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

SMASH

Hydrologis, is the mini-company formed by Andrea Antonello and Silvia Franceschi (GS). Notwithstanding they are just two they accomplished really a lot in their career in the world of Open and Free GIS, where they have a solid reputation. First they built, when collaborating with me, the JGrass GIS that eventually was a clean part of the udig GIS. In contemporary Andrea, for his Ph.D. wrote BeeGIS whose ideas, with exploding the mobile devices wave, flowed into GEOpaparazzi that works with Android OS and can be downloaded from GooglePlay. In the meanwhile they also produced a port of the Horton Machine into gvsig  and as standalone (download the executable from here, the Horton Machine is on Github). I forgot LESTO (EGU Abstract), the product for analysis of LIDAR signals that Silvia developed for her Ph.D.

Now, finally it arrives SMASH  (IOS, Android), the new tool for digital field mapping that work on the two main mobile platform. To describe how it works, Silvia made a video which I uploaded to my VIMEO channel. Unfortunately it is in Italian.

Hoping soon we will have one in English. All the best!

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.

gvSIG Festival

gvSIG is the platform where are migrating my contributions to GIS, thanks to Hydrologis. It is my intention, obviously, to embrace it from version 2.3, hoping that this will be the home sweet home I deeply desired in the last years. In preparing the arrival of the version that contains my tools, the developers had the idea of a nice initiative called gvSIG Festival where many developers were asked to explain their work.

There you can find a lot of useful information. Not specifically about hydrology but someone are. Clicking on the figure you will access the main page. Video Presentations are here.

HydroloGIS is ten years old

I cannot avoid it. I am compelled to bring to your attention to the ten birthday celebration of Hydrologis, run by former students Andrea Antonello and Silvia Franceschi.

Click on the Rain Forest cake above for getting the chronicles of their last ten years directly from Andrea's JGrasstechtips blog.

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