OSGeo UK Local Chapter
Building a React Component Library for Geospatial Web Applications
Adam joined Sparkgeo as a Senior Front End developer in November 2022, having worked in the tech industry for 9 years, over 4 of which were in his previous role as a Senior Software Engineer at the BBC. Adam has specific expertise in Front End web application development, backed up by a broader experience in full stack technologies and was keen to move into the geospatial industry because it looked more fun than user identity management for the iPlayer! His work at Sparkgeo has included working on an interactive Coral Atlas for Arizona University, an EO based methane emission detection proof of concept for the UK Space Agency and more recently the development of a geospatial explorer dashboard for the European Space Agency. Realising how often these projects reinvent the wheel, the Sparkgeo team decided to build a resuable geospatial user interface component library for React development which this talk focuses on.
Sparkgeo are developing an open-source React-based component library to streamline our geospatial web application development. Many such applications share common interface elements like layer controls, legends, and timelines, so this library will offer pre-built, configurable components for reuse across projects. We’ll explore the technical implementation, including React’s component-based architecture, tools for management and testing, and how we ensure compatibility with various mapping libraries like OpenLayers, Maplibre, Deck.gl. Despite challenges like configurability and community engagement, this library aims to reduce development time, minimise code redundancy, and support efficient geospatial web development. This talk has also been presented at FOSS4G North America.
Start the Overture
Freelance Geographer for hire: main interests are Earth observation, ecology and landscapes, and renewable and home energy. Generally act as the technical lead or technical PM on most projects I deliver. Member or the OSGeo:UK committee, podcaster on EO topics. Loves Linux, concerned about environmental degradation in all its forms, and happy to keep on learning stuff.
Having recently done some vector based work, Al discovered how useful Overture is and will compare previous go-to data with this new dataset.
Creating a grid layout plugin for QGIS
I’m a GIS Technical Advisor at the British Red Cross, specialising in GIS for humantarian use in the UK and overseas.
Show and tell of a QGIS plugin I created to make it easier to build consistent layout grids in QGIS. Outlining the purpose of the plugin and how it works, and how I found it developing a QGIS plugin for the first time.
Satellites for Digitalization Of Railways
Currently working as developer/technical architect at CGI in the Space sector
The SODOR (Satellites fOr Digitalization Of Railways) project is led by CGI, supported by the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA), to develop a demonstration of a hybrid satellite communications and terrestrial network for use on trains. This enables improved passenger Wi-Fi and better operational monitoring and predictive maintenance on trains and trackside infrastructure.
A portal was developed using OpenLayers with React to communicate satellite connectivity options, train telemetry data for eg ride quality and display information from trackside assets. A live on-board pilot was carried out on the North York Moors Railway and ScotRail.
QField in an enterprise setting
GIS consultant with Astun. Expertise in shunting data in different places. :-)
A quick talk on how QField can sit in an enterprise setting. I’ll cover security, version control, synchronisation and access to the data from other systems. We’ll cover QFieldCloud and the API and I’ll explain how to adjust a QGIS project to make it as friendly as possible for mobile data capture.
EarthCODE as a reproducible science platform, influenced by EOEPCA+ workflow and data standards
Garin is a Ground Segment Architect specialising in Reproducible Science, AI (Artificial Intelligence), ARD (Analysis Ready Data) and Quality initiatives in the space industry. Heavily involved in the architecture of Open Source solutions, frameworks and platforms. Richard is an experienced (30 years) software engineer, architect and technical lead. Richard is the system architect for ESA’s EOEPCA project (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture), and participates in the OGC EO Exploitation Platform Domain Working Group. Richard was previously the technical architect for the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS), and for the renewal of the Jupiter 2 Control Centre in the Guiana Space Centre, Kourou.
The EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) vision provides an integrated, cloud-based, user-centric development environment, supporting ESA’s science activities and projects. Building on European EO open-source ecosystem and Open Earth System Science community activities (including EOEPCA+, the Open Science Catalogue and EOxHub), ESA is implementing EarthCODE as a collaborative platform for conducting Earth System Science sustainably, adhering to FAIR and Open Science Principles.
