2017 startup day Tartu - some pics

2017 fieldtrip to soontaga fluxnet tower

The Soontaga station is an EDI Fluxtower installation of the Department of Geography at the University of Tartu, Estonia. We visited one nice winter day.  Later I built some scripts for the field researchers and physical geographers to check and export the data.

Source code: https://github.com/LandscapeGeoinformatics/fluxnet_daily_png 

External real-time graphs: https://kodu.ut.ee/~kmoch/fluxnet_daily/Soontaga_HFdata.html

A geeky intro into Fortran

On the 9th of  November I organised another local coding meetup. This time we got an introduction Introduction to Fortran and Forth in order to understand some of the origins of programming.

Our resident CompSci member Benson prepared and presented the materials and gave us a glance onto these two arcane, almost ancient programming languages. Yet Fortran is still very much alive and used in a variety of high-performance computing (HPC) scenarios.

You can use command line and a simple text editor (vi, emacs, nano, gedit, atom, notepad++, kate). For the faint-hearted Atom ( https://atom.io/ ) has most of the features we needed for this session, is open and cross platform.

Links to Fortran language standard and tutorial:

• Standards committee: https://wg5-fortran.org/
• Tutorial: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran_77_Tutorial

While Benson prepared a preconfigured VM for us, you can try out Fortran with a Gnu Fortran GCC installed by yourself, and maybe even Eclipse Fortran IDE:

• https://www.eclipse.org/ptp/
• https://www.eclipse.org/photran/

Links to Forth language standard and tutorial:

• Standard: https://forth-standard.org/
• Tutorial: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/
• Example simple interpreter: https://github.com/howerj/libforth
• Example interpreter for educational purposes: https://github.com/sayon/forthress

The materials are also collated on my GitHub account again. Happy coding :-)

Copernicus info session November 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia

On the 6th of November 2017, several Geoinformatics staff member of the Department of Geography and our international MSc in Geography/Geoinformatics students of the University of Tartu jointly attended the Copernicus Info Session in Tallinn.

The event was held in Tallinn in the conference rooms of the Building of Ministries as the eleventh in a series of national Copernicus events of the European Commission. We had several international visitors as well national estonian officials. For example we had the chance to meet with members of the Estonian Landboard, ESTCube and other innovative satellite data processing companies, and even the Estonian National Library.

One really interesting presentation was summarising the Sentinel mission really well:

After the event about the European Copernicus programme finished we used the "field trip" to visit the Tallinn old town, and we we did a nice walk in the event.

Online references to the event:

http://www.copernicus.eu/events/copernicus-training-and-information-session-estonia

and

http://copernicus.eu/infosession-estonia

A Python Pandas Coding Meetup

On October, 12th, I organised a local meetup event at the Department of Geography. We had around 15 attendees, both from Tartu industry and university students.

In this meetup we played with the Jupyter Notebook (http://jupyter.org/) and did some data wrangling with Python, Pandas (http://pandas.pydata.org/) and co., some data analysis and visualisation.

I presented on how we can use Miniconda, an encapsulated versatile virtual python environment installer, that works under the hood of the big Anaconda python distribution. Miniconda is basically a mini version of Anaconda that includes only the conda package manager and its dependencies. We used a Python version 3.4 because some of the libraries/tools we wanted to work with supposedly only are supported up to Python 3.4. Here it becomes obvious how practical virtual environments can be. They help you to keep various Python versions around without messing up your system.

After we had set-up our local Python working environment, I introduced the Jupyter Notebook. The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

I prepared a variety of resources that we worked through in the meetup. I shared the collated tutorials and course materials on my GitHub account, The repository contains a curated collection of Jupyter Notebooks of introductory materials about programming in Python in general, the Pandas data manipulation and visualisation toolkit, and the Geopandas geospatial library.

