FOSS4G AKL Meetup 2022

9.00am

Peering into the past: geospatial tools for Archaeology in Aotearoa / New Zealand

In 2016 Toitū Te Whenua LINZ in partnership with Regional Councils began a project to procure and make available a nationally consistent elevation dataset for Aotearoa New Zealand. By 2024, 80% of the country will be covered and this treasure trove of data will be freely available on open license. The elevation data is captured using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) which is a remote sensing method using light pulses to capture the earth’s surface in 3D. Part of the process towards making this data publicly available is if for LINZ to quality check the LiDAR and derived products before publication on the LINZ Data Service and OpenTopography. This talk will be focused on how we use a wide range of open-source technologies for our LiDAR quality control processes and data visualisations, and how you can access the data!

Ben Jones
University of Auckland

‘Benjamin Jones is a New Zealand-based doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland and a consultant archaeologist. His Ph.D. research focuses on understanding how future erosion as a result of sea-level rise will impact coastal archaeological sites at the local, regional, and national scale.

9.15am

The Great Maori Feast at Remuera 1844 – solving the puzzle of the Site with QGIS

In 1844 a large number of Maori from the north, locally and the Waikato gathered for what is known as the Great Māori Feast of Remuera ( hākari ) The only records of the event a two artworks, a painting by Joseph Jenner done on site and a lithograph created using the painting by Day and Hague, London, some newspaper articles, many written well after the event. There are no maps. The only descriptive feature of the site is that it was held in what was described as an amphitheatre surrounded by volcanic hills.

Several opinions have been put forward over 175 years as to the location, most in the eastern part of the Isthmus. The lithograph with its labelling of the maunga should have given us the clues but recently a critical tag has been shown to be wrong. Also, there are questions over the site on which Jenner created his painting and which landforms would have been visible to him.

Working with Remuera Heritage the task has been, using geospatial analysis, to try to confirm which of three or four sites was the true one. QGIS processing and mapping, georeferencing aerial imagery, 3D visualisations using DEMs and Three Js, and GDAL Viewshed Analysis has provided answers which have supported the currently most accepted location. And yet the site is remains something of a conundrum. Is there still another option?

Tony Batistich
Voluntary Heritage Geographer to Historical Societies
Standard Presentation (20 min)

Tony reinvented himself a few years back as a voluntary geospatial support person to heritage societies in Auckland.

His interest is in researching local areas, bringing together aerial imagery, historical photography and old maps to bring out some aspects of the history of Auckland using QGIS for the processing.

9.40am

Utilising Open Source Software to Aid Pacific Island Capacity, Ecomony and Resilience.

The very existence of many Pacific Island Nations is dependent on their ability to understand their environment, model change, generate economies and mitigate against known threats such as climate change. However, although many of these nations are acquiring state-of-the-art spatial data, many don’t have the training or infrastructure to make best use of the data.This presentation will provide an overview of the Electronic Information Management System (EIMS) commissioned by the Government of Niue to maximise the benefit from Niue data. This Project required the capture of all relevant data (on-island and off-island), the creation of Niue owned infrastructure, and the development of a bespoke SDI that allows managed access, new data capture, data analysis and manipulation, and tailored reporting. Unique to this SDI is the requirement to provide a solution that caters to all Niue Government departments and the community.

Tak-Hou Law
IIC Technologies
Standard Presentation (20 min)

Tak-Hou has recently joined the IIC Technologies Australasia team and is currently studying the S-5B Hydrography and S-8B Cartography courses, with
a background in commercial construction as a quantity surveyor.

10.25am

Aerial Imagery: Up in the Cloud

2 years ago, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand released LINZ Basemaps with an Aerial Imagery basemap created using high resolution aerial photography. That basemap has been updated from over 50 new imagery surveys since launch. In order to more efficiently process aerial imagery from surveys that contain thousands of individual files and terabytes of data, the Topography team is using a container-native workflow engine called Argo Workflows. Argo allows us to run Python and GDAL based processing pipelines in parallel, and then immediately serve the resulting cloud optimised imagery via LINZ Basemaps. In this talk we’ll run through our processing capabilities and the open source technologies that have made this possible.

