For more than 10 years, apparently since 2002, I have used various discussion sites to list common GIS issues for the community. To get the ball rolling, many posts were just questions sent to me in emails that I would try to answer. I actually started posting the questions from a generic user called “planetary researcher” and then logged in as myself, “thare”, and answered the question. Using the wayback machine, it appears in the second discussion site incarnation, the top read threads included answers to:
Anyway, that second discussion site incarnation lasted only year before the ISIS started a discussion forum and all the GIS topics were co-located with the ISIS topics. But in that one year more than 100 thousand threads were viewed. I assume many hits were from general GIS users who quickly bounced once they figured out we were discussing planets (or false hits from indexers).
Anyway, to get to the point, our latest discussion software platform has been down for about a week from an apparent PHP breach. While many topics even on the latest site become stale, there are still plenty of useful threads for folks to stumble upon. I will start transferring some of the those older topics (but still relevant) and post new topics into this blog. We still get plenty of email questions weekly which posts here can be based on. I don’t see using a blogging tool really any better than a discussion site for keeping threads from becoming stale, but perhaps I can remove or edit sections more easily.
For my first real post I will try to summarize how to load/convert ISIS files – again.
-Trent
- How do I read the MOLA MEGDR 128 [pixels/degree] images?
- How to get a level 2 ISIS image into a GIS?
- Polar glitches in the MDIM2.1 files?
Anyway, that second discussion site incarnation lasted only year before the ISIS started a discussion forum and all the GIS topics were co-located with the ISIS topics. But in that one year more than 100 thousand threads were viewed. I assume many hits were from general GIS users who quickly bounced once they figured out we were discussing planets (or false hits from indexers).
Anyway, to get to the point, our latest discussion software platform has been down for about a week from an apparent PHP breach. While many topics even on the latest site become stale, there are still plenty of useful threads for folks to stumble upon. I will start transferring some of the those older topics (but still relevant) and post new topics into this blog. We still get plenty of email questions weekly which posts here can be based on. I don’t see using a blogging tool really any better than a discussion site for keeping threads from becoming stale, but perhaps I can remove or edit sections more easily.
For my first real post I will try to summarize how to load/convert ISIS files – again.
-Trent
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ReplyDeleteList all files in a directory
Hi Trent, thanks for reviving these discussions in a blog format! Planetary GIS is such a fascinating and highly specialized niche.
ReplyDeleteYour point about the explosion in pixel counts and dealing with 1TB mosaics is completely spot on. Handling those massive file sizes, let alone figuring out how to deliver them over the web, is a massive headache even in standard terrestrial GIS.
When dealing with incredibly heavy raster mosaics or trying to ingest obscure scientific formats like PDS files, I heavily rely on Global Mapper. Its raster processing engine is just incredibly efficient at chewing through terabytes of imagery without crashing the system, and it is my go-to tool for exporting those massive datasets into optimized web tiles for easier delivery.
I'm really looking forward to your upcoming post on loading/converting ISIS files! Do you mostly rely on GDAL command-line tools for that process, or do you have a preferred GUI workflow nowadays?