Rowan Winsemius
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rowanwinsemius.bsky.social
Rowan Winsemius
@rowanwinsemius.bsky.social
Christian | Husband | Dad | Mapping | Gardening | Open source geo when time & energy permits | In 🇦🇺
I try to be open to using both - have them both in the toolbox, and use the right one depending on the project requirements.
March 15, 2025 at 10:30 PM
In my experience ESRI works very well when everything and everyone is using it, but the real world is messier than that.

And the other is big wow is what no licensing costs unlocks for certain environments/projects - cost can eventually become prohibitive in an esri-based setup.
March 15, 2025 at 10:28 PM
Depends a bit on the desired use case as to what might wow them.
But for me one of the big ones of data interoperability - support for different formats, and connectability of different systems.
March 15, 2025 at 10:28 PM
I haven't released the Claude implementation yet as it's pretty slow. It seems to generate a set of simplifications up front, and then you can send a subsequent query for the level of simplification you want which is then very fast. I need more time to poke at the paper.
January 8, 2025 at 12:34 AM
I was reading a recently released paper last week on line simplification - no fancy videos though!
So I asked ClaudeAI to implement it for me and it did 🤯
drops.dagstuhl.de/storage/00li...
drops.dagstuhl.de
January 8, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Shapely probably is the closest I think
shapely.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ma...
The Shapely User Manual — Shapely 2.0.6 documentation
shapely.readthedocs.io
December 7, 2024 at 11:14 AM
I previously arranged sponsorship through an ex-employer and it was easier than I thought it would be, so i'd encourage anyone who knows what value their org gets out of GDAL to give it a go and have that conversation or write that paper, the worst that can happen is they say no!
December 6, 2024 at 6:58 AM
So good to see a government dept getting behind this - wild to think yours might be the first given the vast majority would rely on GDAL in a significant fashion either directly or indirectly.
December 6, 2024 at 6:55 AM
To be fair the actual netcdf part wasn't too bad, it was post-processing we did that was the hard part, particularly with the World Ocean Database, which is a massive point dataset of water data used to generate the Atlas raster.
November 27, 2024 at 9:18 PM
A similar product is the World Ocean Atlas from NOAA - it has info like water temperature at diff depths over time.
It's netcdf and I once wrote a horribly long python script to download and process it 😂
www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/wor...
World Ocean Atlas
www.ncei.noaa.gov
November 27, 2024 at 9:13 PM
That is the most detailed anyone had ever digitised a palm tree 🌴 !
November 26, 2024 at 5:44 AM
🎉 awesome. FWIW there is no perfect solution for this stuff, lots of pros and cons with diff formats, but my general experience is that flatgeobuf is a bit easier to use, esp for non-developers, but hopefully with time geoparquet support will improve & APIs will get simpler.
November 20, 2024 at 4:19 AM
Looks like a spatial index creation is opt-out via GDAL, so geopandas probably follows suite.
gdal.org/en/latest/dr...
FlatGeobuf — GDAL documentation
gdal.org
November 20, 2024 at 1:59 AM
I'm not sure you can create a flatgeobuf file that doesn't have a spatial index
November 20, 2024 at 1:48 AM
I believe yes, but that's a guess... If it's loading quickly in qgis that's probably a good sign that it has
November 20, 2024 at 1:46 AM
Depending on intended use flatgeobuf is perhaps a smidge easier to use in a web browser. Geoparquet requires some more complicated dependencies, but I'm probably about 1 year behind in my last muck about with it so things may have improved.
November 20, 2024 at 1:38 AM
Either flatgeobuf or geoparquet would be pretty good options, both support getting data in a bounding box, and have gdal support
November 20, 2024 at 1:29 AM
In the good ol' days we had an #augischat at a sensible time, most weeks probably had 10-20ish participants. I'm a bit less spatial at the moment but happy to contribute a thumbs up for what works in Aus are doing 😂
November 19, 2024 at 6:49 AM
This is a neat idea! Did you any particular use case in mind? One that came to mind for me was crowd-sourcing validation tasks, or a pre-check on geometry edits (eg hey these changes look wildly different, are you sure you want to proceed)
November 18, 2024 at 12:29 AM