Long live to the Horton Machine!

The Horton Machine is our set of tools for geomorphic analysis. It was named after  one of the father of Hydrology and Geomorphology, Robert E. Horton. The GEOframe group contributed since the beginning of it and at present, the tool is maintained by Hydrologis. The presentation below introduces the last stand-alone version of it and, in particular, there is a part dedicated to a tool that Hydrologis dedicated to the GEOframe community for giving a well balanced partition of catchments for hydrological analysis.

Obviously Horton Machine The Spatial Toolbox contains other tools than those for GEOframe, of particular interest are those that support the analysis of LIDAR dataset (L.E.S.T.O.), the use of the GEOpaparazzi (github) and SMASH mobile applications.  

Dr. Silvia Franceschi (GS) is briefly presenting here the tools. The slides of the presentation can be accessed by clicking on the above figure.  Please see the video of the presentation below

Updated material on Horton Machine

The Horton Machine is our set of tools for terrain analysis actually maintained by Hydrologis. They since 2000 and something took care of keeping my tools alive on various platforms: GRASS, JGrass, uDig and now on gvSIG. We also have a porting of the Horton machine that works under GEOframe but is the same codebase.

Silvia Franceschi and Andrea Antonello gave a tutorial at this year gvSIG conference and here it is the material.

You can find the same material also at this osf project. Soon they will follow some theoretical lectures.

The Horton Machine (formerly known also as JGrasstools) is back

The Horton Machine, the set of tools I developed several years ago with Hydrologis, is now back and well documented in gvSIG. All the merit goes to Andrea Antonello and Silvia Franceschi, the "Hydrologissers'.  I could not support new work on GIS (after my decade of involvement) but they were so kind to make me co-author of their presentations. During the last FOSS4G in Guimãraes they presented what they ported into  gvSIG and prepared some illustrative material that we share with you.

You can find:

• The Introduction/presentation given in Guimãraes
• The material of the workshop given by Silvia and Andrea
• A quick introduction for the installation of the Horton Machine plugin
• The Tutorial
• The DEM the can be used as example

If you need more information about gvSIG, please go to its site or its YouTube channel (learning gvSIG in 30 minutes, here).

A couple of new things from Hydrologis

My former students of Hydrologis, which whom I collaborated in doing the Horton Machine contained in the uDig Spatial Toolbox, came out recently with a few good news.

The first is Stage an application that makes the Spatial Toolbox available alone, in meanwhile uDig migration to Location Tech is ongoing. Besides it offers a way to save and store Geopaparazzi projects in your personal Computer.  In the words of hydrologis:

"The new Spatial Toolbox And Geoscripting Environment is a web application based on the RAP.
The RAP ecosystem exploits the Server-Side Equinox project, which integrates an OSGI engine with classic Servlet Techniques. The RAP framework allows for the development of web applications by means of the java language and supplying a subset of the Eclipse RCP libraries and plugins.

Basing on this technology it is possible to run S.T.A.G.E. both locally or remote and execute modules from the JGrasstools library as well as OMS3 annotated java classes. The modules are executed on the serverside and provide progress feedback to the user as the processing proceeds.
The user interface for the modules is generated on the fly from the code annotations.

S.T.A.G.E. opens possibilities for the execution of remote processes. Servlets can be added to execute modules or syncronize data with a central database instance. Modules can be executed via simple http POST requests, data can be analized and filtered from any connected device or platform.
The modular nature of the application makes it possibile to simply enable functionalities by adding plugins to the installation. This allows for a great deal of customization of the application for the exact purpose of the project involved."

A more extensive description of what Stage does, can be found here.

The second is Lesto, part of the work of Silvia Franceschi for her Ph.D. at University of Bolzano. A set of tools for extracting features from LIDAR data. Information about Lesto can be found here. 

For who interested in GEOpaparazzi, the last tutorial is here. 

For getting more information, please contact info <at> hydrologis.com

The uDig Spatial Toolbox paper

This post contains the data and the synthetic instructions that can be used to draw all the Figures of the book chapter about the Udig Spatial Toolbox. The chapter is here.

