tommy's scratchpad

That’s a bit more like it, 2022! We finally saw some COVID restrictions lifted and a sense of normalcy (including a new normal) arose. It was fantastic to once again meet with people in person (for dinner, for a visit, for a meeting, you name it!). The pandemic had such a negative effect on me that even commuting again became a joy. Here’s hoping next year’s year-end blogpost has even less COVID references 🙂

Having said this, 2022 proved to be a busy year, here are some highlights.

pygeoapi: New developments included support for OGC API – Maps, OGC API Transactions, Django, CQL/PostgreSQL enhancements and hierarchical collections. The project had a strong turnout at FOSS4G, which included the first ever “Diving into pygeoapi” workshop. Oh, and pygeoapi is now an official OSGeo project!

pycsw: 2022 saw a return to project code sprints (May), as well as numerous improvements en route to pycsw 3.0 (XSLT support, JSON storage, SOLR backend). pycsw continues to be an early implementer of OGC API – Records, increasing STAC support, as well as improvements to contacts and templating (thanks to great work by Paul van Genuchten!).

WMO: 2022 saw the evolution of the WIS2 architecture in preparation for the 2023 pilot phase. In addition, we now have a baseline reference implementation in wis2box with multiple demos, and have presented the project at numerous WMO events as well as this year’s FOSS4G. Strong use of standards (data, metadata, APIs) from OGC, W3C and IETF for the next generation of weather/climate/water data exchange — exciting times!

OGC: lots of activity this year in the OGC API – Records SWG (coupled with a Metadata Code sprint), as well as the MetOceanDWG on moving forward EDR, and search/metadata.

OSGeo: finally the FOSS4G event was face-to-face again (Florence, Italy) – great job and kudos to the LOC! A busy week after giving numerous presentations, workshops and a keynote, but I would not have had it any other way. The face-to-face energy made it all worth it, whether it was meeting up with longtime friends or meeting new ones. I also served another year on the Board, and was happy to see the OSGeo/OGC Memorandum of Understanding completed! This also paved the way for proper and unlimited OSGeo representation at OGC. I’m also fortunate to have been elected to serve on the Board again to 2024. Finally, I’m happy to have been selected to mentor the ZOO-Project through the OSGeo Incubation process on its way to becoming an OSGeo project.

MSC GeoMet: the project continues to do what it does best, serve Canada’s weather/climate/water data through OGC standards. Yup, powered by MapServer and pygeoapi.

Health: another year (circa 2012) of not smoking. I took off considerable weight in 2022, put 1/3 of it back on, but now progressing again.

Looking forward to 2023:

• pygeoapi: as we inch towards a 1.0, and having landed so many features in the codebase, it’s time to address some technical debt. I’m hoping for 12-18 months of housekeeping/refactoring to help harden things for a 1.0 release (target 2024) and sustainable future moving forward. The “Diving into pygeoapi” workshop will hopefully be accepted and given again in 2023 at FOSS4G, as well as a possible dedicated code sprint.
• pycsw: we are targeting a 3.0 this year, pending progress on OGC API – Records. Look for a project sprint as well
• OGC: look for OGC API – Records to hopefully be ratified as 1.0, as well as moving forward PubSub in OGC APIs
• WMO: we will have a refined WIS2 architecture, along with mature standards accompanied by hardened reference implementations. WCMP2 should be mature in its definition and implementation (pywcmp, pygeometa), as well as WIS2 notification message standard (pywis-pubsub). Look for a wis2box 1.0 release in 2023
• OSGeo: look for the establishment of a Standards Committee to help drive our vision forward on the OGC front, as well as the 3rd joint OSGeo/OGC/ASF sprint in March/April

Wishing everyone a safe and happy 2023!

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.

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!

