I’ve just returned from a week in St. Louis, for FOSS4GNA, the Free & Open Source Software for Geospatial conference. There were a number of themes, this year, but the predominant topics were increasing integration of of R and RStudio into the geospatial toolkit, big geospatial data management and analysis and the management and analysis of an increasing array of high-resolution and high-cadence satellite imagery sources.
Highlights included:
Julia Wolf, Visual Journalist for FiveThirtyEight delivered a fantastic keynote: “Map Like a Journalist,” outlining her formula for building compelling data narratives and visualizations.
A workshop from Planet.com’s Sara Safavi and Dana Bauer, using Planet’s custom Jupyter Notebook-based Interactive Guides for leveraging their daily image of the Earth at 3m resolution to create mosaics, produce subsets and even run simple machine learning tasks. Students and researchers can apply for free access to Planet.com imagery at: https://www.planet.com/markets/education-and-research/
R, and in particular RStudio, as a powerful desktop GIS alternative was a strong theme, and Tina Cormier, Remote Sensing Scientist at TellusLabs, delivered a great demonstration of using R Notebooks, in RStudio, for geospatial data science. Find her R Notebook code from the presentation, here: https://github.com/tacormier/FOSS4GNA_2018. On the final day, Tom Buckley of Metropolitan Transportation Commission presented a 3-hour workshop on “R Studio as a Traditional Desktop GIS Replacement.”
Other highlights included:
- The Go Spatial team’s workshop on “Running a vector tiles stack” with their tegola server, written in Go.
- Drew Bollinger’s demonstration of DevelopmentSeed’s label-maker (which prepares labeled image chips for machine learning).
- PostGIS Poet Laureate, Paul Ramsey’s “groovy” & irreverent [Spatial] SQL Festival talk (with fantastically verbose speaker notes), highlighting some novel, useful and efficient ways to use PostGIS for wrangling spatial data in PostgreSQL. Stanford affiliates can try pure PostGIS “in the cloud” using their stanford.edu email address at https://stanford.carto.com.
For those interested in Free & Open Source Software for Geospatial, the FOSS4G International Meeting will be held Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the end of August.