open source

STACLint: Validate your STAC

STACLint is an online validation tool for STACs. With it, you are able to validate STAC catalogs, collections, and items by supplying either a URL or JSON. The tool will crawl nested catalogs and report any errors it finds as it crawls through.

Turning Down the Noise with Nearblack

What’s all the racket? These little artifacts along the edge of the data look like they should be considered nodata however they show up despite setting the nodata to be transparent. Turns out these cells are slightly off-white and were likely introduced during JPEG compression. This can happen with both 0 (black) and 255 (white) nodata values.

Building a US Census Tracts PostGIS Database

This article shows how you (yes, you!) can build your very own US Census Tracts PostGIS database. I had looked over the interwebs for some time under the false assumption that someone, somewhere would have already done this, but it seems not. So this article documents my process. I am running a mac, so some […]

Python Geospatial Development Published

Will Cadell was recently a technical reviewer on the latest edition of Python Geospatial Development. Go check it out on amazon here   Here’s the brief:   Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth’s surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of […]

ogr2ogr 3D Shapefile Import to PostGIS Tip

A very quick tip for those scratching their heads over trying to import a 3D shapefile (which doesn’t actually have any 3D data, or at least none you care about) into a flat (2D) PostGIS data set and you keep getting a geometry constratint error.  with a command like: ogr2ogr -update -append -f PostgreSQL PG:”dbname=postGISdatbase” […]

Using Prepared Geometries in Shapely

Shapely is a great tool for the geospatial developer. With Shapely it is possible to run PostGIS-like operations on non-PostGIS geometries. This can keep your python code looking smooth and consistent. In my experience it can also go rocket fast in certain applications. One of those applications is where you are using the same geometry […]