No Clocks

The generation and consumption of spatial information in the hydrographic field is a fundamental part of daily work, as not only are many decisions taken based on this information but, additionally, information is produced in real time based on these decisions and processes. Another of the particular characteristics of hydrographic information is the great amount of detail and its size, which traditionally makes it necessary to use desktop tools for the execution of geoprocesses and the production of derived information. In this context, the use and edition of information through web clients using OGC processes and standards (WMS, WMST, WPS), solves the casuistry and provides the necessary power for daily work, focused on an architecture where the server centralises operations and processes. However, the irruption of new technologies with the use of vector tiles presented as an evolutionary leap presents great advantages in the management of data at both server and client level. At the server side, it allows for lighter and more resilient infrastructures through the use of STAC and enables the process load to be distributed while at client level, it provides the browsers with the vector data for the execution of geoprocesses locally using specific tools. This use case presents a practical application for the production and customisation of vector tiles in the specific case of hydrological information, presenting an application where, on the one hand, spatial information is integrated into the data production processes by generating the appropriate services and, on the other hand, client tools are used for the management, geoprocessing and consolidation of spatial information using vector tiles. Additionaly, the information in vector tile format has specific styles, developed using a tool that manages the spatial information in vector format and establishes an associated style through a simple user interface. Thus, the viewer requests the vector information and the associated style for its adequate rendering to the user. This environment has been based on Open Source technologies and standards, which allows its scalability and sustainability in the future in a modular way. Finally, it is worth highlighting the good performance obtained, as the project, through the interfaces developed, achieves both the updating of spatial information in an integrated way in the production and decision-making processes, as well as its dissemination in different formats. Technologies: PostGIS, GeoServer, Maputnik, OpenLayers, Mapea, vector tiles, STAC

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This blog featured a post on mocking, the art of replacing a function with whatever fake we need for testing, years ago. Since then, we’ve entered a new decade, the second edition of Hadley Wickham’s and Jenny Bryan’s R packages book was published, and mocking returned to testthat, so it’s time for a new take/resources roundup! Thanks a lot to Hannah Frick for useful feedback on this post!

Introduction to Spatial Analytics with PostgreSQL, PostGIS, PL/R and R Programming Language. Example use of R Analytic functions in PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

0. What’s this and what’s not

There’s a bunch of different ways to generate contour lines [1] from scatter data, each of them based on different interpolation algorithms. Like KNN [2], IDW [3] or kriging-flavoured methods [4]. (image from Wikipedia)

This article describes the best practices for connection pooling in an Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Build smarter, faster and with more confidence using AI-powered products and tools from Google Maps Platform, grounded in Google’s fresh, real-world data and cutting-edge technology.

Modern model-based geostatistics for point-referenced data. This package provides a simple interface to run spatial machine learning models and geostatistical models that estimate a continuous (raster) surface from point-referenced outcomes and, optionally, a set of raster covariates. The package also includes functions to summarize raster outcomes by (polygon) region while preserving uncertainty.

mirai is a minimalist async evaluation framework for R that enables asynchronous, parallel, and distributed computation. This page introduces the package's purpose, hub architecture, key capabilities

My work on the Department of Ecology’s Safety of Oil Transportation Act risk model has been an opportunity for me to explore some of the newer tools available in R for reproducible workflows. Taking the time to learn and implement these tools has been incredibly helpful, both because the model requirements were still being nailed down while I was developing it (and thus I needed to be able to easily re-run things and identify changes to results) and because the sheer volume of data requires we use parallel processing approaches in order to achieve feasible run times. I identified the targets package as an excellent tool to achieve both of these requirements, as it not only provides a framework for running and tracking analysis pipelines (which I use for ETL procedures and scheduling model runs) but also allows us to seamlessly switch to parallel approaches using future and backends such as future.callr or future.batchtools.

Uncloud makes self-hosting web applications across multiple machines in production dead simple.

PRQL is a modern language for transforming data

Turf provides advanced geospatial analysis capabilities for browsers and Node.js

In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized. This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.

A tutorial for using purrr::modify_tree effectively.

Learn the options pattern to represent groups of related settings in .NET apps. The options pattern uses classes to provide strongly-typed access to settings.

Learn how to use the Configuration API to configure .NET applications. Explore various inbuilt configuration providers.

MapLibre GL JS is a TypeScript library that uses WebGL to render interactive maps from vector tiles in a browser.

Simple and Fast Geospatial OGC Features and Tiles API for PostGIS.

Animated by some comments / complaints about Postgres’ missing user variables story on a Reddit post about PostgreSQL pain points in the real world - I thought I’d elaborate a bit on sessions vars - which is indeed a little known Postgres functionality. Although this “alley” has existed for ages...

I’m working with an external service that has two main resources: Products and Deals. When I create these items through their API, I get back JSON responses that contain lots of data. Right now I only need certain fields from these responses, but I’m worried that later on I might need other parts of the data that I’m not currently storing. So I’m thinking about saving the complete JSON response somewhere just in case. What’s the recommended approach for handling this situation? I need advice o...