DEV Community: Joana Simoes

Tiling Interfaces Code Sprint: Call for Mentors 📢

Joana Simoes — Tue, 23 May 2023 11:39:46 +0000

We are looking for volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of the Tiling Interfaces Code Sprint (12-14/06/2023), by offering tutorials or 1:1 mentoring.

What's the Code Sprint About 📣

The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event, where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of tiling standards, more specifically: OGC API Tiles, OGC API Maps, the Vector Tiles Extension to GeoPackage, Variable Width Tile Matrix, the Changesets API and WMTS (DGIWG and NSG profiles). The code sprint takes place at the Moonshot labs of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (St. Louis, MO, US) and on the OGC-events Discord server. This code sprint is hosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). You can find more information about the event on the sprint page.

What's this Call About 📣

In the code sprint we would like to also welcome developers which are new to OGC standards, but are keen to learn more about them. Although they can attend the main track, they may feel a bit lost there, so we would like to offer them a parallel track, with more suitable content. On the mentor stream, developers will have the opportunity to give their first steps using the standards and products/services that implement the standards, and hopefully this will build an engagement which will continue past the code sprint.

We have opened a call for volunteers from OGC WGs or standards users/implementers, to participate in this mentor stream.

How can I get involved 🤹‍♀️

If you are interested in being a mentor, these are the main activities where your contribution would be most valuable.

Tutorial

You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the topics of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find here an example of a mentor stream tutorials. To propose a tutorial, you can edit this section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel . You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

1:1 Mentoring

Even with a stream of tutorials available to start with, some people may still feel a bit lost. To address this, we would like to offer them the opportunity to find a mentor that could be a point of contact during the code sprint and support them in their activities, or at least point them to someone who could help them. If you are running a tutorial, we would encourage you to be a mentor, but you could be a mentor even if you are not without doing any tutorials. There is a section of channels which is dedicated to #Mentoring. If you would like to be a mentor, please get in touch so we can assign you a #mentor role on discord. Once the code sprint starts, we encourage you to introduce yourself on the #whois channel and attend the #find-a-mentor room - this is the channel where people will look for 1:1 mentoring. You don’t need to be an expert in all the topics covered during this code sprint, and you certainly do not need to be available 24:7 during the code sprint. We appreciate your contribution, even if it is for a limited period of time.

If you have any queries, please get in touch by email (devrel@ogc.org) or in discord by DM (to doublebyte#8420). We really appreciate your collaboration in making this code sprint more community based and hopefully contributing towards growing your own community. 💚

3rd Open Software and Open Standards Code Sprint: Call for Mentors 📢

Joana Simoes — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 14:24:48 +0000

We are looking for volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of the Joint OGC – OSGeo – ASF Code Sprint (25-27/04/2022), by offering tutorials, mentored projects or 1:1 mentoring.

What's the Code Sprint About 📣

The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event, where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of open standards for geospatial information and to support the development of free and open source software which implements those standards, as well as creating awareness about the standards and software projects. The code sprint takes place on the OGC-events Discord server, and we leverage its channel structure to create a collaborative and productive environment. This code sprint is hosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), The Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and Apache Software Foundation (ASF). You can find more information about the event on the sprint page.

What's this Call About 📣

In the code sprint we would like to also welcome developers which are new to OGC standards, OSGeo or ASF projects, but are keen to learn more about them. Although they can attend the main track, they may feel a bit lost there, so we would like to offer them a parallel track, with more suitable content. On the mentor stream, developers will have the opportunity to give their first steps using the standards and projects, and hopefully this will build an engagement which will continue past the code sprint.

We have opened a call for volunteers from OGC SWGs, OSGeo and ASF projects, to participate in this mentor stream.

How can I get involved 🤹‍♀️

If you are interested in being a mentor, these are the main activities where your contribution would be most valuable.

Tutorial

You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the topics of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard or FOSS projects may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find here an example of a mentor stream tutorials. To propose a tutorial, you can edit this section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel . You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

Project

You could propose an activity from your project which is suited for beginners. For instance for a SWG, this could be completing the OpenAPI definition of the standard. For a software project, it could be adding documentation, or even testing. The important thing is that you specify very well what needs to be done, and provide all the elements that are necessary to pursue this activity, because people may not be aware of where to look for them. To propose a project, you can edit this section of the wiki page with all the relevant details. You are also welcome to add a session for explaining the project activity to the schedule. You can set the location to the #Mentor Room voice discord channel. You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

1:1 Mentoring

Even with a stream of tutorials and projects available to start with, some people may still feel a bit lost. To address this, we would like to offer them the opportunity to find a mentor that could be a point of contact during the code sprint and support them in their activities, or at least point them to someone who could help them. If you are running a tutorial or offering a project, we would encourage you to be a mentor, but you could be a mentor even if you are not without doing any of these. There is a section of channels which is dedicated to #Mentoring. If you would like to be a mentor, please get in touch so we can assign you a #mentor role on discord. Once the code sprint starts, we encourage you to introduce yourself on the #whois channel and attend the #find-a-mentor room - this is the channel where people will look for 1:1 mentoring. You don’t need to be an expert in all the topics covered during this code sprint, and you certainly do not need to be available 24:7 during the code sprint. We appreciate your contribution, even if it is for a limited period of time.

