Data Scrounging 101

Steve Signell, Instructor (signes@rpi.edu)Robert Poirier, TA (poirir@rpi.edu)

School of ScienceRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Monday, February 10, 2014

GIS in the SciencesERTH 4750 (38031)

GeoData: where can you find it?

• Governments• Federal• State• County• Municipal

• Academia • NGOs• Private industry• Open Source Projects (e.g. OpenStreetMap)• Internet

Formats

GeoData repositories • ESRI shapefiles• kml/kmz• geoJSON• Rasters (e.g. ESRI GRID, geoTIFF, geoPDF)

GeoData Servers• Web Map Services (WMS)• Tile Services• Web Feature Services (WFS)• netCDF: Multidimensional (spatio-temporal) raster data

ESRI Shapefiles

Collection of 4-7 files

KML/KMZ

Spatial Variant of XMLGoogle Earth

GeoJSON

Spatial Variant of JSONInternet

Rasters

Not really human-friendly in raw format

Web Map Services (WMS)

A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS database

http://aprgis.org:8080/geoserver/ows?service=wms&version=1.1.1&request=GetCapabilities&

GetCapabilities - returns parameters about the WMS (such as map image format and WMS version compatibility) and the available layers (map bounding box, coordinate reference systems, URI of the data and whether the layer is mostly opaque or not)

WEB/QGIS demo

Web Feature Services (WFS)

The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls.

Like WMS, but have access to attribute tables, can run analysis

Tile Services

A Tile Map Service or TMS, is a specification for storing and retrieving cartographic data, developed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

most widely supported by web mapping clients and servers; although there is some desktop support

http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/tile/{z}/{y}/{x}.png

WEB/QGIS demo

Break

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Website: http://www.opengeospatial.org/

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 475 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. 

OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications.

Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL/OGR)

Website: http://www.gdal.org/

GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation 

OGR is like GDAL, but for rasters

QGIS demo

The National Map

Website: http://nationalmap.gov/

Data Viewer: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/• Allows spatial queries (QGIS Demo)

Web Map Services: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/example/services/serviceList.html

Open Street Map

Website: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world.

QGIS demo

NYS GIS Clearinghouse

Website: http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/

Orthoimagery: http://www.orthos.dhses.ny.gov/

WMS also

Rensellaer County

Search NY GIS Clearinghouse: http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/

County Website: http://www.rensco.com/gis.asp

ArcGIS online

Website: http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgisonline

Demo: https://frontierspatial.maps.arcgis.com/home/signin.html

Questions?

19

5 min break