This repository aims at different degrees of experience with the Python programming language and Python data manipultation and visualisation libraries. Each folder contains a README.md (for the the online repository) and README.notebook.md (readme as readable Notebook) file that list the contents and some details for each of the 3 big modules here:

• 01 - Introduction to Python and the Jupyter Notebook
• 02 - Introduction to the Pandas library
• 03 - Introduction to the Geopandas library

In order to get started, download the full Meetup-Repositiry from https://github.com/allixender/meetup-notes/archive/master.zip and extract it to a LOCAL folder. Go back into the console/commandline prompt and change into that folder. There you should then start the Jupyter notebook.

A few Impressions of the ESTGIS conference of the Estonian Society for Geoinformatics

On the ‎29. ‎September ‎2017  geographers and GIS specialists of the Estonian Landboard, Estonian GIS companies, and Estonian Universities - especially from University of Tartu Department of Geography and environmental Technologies, Tartu University of Life Sciences and Tallinn Technical University - joined at the annual gathering of the Estonian Society of Geoinformatics (EstGIS). Our Head of Chair of Geoinformatics at Dept. of Geography, Tartu, Prof Tönu Oja, is also the chairman of the boards of EstGIS.

The conference took place in the Vooremaa district North of Tartu.

The 2-day conference took place in a small village north of Tartu in small family-run holiday park. Embedded in idyllic country-side the place had accommodation, sauna of course, and a large conferencing room.

"Think Spatially" says the big flyer outside, welcoming the guests. 

Beautifully embedded in the landscape.

I presented about the work on a paper which was originating from my PhD, because I just arrived here, on making environmental research articles discoverable with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) catalogue services. The paper would eventually be finalised and published on MDPI International Journal of Geo-Information together with a colleague from the Department of Geography where I just had started:  "Enhancing Location-Related Hydrogeological Knowledge" (https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/7/4/132), on geo-referencing hydrological and hydrogeological journal articles and making them discoverable spatially through  OGC Catalogue Service for Web (CSW).

The conference talks were mixed in English and Estonian. There were a few international guests and a few students, but mainly local (Estonian) GIS practitioners.

More details about the article: https://allixender.blogspot.com/2018/04/making-environmental-research-articles.html

PhD Dissertation publicly accssible

My dissertation to achieve the degree 'Doctor of Philosophy' at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has the title:

A Context-based Groundwater Data Infrastructure

Online access via the AUT Online Library: http://hdl.handle.net/10292/10740

Abstract

Groundwater bodies are among the most important and valuable natural resources available, but at the same time they are also the least understood. To better understand the hydrological state of the environment and groundwater dynamics, data sets and measurements need to be made available and accessible to scientists, planners, and stakeholders to allow for proper decision making support. Information exchange via the internet has become faster, but at the same time data sets remain scattered both in location and formats. Present research in hydrogeology and freshwater resources management can be significantly supported and accelerated by relating, reusing and combining existing data sets, models and simulations in a streamlined, computer-aided and networked fashion and yield more new and reproducible insights.

In this thesis Design Science Research, Grounded Theory and Case Studies are applied in order to design a spatial data infrastructure that addresses the full data life cycle in the context of hydrogeology in New Zealand. This 'Hydrogeology Infrastructure' design was successfully implemented and evaluated via a networked and open standards-based prototype. Formerly disconnected and distributed data sets may now, for the first time, be used for hydrogeological data analysis, visualisation and modelling within one data portal.


My Supervisor(s)

Many thanks go out again to my supervisors who supported me continuously.

Assoc Prof Jacqueline Whalley (AUT, New Zealand); Assoc Prof Hermann Klug (Z_GIS, Salzburg University, Austria); Prof Philip Sallis (AUT, New Zealand)

The interested reader can find the publication also via ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319164590_A_Context-based_Groundwater_Data_Infrastructure

A Context-based #GroundwaterData Infrastructure #Hydrogeology #GIScience # SpatialDatahttps://t.co/QMpSKTpsp2

— Scholarly Commons (@AUT_SC) 17 August 2017