Call for Mentors for the Web Mapping Code Sprint: 29/11 - 01/12 2022 🎓

Joana Simoes — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 13:50:25 +0000

We are looking for brave volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of this event, by offering tutorials, mentored projects or 1:1 mentoring.

The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event hosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) along with other organisations, where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of open standards for geospatial information and to support the development of software which implements those standards, as well as creating awareness about the standards and software projects. The Web Mapping Code Sprint focuses on a set of standards and candidate standards which support creating maps on the web: OGC API Tiles, OGC API Maps and OGC API Styles.

The code sprint takes place on Mundo-madou (Brussels, Belgium) and on the OGC-events Discord server. You can find more information on the sprint page.

In the code sprint we would like to also welcome developers which are new to OGC standards, but are keen to learn more about them. Although they can attend the main track, they may feel a bit lost there, so we would like to offer them a parallel track, with more suitable content. On the mentor stream, developers will have the opportunity to give their first steps using the standards and projects, and hopefully this will build an engagement which will continue past the code sprint.

We have opened a call for volunteers from the related Standard Working Groups and software projects which implement the standards, to participate in this mentor stream. If you are interested in being a mentor, these are the main activities where your contribution would be most valuable.

Tutorial

You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the topics of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard or related projects may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find here an example of a mentor stream from a past code sprint. To propose a tutorial, you can edit this section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel. You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

Project

1:1 Mentoring

If you have any queries, please get in touch in discord by DM (to doublebyte#8420). We really appreciate your collaboration, in making this code sprint more community based and hopefully contributing towards growing your own community.💙

Call for Mentors for the Vector Data Code Sprint: 12-14 July 2022 🎓

Joana Simoes — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:29:00 +0000

We are looking for brave volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of this event, by offering tutorials, mentored projects or 1:1 mentoring.

The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event hosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of open standards for geospatial information and to support the development of software which implements those standards, as well as creating awareness about the standards and software projects. The Vector Data Code Sprint focuses on a set of standards and candidate standards which are related to some sort of vector representation: OGC API Features, Moving Features, Routes and 3D GeoVolumes.

The code sprint takes place on the OGC-events Discord server, and we leverage its channel structure to create a collaborative and productive environment. You can find more information on the sprint page.

In the code sprint we would like to also welcome developers which are new to OGC standards, but are keen to learn more about them. Although they can attend the main track, they may feel a bit lost there, so we would like to offer them a parallel track, with more suitable content. On the mentor stream, developers will have the opportunity to give their first steps using the standards and projects, and hopefully this will build an engagement which will continue past the code sprint.

Tutorial

You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the topics of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard or related projects may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find here, an example of a mentor stream from a past code sprint. To propose a tutorial, you can edit this section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel. You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

Project

1:1 Mentoring

The Future of Map Tiling 🌐

Joana Simoes — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 09:45:31 +0000

Web mapping is indisputably one of the most popular GIS applications. Back in the 90’s, most digital maps were static, so, in order to have some interactivity, users would often have to install desktop applications or browser plugins. In the 2000’s, with the rise of Google Maps, map “mashups” that integrated different data sources in the same interactive map became popular. Mainstream websites, from governments to newspapers, started using interactive maps to illustrate their “data stories.” Maps became as essential to any data-aware website as the popular interactive table. As an example, when I was teaching full-stack development at a Bootcamp, 7 out of 10 students (who knew nothing about GIS) wanted to add an interactive map to their final project.

Following the success of Google maps, we had access to a variety of interactive web maps that follow a server client architecture – they do something very similar, in a slightly different way. The lack of interoperability between all these solutions was something that was addressed early on by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), with the WMS standard. As with other OGC standards at the time, WMS relied on SOAP technology for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. As images are rendered on-the-fly from a vector data source, the workload can be quite heavy on the server side and users may have to deal with suboptimal response times. The OGC WMTS standard, created in 2010, addressed this problem by serving pre-rendered tiles. Unlike WMS, WMTS adopted a REST architecture which already started to be popular at the time. However, it still used XML encodings and it did not leverage many of the web practices that we see today.