Wentao Kuang & Paul Fouquet
Toitū Te Whenua LINZ
Standard Presentation (20 min)

10.50am

Open-source technologies for LiDAR

In 2016 Toitū Te Whenua LINZ in partnership with Regional Councils began a project to procure and make available a nationally consistent elevation dataset for Aotearoa New Zealand. By 2024, 80% of the country will be covered and this treasure trove of data will be freely available on open license. The elevation data is captured using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) which is a remote sensing method using light pulses to capture the earth’s surface in 3D. Part of the process towards making this data publicly available is if for LINZ to quality check the LiDAR and derived products before publication on the LINZ Data Service and OpenTopography. This talk will be focused on how we use a wide range of open-source technologies for our LiDAR quality control processes and data visualisations, and how you can access the data!

Abbey Douglas
Toitū Te Whenua LINZ
Standard Presentation (20 min)

Abbey is a Location Data Analyst in the elevation team at Toitu Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, in Wellington.

11.15am

Using a Python API with a REST endpoint

Pest Free Kaipatiki need to make their weed monitoring mapping application CAMS more sophisticated for planning return visits to a site after treatment. Cloud based solutions have many necessary restrictions for access, multiple users, mobile, replication, tasks and automation.

This presentation discusses how different it is to use an open Python REST API compared to accessing a database directly to update a weeds layer from a one-to-many visits table.

Kim Ollivier
Ollivier & Company Limited
Standard Presentation (20 min)

11.45am

Stylized COGs: Utilising QGIS to develop stylized zoom scales in a Cloud Optimised Geotiff

Web mapping is experiencing the loss of reliable editing and tiling software for stylized raster tiles. Editing tools like Tilemill are nearly a decade out of service, and tiling tools like gdal2tiles are focused on singular inputs to create tile caches. A reliable tool, with the capabilities to develop style rules at zoom scales for multiple raster datasets and deliver these for online use, is missing in the modern web mapping suite. This presentation puts forward a novel approach to modern raster tiling: utilising QGIS as a styling editor and the Cloud Optimised Geotiff (COG) format as a pseudo raster tile. From this, users will learn a contemporary method to base mapping, creating COGs as stylized raster tiles, and implementing them in a genuinely serverless solution.

Ian Reece
Dragonfly Science

Standard Presentation (20 min)

Ian is the lead geospatial developer/analyst at Dragonfly Data Science
focusing on automation of processes for scientific projects. He has more than a decade of experience in GIS, spending 7 years at Toitū Te
Whenua (LINZ] working as a senior spatial analyst and web mapping
developer.

1.10pm

Map the vax, no time to relax

My journey using R and QGIS to produce maps whilst on secondment at the Covid Vaccine Program. Using automation and atlases to produce maps with tight timeless, large batches or needed weekly updates.

Peter King
Toitū Te Whenua LINZ
Standard Presentation (20 min)

1.35pm

Geospatial Apps with Python and Dash

In this talk we’ll describe how MRCagney’s data science team makes geospatial web applications using the Python programming language and the Dash library, both free and open source software projects.

We’ll do this by example, demonstrating a recent project that analyses and visualises Whangārei’s housing capacity.

Alex Raichev & Danielle Gatland
MRCagney
Standard Presentation (20 min)

Alex leads the Data Science Team at MRCagney, who analyse and visualise all kinds of civic data – walking, cycling, public transport, housing – and create beautiful tools for data-driven decision making.

Alex enjoys writing software, learning new things, and using his skills to benefit society.

Danielle works at the intersection of data and transport strategy, helping people to understand and explain the stories we can uncover behind data to support good decision making and make our urban places better to live in and move around.

Danielle is passionate about helping other people understand the data, and is motivated by working towards creating better places for people.

2.00pm

Modularising Mapbox

Mapbox is an outstanding mapping platform hindered only by the speed at which you can develop your own applications. Have you tried modularising your code, so that you can create great apps faster? This talk demonstrates how modular code can speed up development, and allow users to create apps through configuration rather than code.

