Geopaparazzi Web Map Tiles enhancements

Well, why should geopaparazzi hang behind uDig? :)

Ok, there are a number of reasons, but in this case, it doesn't have to be like that.

A small piece of history
Some of you might know that I am now part if the Italian TANTO geospatial (and not only) information/education blog.
In April I decided to go and visit the one guy that actually founded that blog in the most distant place in Italy from where I live: Andrea Borruso from Palermo.

We spent a couple of days daydreaming under the heavy effects of muffolette, cassatelle, cannoli and the grand finale of the sfince di San Giuseppe.

The recurring question was: how do we bring a custom raster into geopaparazzi? The potential is there, but we need to be able to load custom map!

Well, at the end we figured that the best thing would be to support local (as well as remote) TMS.
Andrea is black belt of TMS and was able to provide me with some tilesets.

So I started to implement the possibility to load the tiles on the phone and describe them with a small file, so that they would appear as tile sources.

We will throw out this new version as soon as the documentation is ready and some good tutorial on how to quickly handle data and stuff. as usual, if you wanna help, please contact us, we badly need support.

But in the meanwhile I really want to share some examples of the results we were able to achieve.

1) tiles of the ortofoto of sicily, zoomed on Palermo

2) an archeological area airbourne survey, done with drones. Imagery provided by the Consorzio TICONZERO. Interested how they are doing this? Have a look here.

3) technical map, overlayed with the results of a risk analysis (perfect for outdoor geologists and engineers)

Do you remember seeing this image somewhere already? Maybe loaded in uDig? :)

4) Last but not least, a scanned historical map (shiver down my spine)

Ok, need to stop here.
Basically soon it will be possible to load almost any kind of raster map into geopaparazzi, which is an amazing enhancement. Now all that's left, is to wait for the next release :)

This post is born as a parallel post (as in two different ways to tell the same story by the people that lived it) of this post.

uDig web map tiles enhancements

Many of you for sure know that uDig has the ability to show Web Map Tiles.

From the import dialog you select Web Map Tiles:

push the next button and find a long list of available web map tile servers (which we should probably check).

There is also the possibility to select a custom server. This is very handy, but had 2 problems:
- it could not load local folders of files
- it understood only the google tile schema numbering, which means no TMS

Well, this is the first enhancement. Those two problems were solved. Mind that you will have to check the right option:

The second enhancement will make uDig Spatial Toolbox users happy. With the next uDig release we will also release the module that creates TMS folders from a set of layers. I do not want to go into detail shere, but a new module will allow to export a set of styled layers as tiles folder. Those tiles come with the complete description of the zoom levels and so on.

In fact since that file is the only thing needed to load a folder of tiles, it made sense to add a small item to the list, the JGrasstools TMS folder:

And there we have it. Push the button, push, push the button and:

This will be extrememly helpful for those like us that use uDig with BeeGIS field extensions out in the field on netbooks. The base dataset gets extremely lightweight to load and rasters can be prepared to be fast and easy.