EarthCODE will provide an Integrated Development Platform, giving developers tools needed to develop high quality workflows, allowing experiments to be executed in the cloud and the reproduced by other scientists. As EarthCODE evolves, it will allow the federation of data and processing, allowing EarthCODE to have the potential to facilitate processing on other platforms, i.e. DeepESDL, ESA EURO Data Cube, Open EO Cloud/Platform and AIOPEN/AI4DTE. EarthCODE has ambition to deliver a model for a Collaborative Open Development Environment for Earth system science. Researchers will be able to leverage the power of wide ranging EO platform services available to conduct their science, while also making use of FAIR Open Science tools to manage data, code and documentation, create end-to-end reproducible workflows on platforms. Scientists would also have the opportunity to discover, use, reuse, modify and build upon the research of others in a fair and safe way. Overall, EarthCODE aims to enable elements for EO Open Science and Innovation vision, including open data, open-source code, linked data/code, open-access documentation, end-to-end reproducible workflows, open science resources, open-science tools, and a healthy community applying all the elements in their practice.
The ‘Exploitation Platform’ concept derives from the need to access and process an ever-growing data volumes. Many web-based platforms, with cloud computing resources, have emerged - offering access to a wealth of satellite EO data and facilitating the analysis and processing of large data volumes in a scalable manner. To fully exploit the potential of complementary platform resources, interoperation is needed amongst them, such that platform users may consume the services of another, platform-to-platform.
EOEPCA+ (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture), an ESA funded project, aims to define a re-usable exploitation platform architecture, with standard interfaces, encouraging interoperation and federation between operational exploitation platforms. This facilitates easier access and efficient exploitation for EO and other data. Interoperability through open standards is key for the Common Architecture, where platform developers would likely invest efforts in standard implementations having wide usage.
The EOEPCA+ system architecture is designed to meet defined use cases for various user levels, from expert application developers to consumers. The system capabilities are defined as a set of Building Blocks (software components) exposing well-defined open-standard interfaces. The Building Blocks provide capabilities for Discovery, Processing, Data Access & Visualisation, Datacube semantics for analysis, Machine Learning, Dashboards to showcase research outcomes, Federation, and more, all supported by a framework for Identity & Access Management. Each of these Building Blocks are containerised for cloud-native Kubernetes, providing an infrastructure-agnostic deployment target. The exploitation platform is conceived as a ‘virtual work environment’ where users can access data, develop algorithms, conduct analysis and share value-adding outcomes.
Geo-spatial data analysis for heritage & habitat
BSc physics (1970), 1971 - 1980 research in telecoms industry, been using GIS for habitat survey/conservation, archaeology, land management planning in Herefordshire since mid 1990s
Application of FOSS4G to advance the Nature Recovery strategy for Herefordshire, focussing on QGIS, PostGIS, geo-referenced raster layers of aerial photography, scanned historic maps and LIDAR integrated with mobile phone geotagged photos for citizen science surveys and using Geoserver to develop website delivery
Dogfooding OSGeo - Should the inmates run the asylum?
I began my spatial career as a land surveyor in Germany before settling in the United Kingdom. Having gained GIS and Geography degrees from Kingston University and King’s College London I am now committing most of my time to the development of serverless spatial data interfaces for GEOLYTIX.
Building [spatial] applications is hard. The mechanics of building an application often end up taking precedence over the aims of the project, to the point where nobody—user, designer, programmer or manager—ends up getting what they want.
Using your own software, alone and with other end users, turns out to be a great way to determine not only if you’re building the right thing, but also whether you’re building things right.
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) has a wealth of experience through its members who are devoted to an open philosophy and participatory community driven development.
What are then the benefits of applying a framework restricted by the requirement of being truly free and open to in-house software projects for primarily commercial applications.
This talk will provide an introduction and brief overview for the XYZ/MAPP project, its history, and current state. How stakeholders and competition have paved a long and winding road towards becoming an OSGeo community project.
Notes: “Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”, Alan Cooper [2004] Written by Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them.
Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one’s own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers’ confidence in their own products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
Experiences growing a FOSS4G project
James is a London based software developer with a passion for geosptial. He is currently a Staff Engineer at Nearform, a company with roots in the open source community.