The next step in terms of web mapping interoperability came with OGC API – Tiles. As with other Standards and candidate standards from the OGC API “family,” it leverages many of the patterns/best practices that we see on the web today (e.g. the use of http status codes, recommended JSON encodings, self-documented using OpenAPI). This was intentional, so as to decrease the learning curve for web developers. As with other OGC APIs, it has a modular structure; i.e. a developer can pick some parts of OGC API – Tiles and integrate them into their existing application. Another very interesting feature about this candidate standard is the tile abstraction – you can serve raster tiles, along with vector tiles, and/or styled tiles. You can explore an example of OGC API – Tiles “in action”, here.

If you are interested in learning more about this promising candidate standard, and maybe even coding one of its earlier implementations, you are very welcome to join us at the “Space Partitions Code Sprint”, in the second week of May. Registrations are free and open to anyone, until the 9th of May.

Let’s build the future of map tiling together!

Getting Geospatial Data on The Web 🌎

Joana Simoes — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:53:38 +0000

As a result of cheap location devices, user generated content and IoT — among other things — an increasing amount of geospatial data is generated everyday.

In this talk at SkillsMatter, I discussed how we can serve or consume these data over the Internet, without reinventing the wheel.

You can find the slides here: https://res.cloudinary.com/skillsmatter/image/upload/v1644585677/kkcchrim4gbwcqddqq36.pdf

2nd Open Software and Open Standards Code Sprint: Call for Mentors 📢

Joana Simoes — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:21:54 +0000

We are looking for volunteers to help us run the mentor stream of the Joint OGC – OSGeo – ASF Code Sprint (8-10/03/2022), by offering tutorials, mentored projects or 1:1 mentoring.

What's the Code Sprint About 📣

The Code Sprint is a three day virtual event, where dozens of developers from around the world come together to code and share their ideas. The main goals of this code sprint are to support the development of open standards for geospatial information and to support the development of free and open source software which implements those standards, as well as creating awareness about the standards and software projects. The code sprint takes place on the OGC-events Discord server, and we leverage its channel structure to create a collaborative and productive environment. This code sprint is hosted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), The Open Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and Apache Software Foundation (ASF). You can find more information about the event on the sprint page.

What's this Call About 📣

We have opened a call for volunteers from OGC SWGs, OSGeo and ASF projects, to participate in this mentor stream.

How can I get involved 🤹‍♀️

If you are interested in being a mentor, these are the main activities where your contribution would be most valuable.

Tutorial

You could present a tutorial/ entry level workshop in a topic which fits within the topics of the code sprint. We prefer hands-on tutorials, where participants have the opportunity to do something practical and achieve some results at the end of the session, as this promotes more engagement. Just bear in mind that their knowledge about the standard or FOSS projects may be limited, although they may be very knowledgeable about coding and technology in general. In the past, the duration of these sessions was about 45 minutes, but it is entirely up to you. You can find here an example of a mentor stream from a past code sprint. To propose a tutorial, you can edit this section of the wiki page and add your session below, following the same format of the sample tutorial. All the tutorials take place in the #Mentor Room voice discord channel . You can use the #Mentor room text channel for asynchronous discussions, during the code sprint.

Project

1:1 Mentoring

How-to share geospatial data on the web

Joana Simoes — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 09:09:02 +0000

On this tutorial we will explore how to share geospatial data on the web, in a simple and efficient way. You can use the provided dataset or use your own dataset, in order to implement the pipeline to make it available with a REST API, using a stack of free and open source software.
We will conclude by exploring the deployed service using a swagger endpoint and postman, but "sky is the limit" in terms of client applications which could consume this dataset.
In order to complete this, you will only need some basic knowledge of docker and docker-compose. The links used in the tutorial are listed bellow. Have fun!🙃

https://www.sawcer.com/
https://ogcapi.org/dev/features
https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-bp/#spatial-things-features-and-geometry
https://pygeoapi.io/
https://github.com/geopython/pygeoapi
https://github.com/emotional-cities/pygeoapi/tree/mongo
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
http://bboxfinder.com/#0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000
https://features.byteroad.net/

Sharing Geospatial Data with OGC API, pygeoapi and MongoDB

Joana Simoes — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:20:11 +0000

Geospatial data can be defined as any dataset which has a location tag attached to it, i.e.: a pair of coordinates which allows us to position it precisely at the surface of the earth. In this post we are going to describe how we can make geospatial data available on the web, trough a RESTfull API, so that ourselves or others can do something with it, for instance creating a map. If it is true you can create a map using a static file, using an API has numerous advantages like scalability, reliability and updatability. In order to do this, we will use three things: a dataset, a standard and a stack of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

Dataset

In this tutorial we will share a dataset with local shops and products in the city of Barcelona, kindly provided by sawcer.

