Another of my modest contributions to QGIS is now in the master. I added 4 new tools to customise raster rendering: brightness and contrast controls (raster pipes, once you understand how they work, are cool and flexible thing). In addition to changing the raster rendering on the fly, users can also save the modified image for future use.
I read “Notes of a Ukrainian Madman” by Lina Kostenko. Excellent, I didn’t even expect to like it. Now I’m thinking what to read next: “A Requiem for November” by Dzvinka Matiyash or “Raven” by Vasyl Shkliar. But I don’t have either book yet, and it’s unlikely that I could buy them here.
Yesterday I finished “The Idiot” by Dostoyevsky. Impressions are twofold, it was a bit easier to read than “Crime and Punishment”, but in general I did not like it. I haven’t decided what to read next, and I won’t have much time for books in the near future.
Traditionally, at the end of the year, I try to summarise the most important and interesting events.
This year I have had to work hard. In addition to working on various projects, I have been quite active in QGIS, especially at the beginning of the year. In total, more than 50 bugs in QGIS were fixed, and 4 new plugins were released. It looks like next year will be even more intense.
The year was rich in releases: GDAL 1.9.0 (and related shapefile encoding issues), Proj 4.8, QGIS 1.7.4 and 1.8.0, PostGIS 2.0 (topology and raster), OTB 3.12 (full support for Πλειάδες). 181317 OrbView-3 scenes have been released under the Public Domain licence. Also, this year SEXTANTE for QGIS was announced — a powerful geoprocessing platform that soon became part of QGIS.
QGIS is now 10 years old.
I released several new QGIS plugins, including Geotag and import photos, and participated in GSoC as a mentor. For a short time I became a SEXTANTE core developer (then it was integrated into QGIS and I lost that title).
TauDEM (Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models) is a set of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tools for extracting and analysing hydrological information from the topography represented by a DEM. It was developed at Utah State University (USU) for hydrological analysis of digital elevation models and watershed delineation.
TauDEM has recently been integrated into QGIS as a SEXTANTE provider. This makes it possible to run TauDEM tools directly from QGIS, easily perform complex analysis workflows, and view the generated results.
In this post, I will show how to perform some hydrological analysis tasks in QGIS using TauDEM, namely how to delineate watersheds and extract stream networks.
About a week ago, Alessandro Furieri announced the release of SpatiaLite 4.0.0 — a spatial extension to SQLite. There are not just a lot of changes, there are VERY many of them. And some of them may cause compatibility problems, so all users should read the migration guide.
Among the most interesting features:
tessellation support
VirtualOGR driver
support for SQL/MM topology
and more
And yesterday, the SpatiaLite data provider in QGIS was updated. Compatibility with databases created in previous versions of SpatiaLite is maintained. However, you will need to convert your databases to the SpatiaLite 4.0.0 format (you can use spatialite_convert from spatialite-tools) to take full advantage of the new features.
With the Nth attempt, I set up the web-server and transferred the site to it.
I’m not much of a sysadmin, so not everything has been done the way I wanted, and not everything I planned is there and working. I will try to add what is missing over time. So the site may be down for short periods of time..
SEXTANTE is a powerful and flexible platform for performing geospatial analysis in QGIS. It provides access to its own geoprocessing functions as well as algorithms implemented in third-party applications, making analysis easier and more productive.
Initially written in Java and only available to gvSIG users, SEXTANTE has gradually extended its presence to other GIS. In 2012, a Python version was developed for use with QGIS. It immediately attracted a lot of interest from users and developers alike, and in September 2012 SEXTANTE was integrated into QGIS as a core plugin.
SEXTANTE in QGIS allows you to use the main features of well-known third-party GIS tools (SAGA GIS, GRASS GIS, TauDEM, OrfeoToolBox…) and algorithms implemented directly in SEXTANTE (fTools, MMQGISX…) via a unified interface.
It also offers a wide range of possibilities for automating data processing: combining repetitive steps of applying algorithms to data in a custom analysis model, writing and using Python scripts, batch processing mode. Advanced users can further increase their productivity by using SEXTANTE algorithms and the Python console together.
Two of my plugins are in the TOP-20 by downloads, 4 by ratings and 5 by votes. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice.
Actually, the list is not complete, as there are still C++ plugins that are distributed as source code and plugins that are not published in the official repository. And some plugins, although they have been significantly reworked by me and are now maintained by me, were originally created by others.