tommy's scratchpad

2023 was a memorable year and quite the ride! Eventful and full swing on so many fronts. Here’s the annual rundown:

pygeoapi: two releases, lots of development at code sprints and continuous improvement for the project. Dutch API rules, CRS and increased support for the various standards as they evolve. As well, numerous valuable discussions this year around hardening the project for the long term. Contributions (always valued!) continue to increase, which shows a healthy project with considerable interest.

pycsw: lots of improvements on standards support (OGC API – Records, STAC) as we move towards version 3.0. The project supports so many discovery API standards, and we are not done yet 🙂

OGC: development on numerous standards: OGC API – Records, and OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval and Pub/Sub went though a number of improvements and updates in 2023. I was also fortunate to help deliver the OGC API workshop as part of the GISE Hub Winter School on OGC Stack (which included delivery of the Diving into pygeoapi workshop as well).

OSGeo: I’m happy to report that the ZOO-Project passed incubation and became an official OSGeo project! A big congratulations to Gérald and team. We also had a successful joint sprint with OGC as well as the first in-person OSGeo Community Sprint since 2019, in November. The annual FOSS4G global event in Prizren was fantastic, and I was happy to provide two workshops, numerous presentations and a keynote. I continue to serve on OSGeo’s Board of Directors and was happy to help move forward the OSGeo / OGC collaboration piece in 2023.

WMO: the WIS2 standards and architecture were put through a pilot phase this year. WIS2 specifications, guides, manuals all received significant updates this year thanks to the contributions of many experts. Most specifications also have reference implementations (wis2box, wis2-gdc, wis2-gc, pywis-pubsub, pywis-topics, pywcmp, etc.). The series of WIS2 training sessions also proved valuable for numerous members in implementing WIS2 technologies. Did you know that wis2box now has 30 or so deployments worldwide?

MSC GeoMet: the national weather/water/climate API platform continues to grow. We’ve recently added GOES imagery, and MSC AniMet is emerging as a great tool for visualization of our API!

Health: another year (circa 2012) of not smoking. I am hoping to shape up again in 2024, let’s see how it goes.

Looking forward to 2024:

• pygeoapi: RFC2 will help harden things as we move towards 1.0. As well, look for news soon on the first ever pygeoapi code sprint 🙂
• pycsw: moving towards 3.0, look for a new YAML-based configuration format, as well improvements on faceting, distributed search, harvesting and more
• OGC: look for OGC API – Records to be released, as well as Pub/Sub development in EDR and beyond. The annual joint sprint with OSGeo will also take place in Évora, Portugal on 26-28 February. See you there!
• OSGeo: the global event in Belém (December) promises to be a can’t miss event, and I look forward to providing presentations and training on Geospatial Python, pygeoapi and OGC at the event
• WMO: 2024 is the year that the architecture and specifications are ratified as we move into the pre-operational phase

Wishing everyone a safe and happy 2024!

So 2021 wasn’t much better than 2020. Another year of endless virtual meetings and the 24 hour office. Here are some updates from WFH life:

pygeoapi: both OGC API – Records and OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval support were added to the codebase. The project also saw both CQL and i18n support, which is a positive indicator of contributions from various developers. Thanks Sander Schaminee and Francesco Bartoli!

pycsw: OGC API – Records and STAC API were both implemented. In addition, CQL support was added with the help of the impressive pygeofilter package — great work by Fabian Schindler!

QGIS MetaSearch: standards implementation needs both servers and clients, and so OGC API – Records support made it into MetaSearch. A nice by product of this enhancement is the implementation in OWSLib, which MetaSearch uses as its discovery library.

OGC API (Records, EDR): EDR is now an adopted standard! Records also made great strides in 2020, and helping clarify the relationship with STAC has proved valuable for all communities involved.

WMO: Lots of fun work this year on the Task Team on WIS Metadata: new KPIs, an update to the WIS Guide, the metadata search pilot, and we backed it up with tools (pywcmp, pywiscat). In addition, the Expert Team on Architecture and Transition (W2AT) was formed to move forward technical regulations on the WIS 2.0.

MSC GeoMet: our weather/climate/water OGC API platform continues to crank out millions of maps, features and metadata on the daily for everyone. Happy to report that real-time / event driven data support was added this year to our pygeoapi instance.

FOSS4G: between 7 presentations and the Geopython workshop, lots of action this year at this year’s virtual FOSS4G global event. I was fortunate to deliver these alongside some really talented folks in the Geopython community. Kudos to the BALOC for putting on such a great event under some difficult circumstances!

OSGeo Board of Directors: I was happy to help with the first ever OSGeo / OGC / Apache joint sprint, as well helping move forward the OSGeo / OGC MOU renewal.