Terra Draw is an open source JavaScript library for drawing on web maps. The project started two years ago in the UK and in that time the project has had over 20 unique contributors and amassed nearly 500 stars on GitHub. This talk will look and the ups and downs of attempting to grow, maintain and foster active adoption of an open source project. The talk will also touch on how we joined the OSGeo Community Project initiative and what that process looks like.
Unlocking the Power of Overture Maps with DuckDB Spatial
I’m Matt Travis, and I work at Addresscloud in the UK. I’m passionate about geospatial technology, especially within the open-source GIS community both in the UK and globally. I love working with spatial data - whether it’s querying it with tools like DuckDB or visualizing it in creative ways. My focus is on making both geospatial tech and data accessible, finding ways to do this and sharing with others.
This will be an overview of the Overture Maps project, which is an initiative to build and maintain a global map from various open and commercial data sources. Overture combines information from different contributors, making it a rich and diverse map resource. I will explain how to remotely query this data using DuckDB, a fast SQL-based database engine, and demonstrate how to visualize spatial data interactively using Lonboard within a notebook environment. Additionally, I will cover extracting and manipulating spatial data with the DuckDB spatial extension, allowing seamless integration with desktop GIS tools like QGIS for further analysis and mapping.
GoFundGeo
I’m Nick Bearman and deliver GIS training sessions and GIS consultancy for a variety of clients, primarily focused in the academic and not for profit sectors. I help people make use of GIS to answer their research questions, and get more answers from the data they already have. I am a passionate supporter of Open Source software and am Chair of OSGeo:UK, the UK Local Chapter of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
This will be an overview of OSGeo:UK’s GoFundGeo project, where every year we award money to a range of UK related OSGeo projects. This year we have a budget of £6,000 and will be making the decision about which projects we support at our AGM on Mon 18th November. Hear about the GoFundGeo at my presentation, and come and have your say at the AGM!
Mergin Maps: your field data collection tool
I am a QGIS core contributor and project lead of Mergin Maps.
I will introduce Mergin Maps, open source tool powered by QGIS, and its uses in field data collection. I will explain how it can be used for collaboration of teams working even offline. I will also mention notable features in the project in last year and vision of the product for next months. At the end we will also look at whole ecosystem behind the project.
Real-Time Vessel Monitoring with Open-Source Tools: Leveraging PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and Python for Geospatial Analysis and Visualisation
Have spent about a decade working in the offshore energy industry with a focus on GIS and geospatial technologies. From 2013 to 2020, I worked at Senergy, where I contributed to various geospatial projects related to offshore operations. I currently work at Inosys, where I continue to leverage geospatial technologies, specialising in the integration of PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Python, and QGIS for spatial data analysis. My interest lies in using geospatial data to solve complex challenges in energy and maritime sectors.
This talk will explore the use of AIS data for real-time vessel tracking around energy facilities on the West African coast. Key vessels are monitored, and geofences (including dynamic ones) are defined using PostGIS. PostgreSQL’s LISTEN/NOTIFY feature triggers a Python script that leverages open-source libraries to analyse each position, generate the vessel’s current state, compare it to the previous state, and update the database accordingly. The resulting vessel state data is visualised, allowing users to track vessel activity and state over user-defined timescales.
Using cloud-native geospatial technologies to build a web app for analysing and reducing flood risk
Robin Wilson is a freelance geospatial software engineer and data scientist. He has a PhD in satellite imaging from the University of Southampton (where he won the RSPSoc prize for both his MSc and PhD theses), and has worked with clients ranging from tiny two-person companies to large multinational corporations, and is currently working with Rebalance Earth. He has been involved with open-source geospatial software for many years, has contributed to many projects and has spoken at multiple FOSS4G events. He has a particular interest in cloud-native geospatial technologies.
This talk will give a case-study of the use of modern cloud-native geospatial technologies to build a web app for assessing businesses at risk of flooding and investigating potential nature-based solutions to reduce this flooding. The initial app prototype was developed in about 15 hours during a hackathon, and the use of cloud-native technologies significantly contributed to this speed. I will focus on the use of technologies including PostGIS, Mapbox Vector Tiles (generated directly from PostGIS functions), Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs and Titiler and delve into the technical details of using them, and how they can be combined to produce a responsive app showing large volumes of raster and vector data and performing GIS analyses ‘on the fly’.