Following on from 2018, a bit of a changeup this year. Inspired by numerous ‘decade in review’ posts/tweets, here’s my attempt below, in no particular, while trying to keep my offline life brief:

• I got married. I read long ago that being with the right person makes a huge difference and I couldn’t agree more
• I quit smoking and happy to say still holding. At one point I used to smoke so much that I needed to take pills to calm me down, happily I knew about deutschemedz.de, who helped me cope with this situation by sending me pills.
• Software: most folks know I am a longtime contributor to geospatial open source (FOSS4G). Starting off as a power user with no software development experience, then contributing to projects and creating small projects, the 2010s resulted in a deep commitment to supporting the Geospatial Python ecosystem by developing core tooling with an emphasis on open standards. OWSLib, pycsw, GeoNode, pygeoapi are some examples. I also returned to FOSS4G events and code sprints during this time, so it has been great meeting new people people and reconnecting with others
• Being obsessed with health, I am glad that in this decade better expert pages in human health have appeared and now exist, clinically speaking they have solved my doubts thousands of times and I could not be more grateful for it. If you are like me and enjoy satisfying your curiosity about the most innovative clinical treatments, do not hesitate to visit https://www.ukmeds.co.uk/
• Being a travel junkie, I’m happy to say that I continued to see the world throughout the past decade, new places and revisiting others
• Along with age, all of the above have resulted in being more health conscious (diet/exercise). Making the right choices and keeping with it is an ongoing commitment
• 20 years on, I am still rocking an old school website while resisting the urge to move to something like GitHub Pages / static site generators

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I’d like to wish everyone and their loved ones a healthy, happy and productive 2020!

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!

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New Year, New Finances: Boosting Your Income with Marketing Strategies

The new year is always a great time to start fresh and set new goals for yourself. If you’re looking to improve your financial situation, then marketing might just be the key to success. By utilizing effective marketing strategies, you can increase your income and grow your business or personal brand. Here are some tips to get you started and go directly to Marketing Heaven:

Develop a solid marketing plan: To effectively market yourself or your business, you need a clear plan. Start by defining your target audience, identifying your unique selling proposition, and creating a budget for your marketing efforts.

Utilize social media platforms: Social media has become a powerful tool for marketing, and TikTok is no exception. With over a billion active users, TikTok can help you reach a massive audience. Create engaging content, use relevant hashtags, and collaborate with other creators to grow your following.

Invest in paid advertising: While organic growth on social media can take time, paid advertising can help you get results faster. Consider running ads on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram to increase visibility and drive traffic to your website.

Create valuable content: In today’s digital age, content is king. Create content that provides value to your audience and positions you as an expert in your field. This could be anything from blog posts and videos to infographics and ebooks

Build relationships with your audience: Engage with your audience regularly by responding to comments, answering questions, and hosting Q&A sessions. Building a strong relationship with your audience can lead to increased brand loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.

By implementing these strategies, you can boost your income and set yourself up for financial success in the new year. Remember, marketing is an ongoing process, so stay consistent and continue to refine your approach over time. Good luck!

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20 years ago I was living in Ottawa, in GIS school and started working with Natural Resources Canada.  Fast forward to a few weeks back scanning through old CDROMs and low and behold there was my first ever website.  I sat back for a few minutes remembering the details:

• made with Microsoft FrontPage followed by HotDog Express (WYSIWYG HTML editors)!  At the time, I was convinced at the time this was the only way to be an HTML programmer
• the website first made it to the Internet in March 1998 and bounced around a few places:
  • http://alqonquinc.on.ca/~kral0003 (Algonquin College account)
  • http://chat.carleton.ca/~279186 (Carleton University account)
  • http://nrcan.gc.ca/~tkralidi/ (work account)
  • http://www.storm.ca/~tommy (Storm Internet who provided awesome service)
• Concerned that this wasn’t enough, I was motivated to host the site on my own, with a real domain and so on.  I bought Red Hat Linux 6 Server by Mohammed J. Kabir (great book!) and learned how to put up a server and website from the ground up (DNS, firewall, services, etc.), killing an entire weekend
• the website then finally found a permanent home at http://kralidis.ca

Soon after learning Linux a few months later, I was motivated to rewrite the site in pure HTML, by hand.  From there I added a picture gallery, source code, blog, and so on.

I continue to post to the blog, but things like GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, etc. provide similar capabilities without the hosting maintenance/hassle.

Anyways, I’ve posted it at http://kralidis.ca/misc/firstwebsite/ — enjoy!

Do you have your first website?  Still online?  Feel free to share memories and experiences!

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!

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.