Health: another year (circa 2012) of not smoking. The pandemic continues to challenge the scale, although some recent progress has helped some. Implementing a balanced diet and regular exercise routine is essential and more if is combined with ice hack weight loss supplements, as well as seeking support from friends, family, or professionals if needed. Tracking progress and staying motivated throughout the year will help to maintain focus on the resolution and ultimately achieve the desired weight loss.

For 2022:

• OGC API: critical path for me this year are helping in the adoption of Records and Coverages
• WMO: WIS 2.0 continues to evolve, lowering the barrier to weather/climate/water data. I recently signed on as lead architect/dev of the WIS 2.0 in a box project, which will be a reference implementation and publishing pipeline aligned with WIS 2.0 principles. Under the hood is Geopython, PubSub. Look for an initial release in 2022
• OSGeo: 2022 will mark the year that the OSGeo / OGC MOU is officially updated, along with a shiny new Associate Membership. Rolling this into the OSGeo standards community will be key, along with moving forward the renewal of OGC CITE tooling
• pycsw: key items this year include XSLT transformation pipelines, virtual collections and deeper JSON support. We are also planning a sprint in Q1, come join us!
• pygeoapi: look for deeper support of OGC EDR as well as some refactoring that will help with extensibility (primarily for output formats)

Wishing everyone a safe and happy and better 2022!

So 2020 didn’t quite work out as expected or hoped. Still, in a year where days seemed to fold into one another, the 24 hour home office and endless virtual meetings, some successes:

• pygeoapi: the Python OGC API server continues to pick up steam. The project was presented, demoed and discussed at numerous events. 2020 saw the addition of support for OGC API – Coverages, OGC API – Tiles, STAC, as well as improvements to OGC API – Processing job management and queryables
• more Geopython: pycsw, PyWPS, OWSLib, GeoHealthCheck continue to be developed/maintained, and we are starting to see OGC API support trickling in. Big thanks to the communities that support those projects. pygeometa has been refactored for supporting any metadata format output, which further positions the project for STAC and JSON-based metadata exchange
• WMO: with the new WMO structure in place, I was honoured to be nominated to the Standing Committee on Information Management and Technology (SC-IMT), as well as chairing the Expert Team on Metadata Standards of (ET-Metadata) and participation on ET-Data
• GeoMet: our weather/climate/water API platform continues to grow with more open data and OGC API support, powering the Canadian Centre for Climate Services, WeatherCAN, Canadian Open Data and beyond
• OGC API: Records and Coverages are groups that I was particularly involved in to move forward discovery and raster data API access. I look forward to help lock down these standards
• OSGeo Board of Directors: I was honoured to be re-elected for a second term to the Board and look forward helping OSGeo grow, particularly with regards to standards implementation in the Community
• health
  • another year (circa 2012) of not smoking
  • the pandemic has not been easy for weight management. Time to get back on that!

For 2021:

• OGC API: the march continues to modernize the API client/server ecosystem, and I’ll be targeting the Geopython projects, as well as QGIS, MapServer, GeoNode and associated Golang tools
• OSGeo: continue to foster interaction with standards development organizations (OGC, ISO TC211, etc.) and help navigate the community through these unprecedented times
• pycsw: update the pycsw core model to encompass OGC API as well as integration with pygeoapi
• pygeoapi: work on OGC API – Records and OGC API – Maps continues to progress and should make its way into master this year. Other candidates include OGC API – Styles and EDR API. In addition, I’m hoping this is the year we enter OSGeo incubation
• this website: revitalize the photo galleries and possibly migrating the blog into a static site generator approach

In summary, another year of firm belief in the Unix philosophy, composable workflow and lowering the barrier to geospatial data and tools for anyone.

I hope we have the ability at some point to see one another this year, whether at a code sprint or meeting/event. I’d like to wish everyone and their loved ones a healthy, safe, happy and, well, better 2021!

What a year!  Following on from 2017, in no particular order, here goes:

• Bonn Code Sprint: talk about a worthwhile event!  It was great to meet old and new OSGeo hackers.  Serious progress made on many projects (keep reading)
• OWSLib: thanks to Carsten Ebrecht, we finally have a much better handling on tests (moving to pytest, skipping hosts that are down, etc.).
• OSGeo Board of Directors: I was honoured and excited to be nominated and elected into the Board and look forward to helping guide the way for the Foundation
• pycsw: we released 2.2 at the Bonn Code Sprint, and our Athens dev meeting in the summer helped paved the way for pycsw 3.0 which will get a major revamp given the direction of the OGC service architecture modernization
• GeoHealthCheck: thanks to Just Van Den Broecke and others we made progress this year on per resource scheduling and Docker.  In related news, check out GeoQoS which provides GHC as a service.  Great work Just!
• PyWPS: this Python based WPS server graduated as an OSGeo project!  Congratulations to the community and thanks for helping with incubation
• GeoUsage: following the UNIX philosophy, this lightweight Python package provides OWS aware web analytics.  Handy for finding out your top requested WMS layers, for example
• pygeoapi: born out of the OGC WFS 3 hackathon and Bonn Code Sprint, pygeoapi provides WFS 3 capability and a way forward framework for OGC web services (read REST/JSON).  A clean break from the traditional OGC service interface design pattern
• adventures in Go: in the new horizons category, geocatalogo and jivan were developed to support the STAC and WFS3 APIs using Go and everything it brings to the table.  I have to admit, even as a Python die-hard, Go is fun to work with and has great potential for the long term
• Pydap: we revived Pydap this fall by providing access for more maintainers and clearing out some of the issue backlog
• GeoMet: as part of the Meteorological Service of Canada we released a major upgrade to our national realtime weather WMS, thanks to MapServer and Python MapScript.  1000s of weather layers via OGC standards!
• CCCS: the Canadian Centre for Climate Services was launched in the fall and I was lucky enough to architect the provisioning of 1000s of climate datasets as OGC Web Services and the extraction tool.  As part of this effort we used pygeoapi to serve out our station data archives and mappyfile/MapServer/Python MapScript for historical and forecast climate datasets.  As icing on the cake we’ve published our relevant source code to GitHub to boot — check it out!  I can’t recommend enough mappyfile for those who need composable mapfile workflows!
• health
  • another year (circa 2012) of not smoking
  • I’ve put on most of the weight I lost in the last couple of years (no excuses).  Back on it in 2019 I promise.

For 2019:

• OGC next generation APIs: one way or another all major OGC service specifications will undergo the REST/JSON/clean break treatment.  This means updates to servers and clients accordingly (read pycsw, PyWPS, pygeoapi, MapServer, OWSLib, etc.), as well as supporting tools
• OSGeo Board: there is an interest in geospatial Python implementations from the OGC and I’ll be looking for ways to market geopython more to OGC from an OSGeo perspective
• Pydap: I think this is the year that I do something real with Pydap.  On deck is stable deployment and custom handlers for weather data

I’d like to wish everyone and their loved ones a healthy, happy and productive 2019!

Continuing on the UNIX philosophy, another little tool to help with your OWS workflows.

GeoUsage attempts to support the use case of metrics and analysis of OWS service usage.  How many users are hitting your OWS?  Which layers/projections are the most popular?  How much bandwidth?  How many maps vs. data downloads?

A pure Python package, GeoUsage doesn’t have strong opinions beyond OWS-specific parsing and analysis of web server logs.  GeoUsage is composable, i.e. frequency, log management, and storage of results is totally up to the user.  Having said this, a simple and beautiful command line interface is available for eyeballing results.

As always, GeoUsage is free and open source.

It’s early days, so feedback, bug reports, suggestions are appreciated.  Contributors are most welcome!

At the beginning of a new year, it is beneficial to reflect on the previous year and summarize the significant events and memories. This can include everything from the new knowledge and skills gained to special moments like children’s birthdays and cherished gifts like baby boy clothes. Taking the time to acknowledge and appreciate these experiences can help us enter the new year with a sense of gratitude and excitement for what lies ahead.

Here we go again! Following on from last year, a summary of my 2017:

– pycsw: the lightweight CSW server continues provide stable, composable, and compliant CSW services.  Highlights include:

• an official code of conduct
• Docker image
• testing framework enhancements
• code coverage support
• custom repository plugin filter parsing

– MapServer metadata: at long last RFC82 has been implemented in master and will be available in 7.2.  This enhancement will bring more fulsome layer/feature type/coverage metadata support to OGC web services in MapServer

– QGIS metadata: at long last metadata support is building in QGIS!  There is now an official internal schema as well as work in master around the editor

– parsers: in the back to basics category, pyshadoz and pynumeric were built as small, composable Python packages to feed operational data processing workflows.  At the end of the day (or the beginning depending on how you look at it), it’s all about the data, and data formats are everything

– other geopython:

• pygeometa: another little toolset for discovery metadata, YAML is now the supported configuration format
• OWSLib: continues its (still pre-1.0!) journey, making OWS suck less
• GeoHealthCheck: Just has been leading the charge on improvements and fixes to GHC (thanks Just!)

– health:

• another year (circa 2012) of not smoking
• I’m happy to continue commitment to the Greek/Mediterranean diet.  Another 10lbs would be great, however I’m very happy with my overall state of weight management (first time since starting a desk job in 1997).  Some small adjustments and minor ups/downs, but overall stable and continued following of olivetomato.com
• I’ve also given up coffee after 25 years and would highly recommend it!

