where you live”. Hence I still don't believe that there were more Dutch than German people at the conference (Tik hem aan, ouwe! ;)

Categories: en, CouchDB, GeoCouch, MapQuery, Erlang, JavaScript, geo

2011-05-29 22:35

The WhereCampEU 2011 is just over now, so it's time to get my impression and notes from the sessions written down. But first I'd like to thank all the organizers and attendees for this great event and the geobeers in the evenings.

Geo Databases

The WhereCamp is also a chance to meet people you haven't seen for a long time. Exactly this was the case with Shoaib Burq. We know each other from being a member of the FOSS4G 2009 organizing committee.

As there were still a few free slots, we decided to make session that is simply called "Geo Databases". I didn't expect many people to show up, as there were other sessions with way catchier names.

I ran late as I didn't find the room where my session was supposed to be. But luckily Shoaib was already presenting a rough outline on what will be talked about (we haven't talked about what we want to do upfront). So I happily joined the crowd and started to moderate things a bit. And it was just amazing, the room was packed with people even sitting on the floor. A rough guess would b,e that it was half of the attendees.

We discussed a bit about one of my favourite topics, the question of how much should be done within a geospatial database and what should be done outside of it. It then led to the problem that doing a lot within the database is easy (and fast) on a single instance, but as soon as you want to distribute your database, you might get into trouble.

To conclude, the atmosphere was good and people seemed to have enjoyed it (at least some were telling me so :) I'm happy that it went this well. Shoaib has kindly taken some notes and put on Github.

Web Mapping Libraries

On the second day the program wasn't as packed as on the first day, so I decided to make another session called "Web Mapping Libraries". The Again I didn't expect too many people to show up and this time I was right. It was a good crowd nonetheless.

What I wanted to find out was why people create new web mapping libraries instead of just improving existing ones like OpenLayers. This was also triggered by Slide 54 from Peter Batty's talk, where he compares OpenLayers to Google Maps. The two things that were catching my attention were "lightweight" and "extra mobile features". Those two can be solved. Eric Lemoine demonstrated a 29KB (gzipped) version of OpenLayers including the mobile features that were added at the Lausanne Code Sprint.

In the session it was just great to hear the impressions for what I call "web neogeo people" (people are web developers, designers and general people that like to visualize data) as opposed to "old school GIS people" (that know all kinds of OGC standards and dream about the axis confusion at night).

Things we've identified were (photo version):

• Documentation
• Default Look
• Usability
• Examples are not good
• No explanation of the general architecture

Documentation

The main source of documentation are the API docs. They describe every function of the library. One problem is that it isn't really clear what exactly you can pass in when one parameter is an options object (Example.

The lack of documentation with a nice introduction was also mentioned. Though I don't fully agree, there is some really nice documentation in prose, but it seems that people easily miss it (I especially like e.g. the page about Spherical Mercator).

Default look

I agree that the default look of OpenLayers looks a bit out dated. The main buttons look like from the early 2000's and the layer switcher isn't nice either.

On the one hand, you can change the look if you want to (example (scroll down)), or code the controls with any UI library you'd like to use (this is what GeoExt/MapQuery does).

Usability

I'm not really sure what this one was about, but I think it was about the complexity of OpenLayers. You need to have quite a bit GIS knowledge before you can get started. Don't get me wrong, I love OpenLayers for what it does and it's huge amount of features, though it comes to a price for newbies.

Again this is where I think GeoExt/MapQuery can help. They can build an easy to use API around the most common functionality like: display a GeoJSON file on a Google base map that shows a popup when I click on the geometry.

Examples are not good

It's nice to have a whole bunch of examples, though in the case of OpenLayers they are a bit misleading. I use them a lot to see how things work. Though they are not always well drafted idiomatic OpenLayers examples, but rather some source showing how a specific feature works. And this is exactly what they are. If you implement a new feature, you create API documentation and a working example.

For me they are more like acceptance tests, rather than good howtos for newbies.

No explanation of the general architecture

This one was mostly about "how do things work". One point was about vector layers. They are really powerful and you can compose them out of several parts with things like strategies and formats. It's not easy to understand how they fit together.

I think there was also another point, but I don't recall it. Let me know if you were at the session and remember it :)

Conclusion

I had a great time at the WhereCampEU 2011 and it was definitely worth going there. If you have anything to add to the notes about the session, please do so.

Categories: en, GeoCouch, OpenLayers, MapQuery, conference, geo

2011-04-19 22:35

Two weeks ago I had the chance to give a talk about GeoCouch and MapQuery at the FOSSGIS 2011. Most of the people who read this Blog are probably aware of GeoCouch, but not so much of MapQuery. For me these two projects are tightly connected and therefore deserve a quick introduction/update.

GeoCouch

GeoCouch, a spatial index for CouchDB gains, more and more attention. One of the reason is that the installation recently got way easier for developers as well as for normal users. You now can install GeoCouch as an extension right next to your already existing CouchDB instance. You may also download a binary of Couchbase-Server, which already includes GeoCouch. And finally there's the brand new Iris Couch hosting as well (previously known as the CouchOne hosting). So getting started with GeoCouch is easier than ever before.