Each record describes characteristics of the shop such as name, address, website, which products are sold (e.g.: Gluten free donut) and, last but not the least, its location as a point geometry, with x,y coordinates.

Standard

Standards are the glue in the server-client architecture. The Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) is a member organisation, which publishes standards to ensure the maximum degree of interoperability between geospatial data and services. In practice interoperability would mean that you could write a client application that talks to any server, without knowing any details about that server's implementation.
In this tutorial we will use the OGC API Features standard, which was designed for sharing feature data over the web (if you are wondering what a feature is, you can check out this article). These are some of its main traits, which make it very convenient to use:

Modular
RESTfull
Recommended encodings (e.g.: GeoJSON, HTML)
Use of OpenAPI

Software Stack

In order to publish the dataset using the OGC API Features standard, we need a software which implements the standard. In this tutorial we will use pygeoapi, which is a python server implementation, released under a FOSS (MIT) license. pygeoapi needs a backend to store the data. For that we will use the MongoDB document oriented database. In order to make deployment easier, the complete stack was virtualised into a set of docker containers, and orchestrated using docker-compose.

Putting it all together

In order to publish the dataset, you can clone this repository. If you navigate to the docker/examples/mongo folder, you will find this docker-composition:

version: '3.3'

services:
  pygeoapi:
    image: geopython/pygeoapi:latest

    container_name: pygeoapi_mongo

    entrypoint:
      - /mongo-entrypoint.sh

    ports:
      - 5000:80

    volumes:
      - ./pygeoapi/docker.config.yml:/pygeoapi/local.config.yml
      - ./pygeoapi/mongo-entrypoint.sh:/mongo-entrypoint.sh
      - ./pygeoapi/wait-for-mongo.sh:/wait-for-mongo.sh
    links:
      - mongo
    depends_on:
      - mongo

  mongo:
    image: mongo
    container_name: mongo
    ports:
      - 27017:27017
    volumes:
      - ./docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/add_data.sh:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/add_data.sh:ro
      - ./mongo_data/:/mongo_data
    environment:
        MONGO_INITDB_DATABASE: sawcer

  mongo-express:
    image: mongo-express
    restart: always
    container_name: mongo_express
    links:
      - mongo
    depends_on:
      - mongo
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
mongodb://root:example@mongo:27017/


volumes:
  mongo_data: {}

Here is what happens behind the scenes, when you type docker-compose up:

The mongo container starts, a database is initialised and the data is injected into a collection. The data is pulled from a GeoJSON file in the mongo_data folder. If you are trying this with your own data, it is worth to mention that mongo ingests the features array, without the outer element. You can transform a regular GeoJSON file into MongoDB-consumable JSON, using the jq command-line utility: jq --compact-output ".features" shops-orig.geojson > shops.geojson
Once the database is live, the pygeoapi container starts. The configuration of the service is on this file, which is mounted by the container. In particular, this bit is where the sawcer dataset is exposed from the MongoDB backend:

    sawcer:
        type: collection
        title: Shops and Products 
        description: SEARCH & FIND & SHARE where to get ingredients in local shops
        keywords:
            - cases
        links:
            - type: text/html
              rel: canonical
              title: information
              href: https://www.sawcer.com/
              hreflang: en-US
        extents:
            spatial:
                bbox: [-180, -90, 180, 90]
                crs: http://www.opengis.net/def/crs/OGC/1.3/CRS84
            temporal:
                begin: 2011-11-11
                end: null  # or empty
        providers:
            - type: feature
              name: MongoDB
              data: mongodb://mongo:27017/sawcer
              collection: shops

At this stage, the pygeoapi is running on port 5000: http://localhost:5000. You can access the sawcer dataset at: http://localhost:5000/collections/sawcer
You can retrieve the collection items at:
http://localhost:5000/collections/sawcer/items
The default response is in html, but you can change it using the f (format) parameter. The server supports both, JSON and JSON-LD encodings. For instance:
http://localhost:5000/collections/sawcer/items?f=jsonld
You can access one particular item, using its id:
http://localhost:5000/collections/sawcer/items/61afae9fc6bf8d516533620f

If you want to explore the MongoDB collection, you can use the provided mongo-express user interface, running on port 8081: http://localhost:8081

What's next

Making your geospatial dataset available on the web using a standard, unlocks a world of possibilities. It means that many existing (or future) client applications will be able to read your data, out-of-the-box. For instance, anyone can use QGIS, Esri ArcGIS, React-leaflet, OpenLayers or Python OWSlib to pull your data and analyse it, or create products or services on top of it.

You can explore a live deployment of this dataset, at this endpoint:
https://features.byteroad.net/collections/sawcer
On this OpenAPI document, you can try all the available endpoints:
https://features.byteroad.net/openapi?f=html