For 2018:

-pycsw: the pycsw team is attending the OSGeo Code Sprint 2018 in Bonn, and will be working on getting 2.2 out the door as well as pycsw 3.0 planning (more info on this soon)

– QGIS metadata: looking forward to continuing this effort with enhancements to MetaSearch to allow for CSW publishing

– Pydap: I’m hoping to make some serious movement in deployment Pydap with some dayjob projects.  Key focus is hardening deployment as well as stability

– Golang: some may have seen some recent work on geocatalogo.  Given the nature of Go and simplicity of deployment, there is opportunity in the geospatial community for Golang packages in providing geospatial discovery and access services which are based on focused use cases / workflows, are dead simple to install, deploy and scale, and blazing fast.  While these packages may not be as full-featured or mature as current OSGeo projects, there’s certainly room for them and hopefully we can see a Golang geospatial community evolve over the next few years

– PyWPS OSGeo incubation: got a bit closer but didn’t finish this off in 2017.  A sprint will close this one and send for graduation

– OWSLib tests: could this be the year that OWSLib unit tests are finally not always failing!?

In summary, another year of firm belief in the Unix philosophy.

And what can we expect as people who struggle with being overweight every year? Better and better medications and formulas that allow us to carry out our process with dignity, which is why at the beginning of the new year, the arrival of the best phentermine over the counter gives us a push in the right direction, everything within reach of a link.

I’d like to wish everyone and their loved ones a healthy, happy and productive 2018!

For decades now my dev life has been thanks to headless servers in the basement (these days running Debian) which I simply SSH to and work remotely. This has served me well for so long although serious box hugging was at play here.  Being a reproducible workflow maniac and having virtualenv helped as well.

Fast forward a few years and add to that mix dev work on my MacBook Pro.  It’s 64-bit with an SSD and 8GB of RAM and is great for trips.  In this case I was less liberal with installing libraries and packages given it’s a shared computer (I recently had to do a full macOS re-install to fix performance issues).

Enter Docker.  Here I am able to start up a full development environment very easily without affecting my MacBook per se (only a Docker install is required).  Publish to Docker Hub and done.  Pull and run at will. My initial requirements for the repo are pycsw development, but this will grow over time.

Of course I’m really late to the party (Sean Gillies thought he was late!), and I’m sure there are better approaches, but I think I’m finally feeling Docker. Good times!

Metadata should be automagic and low barrier.

pygeometa is a handy little metadata generator tool which is flexible, extensible, and composable.  Command line, or via the API, users can generate config files, or pass plain old Python dicts, ConfigParser objects, etc.

We’ve just released 0.2.0 which supports WMO Core Metadata Profile output, as well as better multilingual support.  At this point we’re embarking on breaking changes in master led by moving to YAML as the configuration format.

Given pygeometa is pre-1.0 in theory changes can be breaking without support.  Still, I’ve cut a 0.2 branch in case anyone’s existing workflows depend on the (now) old pygeometa functionality.

As always, bug reports, feature requests are more than welcome. Hopefully the new enhancements will make metadata management even easier for agile workflows.

I attended the 2017 OSGeo Code Sprint last week in Daytona Beach.  Having put forth a personal sprint workplan for the week, I thought it would be useful to report back on progress.

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pycsw

There was lots of discussion on refactoring pycsw’s filter support to enable NoSQL backends.  While we are still in discussion, this enhancement should open the doors for any backend (ElasticSearch, SOLR, a GitHub repository, another API, etc.).  In addition, Frank Warmerdam started writing a pycsw OGR backend to support CSW exposure of the Planet Scenes API via OGR. This also presents exciting possibilities given OGR’s support of numerous underlying formats.  Frank also provided valuable advice and feedback on interacting with pycsw as a developer/contributor.  Thank you Frank!

GeoHealthCheck

There has been long discussion on a next generation GHC including a renewed architecture with core work on the model as well as an API.  A basic architecture has surfaced as a result which focuses on having the UI exclusively work with the API, as well as a plugin framework which Just van den Broecke has started working on.  I also worked on tagging which will be the last piece before cutting a release and forging ahead on the new architecture.

pygeometa

The focus on pygeometa is now on renewing the MCF format from .ini to YAML.  Initial pieces are completed in a dev branch which I plan to merge once we clear current issues and cut a stable release.

Summary

While I couldn’t get to everything I planned for, I think significant steps were made in moving the above projects forward along their respective roadmaps.  It was also great to see some familiar faces as well as new contributors and projects!

To know if this project was going to have good results and in the others also that they propose me, not only do I trust my professional ability, it is also advisable to go to a tarot reading, it is the best to know what will happen if you have doubts about something.

The best of all is that usually the first time you can connect to the internet because you can access online tarot card reading, so you don’t have to worry about traveling somewhere that seems dangerous. Be careful with everything that can happen to you in life. it is safer to trust a tarot reading. do not complicate yourself in following blindly and rather follow what God tells us through the tarot.

Oh, and the weather certainly didn’t hurt 🙂