Some people might have wondered about the state/future of GeoCouch, especially after the merger of CouchOne with Membase to Couchbase. I will keep on developing GeoCouch at Couchbase and it is (as it always was) fully open source licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

The new home for the latest source is the Couchbase Github repository.

OpenStreetMap

The FOSSGIS was also about OpenStreetMap. The idea to put OpenStreetMap data into GeoCouch is very sensible, but wasn't really done (AFAIK) in a big fashion. Luckily Jochen Topf from Geofabrik told me about his Projekt Osmium, which makes it possible to process OSM data with JavaScript. There is already a script to output a Shapefile, so it should be really easy to output GeoJSON, which could be consumed by GeoCouch. So if you (who are currently reading this) have some spare time, please give it a go :)

MapQuery

MapQuery is a web mapping framework that builds on OpenLayers and jQuery. The goal is a framework that is just as easy to use as jQuery combined with the power of OpenLayers. It's meant for people that just want to get started with web mapping, but also for those who have already knowledge about OpenLayers and want to have easy integration into their jQuery application.

I was able to show a quick demo of the MapQuery API at the FOSSGIS. I won't publish it here, as things are about to move fast. After over one year of discussions about MapQuery and only little code contributions, it seems that we are finally getting somewhere. That feels so good :)

The wonderful EduGIS is build on an early version of MapQuery (source code), but will be merged with the most recent version of my fork.

Other big news is that the WhereGroup hired Christian Wygoda, who is a committer of the MapQuery project. This also means that Mapbender 3 will use MapQuery.

And finally I've also met a developer of a another company that was building a big mapping application based on OpenLayers and jQuery. I don't want disclose it here, as the code isn't open source yet, but the developer told me that it should be easily possible. I will keep in touch with them and hope they will contribute their code to MapQuery.

To get to a conclusion about MapQuery. If you want to stay in touch with the project, please subscribe to the official mailing list, this is where things are happening (there's also the little attended IRC channel #mapquery on freenode). If you want to be a user of MapQuery, you should be patient and wait a bit. If you plan to contribute, you can start now. The currently biggest item is moving the EduGIS MapQuery code base over to the MapQuery version of my fork. The "documententation" are the demos.

FOSSGIS

As people started to asked about the slides from my presentaion at FOSSGIS, here they are.

FOSSGIS was a really awesome event, where I met a lot of new people, but also a lot of friends I haven't seen in a while. I'm really looking forward to next year's conference, but also hope that I might see many of the people at this year's FOSS4g in Denver.

Categories: en, CouchDB, GeoCouch, MapQuery, geo

2010-07-14 22:35

It was a Saturday in late April 2008, I was sitting on my Laptop in my 5m² room down under. Chatting with some German people I used to chat with for about 8 years by that time. Suddenly I discover that Jan is there, who I haven't talked with for years. Wondering why he was in there, he replied that he wanted to brag about his apache.org email address. This is how I found out about CouchDB.

After several long discussions with Jan I finally wrapped my head around the document oriented concept. I was blown away, it was exactly what I would have liked to use on so many occasions at my one year internship at a geospatial company. Though CouchDB wasn't ready, I needed spatial indexing. One week later I had a first idea of how such an extension might look like.

And only 2 years later I'm really involved in CouchDB and people actually start using GeoCouch :) I'd like to use this blog post to thank the developers and the whole community, it's been a great time and the IRC channel just kicks ass. You all helped to make CouchDB 1.0 possible!

Categories: en, CouchDB

2010-06-11 22:35

The OSGeo hacking event in Bolsena/Italy was great. Many interesting people sitting the whole day in front of their laptops surrounded by a beautiful scenery and nice warm sunny weather. It gets even better when you get meat for lunch and dinner.

I had the chance to tell people a bit more about CouchDB and Couchapps,

One project I haven't heard that much before of was Degree. They build the whole stack of OGC services you could imagine. For me it was of interest that they have a blob storage in their upcoming 3.0 release. The data isn't flattened into SQL tables but stored as blobs. This sounds like good use for a CouchDB backend in the future.

I was working with Simon Pigot on a GeoNetwork re-implementation based on CouchDB using Couchapp. We got the basic stuff like putting an XML document into the database, editing it and returning the new document, as well as fulltext indexing with couchdb-lucene work. Next steps are improving the JSON to XML mapping and integrating spatial search based on GeoCouch.

The event was really enjoyable, thanks Couchio for sponsoring the trip, thanks Jeroen for organizing it, and thanks all other hackers that made it such a awesome event. Hope to see you next year!

Categories: en, CouchDB, JavaScript, geo

2010-05-21 22:35

I did it! I'll speak at the FOSS4G Conference 2010 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference), 6th–9th September in Barcelona about “GeoCouch: A spatial index for CouchDB”. As soon as the abstract is available online I'll link to it. Hope to see you there!

Categories: en, GeoCouch, CouchDB, Erlang, geo