The material includes:

 - the DEM of the above Posina basin
- a "How to" for using the Spatial Toolbox  (work in progress)
- some  R scripts for doing the additional Figures.

A paper on the Horton Machine

The Horton Machine toolset has gained a certain stability during the years, and I currently use it in my Hydrology class. There is a tutorial in Italian and an out-of-date Reference Manual which are waiting for being merged into a unique English Manual. Meanwhile, here it is a paper that explains it, as much as it can be made in a paper. This would be part, after having passed the appropriate peer review, of an open access book of the British Society for Geomorphology, Clarke (2013), section 2.4

The book chapter draft can be found here. The complimentary material to reproduce the manuscript figures can be found in this post.

Reference

Clarke, L.E. (Ed.) Geomorphological Techniques (Online Edition). British Society for Geomorphology, London. ISSN: 2047-0371,

The Horton Machine

The Horton Machine is the place where, during the years, I conveyed my tools for the treatment of Digital Elevation Models, which where used in my past research in hydro-gemorphology, and hydrological modelling. Before using it, certainly, it is better that you read the previous post about uDig.

• An introduction to the analysis of DEM for their use in hydrology can be found here
• The Horton Machine manual is still splitted in two parts which will be merged as soon as we will be able to o it
• The tutorial  (a draft in Italian, but looking at the figures can be useful - 38Mb: we are working at its translation and merging with the reference manual in a future publication)
• The old reference manual which also have some bibliography.
• If looking to the youtube/uddigis channel and reading the help of the Spatial Toolbox you succeeded in running it below you will find a data set where to make some practice: the  rio Valpiana (100 Mb)

• Here you can find some R-scripts which can be useful to plot and analyse the results of some uDig elaborations (by Leonardo Perathoner): 
• how to plot the distribution of the values of a map
• how to extract the table of attributes from a shapefile

For your curiosity following the next link, you will find the cost of what you have learned so far, once taught in a commercial environment (that you have to pay separately).

To come: the documentation of the GIUH model Peakflow, of the semi-distributed model components of the Jgrass-NewAGE system, and of our implementation of SHALSTAB, that are, actually included in the Horton Machine.  Further information can be retrieved also at the Horton Machine site.

The Horton Machine: JGrasstools resources for DEM treatment and delineation (in Italian)

Ecco dunque la documentazione e vari esempi dell'utilizzo della Horton Machine, ovvero come si analizzano i dati digitali del terreno con i Jgrasstools/STAGE

• Il tutorial (ancora in bozza - 38Mb)
• Il vecchio manuale di riferimento della Horton Machine (in Inglese) per capire qualcosa di quello che si sta facendo ed avere un po' di bibliografia.

E le varie presentazioni:

• p-JGrassTools (jgt) (ovvero: scaricare e installare STAGE, iniziare ad usare QGIS, creare una location in QGIS, usare il plugin per legende con scale colori continue
•  p-SpatialToolbox (con: un'introduzione ai jgrasstools, una spiegazione di come utilizzare i comandi dei jgt attraverso lo spatial toolbox di STAGE e di come utilizzare Mosaic12 per unire le tavole del DTM)
• p-HortonMachine (ovvero come utilizzare i comandi HortonMachine dei jgt per fare un analisi idro-geomorfologica)

•  Qui trovate alcuni DEM per esercitarvi e per confrontare, nel caso, i vostri risultati:  il rio Valpiana (100 Mb). Contiene anche una relazione tipo fatta sullo stesso bacino.

Quanto sopra è il bagaglio che serve per il mio corso di idrologia. A questo proposito

• Un'altra relazione di esempio può essere trovata qui.
• Qui si trovano degli script di R che che possono essere utili nell'elaborare alcuni risultati dei jgrasstools: 
• come graficare la distribuzione dei valori di una mappa
• come estrarre la tabella attributi di uno shapefile

Per la vostra curiosità: qui potete avere qual è il costo delle nozioni apprese (costi del software a parte) in una iniziativa commerciale.