(UPDATE: Ecotrust has asked me to remove material related to the Calzone and Gulf Tool.  Please feel free to contact Ecotrust directly to find out more about those tools)

I have been working on a new decision support tool for Ecotrust over the last few months, so today I decided to make some screen casts (with audio!) of some of our work.

Cal-Zone – Web based DST based on Marxan / Marzone for helping evaluate site selection of marine protected areas. Marxan / Marzone results are generated and stored in PostGIS for display via OpenLayers. New windowing functionality introduced to allow for future enhancements such as multi-run comparisons and use of region of interest tools for site selection.

http://www.reprojected.com/demo/cal-zone-demo.html

Gulf Tool – Web based DST based around scenario development for Gulf of Mexico fisheries. Uses a Chameleon based frontend, Mapserver on the backend and all data storage and queries through PostGIS. GMT is used for graphing.

http://www.reprojected.com/demo/gulf-demo.html

Just a snapshot into some of the DST development we are undertaking and very excited about. Hope you enjoy…

Just posted an extended abstract for Coastal Zone 07 to take place in Portland OR July 22nd-26th. Great to get some more Open Source geospatial published…

I have posted a new presentation on Open Source GIS that I gave on Feb 21st 2007 at Portland State University. Included is an audio recording of the talk, a ppt presentation, and a flash demo of doing some simple GRASS interaction.

http://www.reprojected.com/geoblog/presentations/

Enjoy!

Aaron

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Non-profit_Discount

We at Ecotrust just signed up… can’t beat 1/2 terabyte of storage and 5 terabytes of bandwidth… FREE!

This personal blog is hosted there as well under my personal account, but if you are a non-profit interested in playing with Mapserver/PostGIS/GMT/GRASS you can check out my post on installation in this environment to get up and running with web mapping… FOR FREE!!!

Enjoy

UPDATE (12/09/06): For those who are not in the non-profit world but are still interested in Dreamhost for cheap hosting I just created a promo code that gives the FULL $97 discount to you… Nothing to me.  Dreamhost works on this crazy “reward” system for getting people to use you as a referal, offering a finders fee to the current customer.  I have created this code to apply all of the finders fee to your discount… I get NOTHING.  It is ZPULLEYFULL , enjoy!

We are delighted to announce a new open source framework for web-mapping, your personal Ninja of web-mapping, ladies and gentlemen, it’s:

*Map-Fu*

Available for download, contribution of code, or reporting of bugs at our not-so-secret location on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/map-fu/

It features a true object-oriented PHP-Mapscript backend, with a variety
of classes and interfaces, ease of extensibility, and other
configuration zoink-zoink.

On the front end is a fat Javascript client, using XMLHttpRequest to communicate with the server for updating the map and map-related data. It employs JSON for messaging and goes for a Web 2.0 feel. Some features on the front-end include pop-up tabs for reference map, legend, map information and query results. We try to maximize screen area for the map, since that’s what we are interested in visually!

Based on Minnesota Mapserver (of course) and PostGIS, we developed this interface to satisfy actual needs of clients for creating web-mapping applications that served SPECIFIC needs and required SPECIFIC tools.

Some production sites that are using the Map-Fu or related codebase (formerly known as YAMI (Yet Another Map Interface)):

http://glaciers.us – A database of glacier change in the Western US, including a linked assets database of aerial and oblique photos from the last century

http://www.oregongeology.com/sub/ogdc/index.htm – The most up-to-date geology compilation for Oregon, soon to be used for other states!

http://oscdl.research.pdx.edu/ – Oregon Sustainable
Communities Digital Library, a temporal database of regional planning for the Portland Metro area (ten years of regional planning data, plus links to documents tied to spatial objects)

We look forward to collaborating with a larger group of developers, and receiving feedback on our efforts! We’re interested in incorporating the OpenLayers interface, and “through the web” feature editing via WFS-T.

In the current vacuum of viable enterprise GIS solutions, we see this as a ripe time for rapid development!

The Map-Fu development team,
Morgan, Cris, Tim, Percy & Will
Portland State University
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