Kieran O’Donnell
Locus
Lightning Talk (5 min)

2.05pm

Using Open Source Tools for Data Collection

Join Danielle Gatland from MRCagney to hear about how you can configure a QGIS project for data collection using the “Mergin Maps” mobile phone application. Danielle will share how MRCagney have used this app to conduct audits of accessibility of pedestrian infrastructure for disabled people in Auckland and Morrinsville.

Danielle Gatland
MRCagney
Lightning Talk (5 min)

Danielle works at the intersection of data and transport strategy, helping people to understand and explain the stories we can uncover behind data to support good decision making and make our urban places better to live in and move around.
Danielle is passionate about helping other people understand the data, and is motivated by working towards creating better places for people.

2.30pm

Maritime geospatial analytics for supply chain transport policy

At the Ministry of Transport, we are building capability in geospatial analytics to feed into different aspects of transport policy. In this presentation, I will share a fully FOSS4G (and FOSS) approach to build a robust evidence base for understanding supply chain issues. Geospatial data of various aspects of container shipping are combined with network analysis, forecasting and other techniques to draw out insights – which are delivered as “data stories” via Quarto web books.

2.55pm

Managing Large Multi User Field Operations using QGIS, QField, Geoserver and Postgresql

Zero Invasive Predators is taking on the challenge of eliminating predators from large areas of the New Zealand mainland. As we carry out our mahi we are constantly learning and evolving meaning our systems need to keep up with this change.

Using an Open Source stack of QGIS, QField, Geoserver and Postgresql we have designed a system that caters for multiple users, offline access, full control of the data and customizable.

This presentation will outline the high level architecture, and processes that make this system work.

Nicholas Braaksma
Zero Invasive Predators
Standard Presentation (20 min)

3.20pm

2 for 1, 3d web gis and gaming

At Woods we capture a lot of rich 3D data that we share across our Cesium based platform. Like other platforms Cesium supports bringing its data into the Unreal Gaming and Visualization environment.

This lightning talk will quickly run through the process in the Unreal Engine 5 environment.

Steven Haslemore
Woods
Lightning Talk (5 min)

Steven is the Geospatial Team Lead, Developer, and Tinkerer at Woods based in Auckland. He’s worked with traditional GIS stacks building SaaS platforms and across councils and engineering firms. His role at Woods provided the opportunity to build a platform on FOSS4G and he’s not looked back, involving himself as part of the OSGeo Oceania Auckland team.

3.25pm

QGIS and Kart

Maybe you’ve heard of Kart, the great new geodata versioning tool from the team at Koordinates? But did you know that Kart also has a QGIS plugin so you can do real data versioning without needing to leave QGIS?

In just 5 minutes we’ll demonstrate how to import data into a new Kart repository, make and review some changes, merge a branch, and push everything to a remote server. All from QGIS!

Hamish Campbell
Koordinates
Lightning Talk (5 min)

Hamish is a Product Manager at Koordinates.com based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He has a software development and geospatial background, and he’s interested in open data, making maps and the outdoors. He’s also a chartered OSGeo Oceania Member and an organiser of OSGeo Oceania Auckland events.

3.30pm

Detecting and adding missing pedestrian cut-throughs to OpenStreetMap

Outlining a process in QGIS and JOSM which makes use of LINZ Road Parcels and the Strava Heatmap to systematically detect and add missing pedestrian accessways to OpenStreetMap.

Timothée Duhamel
Auckland Transport
Lightning Talk (5 min)

3.35pm

JSON Strings and Geometry Generators

Using JSON strings inside an attribute table gives the flexibility to change what gets recorded without changing the data schema. Add this with with geometry generators gives on the fly geometry generation resulting in quick and efficient mapping environment.

Nicholas Braaksma
Zero Invasive Predators
Lightning Talk (5 min)

3.40pm

Better Metadata: the STAC standard

Toitū Te Whenua LINZ stores hundreds of terabytes of data in the cloud and we use the STAC (Spatial Temporal Asset Catalog) metadata standard and tools to ensure we can find and use the data later. This talk will focus on why we chose STAC, and the associated open source projects we use and have contributed to.

Bill Nelson
Toitū Te Whenua LINZ
Lightning Talk (5 min)