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 solver for the 1D de Saint-Venant equation in OMS

A simplified but not so simplified way to describe the motion in channels, is to use the de Saint Venant 1d equation. Solving it is not anymore a particularly complex model and almost twenty years ago, I and collaborators implemented one of it based on Vincenzo Casulli work.  This can be seen, from Angelo Zacchia's master thesis (in Italian), which contains the main elements from page 36 to 51. A more scientific treatment of the problem is presented in Casulli and Zanolli [1998], and Aldrighetti's Ph. Thesis [2007].

This work is simpler but implemented inside the JGrasstools, by Silvia Franceschi (of Hydrologis) during her Google Summer of Code 2015 exercise,  and available as open source here.
A little of documentation is in the GSoC 2015 page of the project itself.

References

Aldrighetti, E., Computational hydraulic techniques for theSaint Venant Equations in arbitrarilyshaped geometry, 2007

V. Casulli and P. Zanolli. A conservative semi-implicit scheme for open channel flows. International Journal of Applied Science & Computations, 5:1–10, 1998.

Zacchia,  A., Master Thesis, Su alcuni metodi per la prevenzione e previsione del rischio idraulico, Trento University, 1997

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

A little bridge between JGrasstools and R

I receive from Emanuele Cordano, and I publish, knowing that is of interest to many:

"Dear all, 

some months ago I developed a R package on github which allows to execute some classes of jgrasstools from R.  I did it because I needed to do hydro-geormorphological analysis with R rasters maps. It is quite trivial. The package creates a groovy script file from a R S3 object and then executes the script. 

The R code is here on Github with GPL license: 

It also contains a jar of jgrasstools or they can be complied and downloaded from github.  It needs that groovy is previously installed. 

The code is now experimental and needs more testing.   The examples are limited to geomorphological analysis and basin extraction. 

In the next months I'm going to continue the development and to perform the documentation and the examples. 

I would like to share this experimental R package with those who are potentially interested. 

Any feedback is appreciated and please let me know if you know something similar already existing. 

Regards 

Emanuele Cordano

"

Who wants more information about the JGrasstools, could browse this link, and for knowing more about  to geomorphological analysis (he can get a quite comprehensive set of slides in Italian here, and, a less comprehensive introduction in English here).

The link is also added to the main R hydrological resources post.

JGrass-NewAGE codes

Jgrass-NewAGE is going out from its infantry, and this is signed by its appearance in Github, where the code in development is going to be uploaded. The definitive repository for the code is the JGrasstools Github repository, however, since the requirement to fulfil the jgrasstools standards, were not followed during these first years of development, and because, at the same time, some of the functionalities required for the most recent components are not yet met by the actual version of the uDig Spatial Toolbox, we decided to open a series of new repositories receiving the code in development.

This step was decided also to boost the development of the documentation for the software, that is still kind of missing, at the moment. So here it is the list of the places where the main JGrass-NewAGE components can be found:

• The Hymod component (by Giuseppe Formetta)
• The longwave radiation component (by Giuseppe Formetta)
• The Kriging component (by Giuseppe Formetta)
• The particle swarm component (by Giuseppe Formetta - when downloading OMS you download it)
• The Luca component  (from the OMS team-when downloading OMS you download it))

All the other components:

• The Hymod component, 
• The shortwave radiation component (by Giuseppe Formetta, starting from previous work by Daniele Andreis)
• The snow water equivalent component (by Giuseppe Formetta)
• The  evapotranspiration component (by Giuseppe Formetta)

can be found instead here, under the same general repository.

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 JGrass-NewAGE informatics

As I tried to convey in previous posts, since more than five years, I am working to the idea to built a hydrological model by components. Well, this should have been the first paper in row, but as often happens, is the fourth to have been submitted.

The paper contains, by Formetta et al., the main ideas behind this type of modelling and shows that the system actually works, it is not just a matter of  speculations. We did it. At the moment it is at a late stage of review on Environmental Modelling & Software, and we eventually ask for it being open access.

The rational of the paper is expressed in its introduction:

"Scientists demand more and more the availability of simulation model’s source code since it has become a key factor for the understanding, validation, and advancement of science (e.g. Ince et al. [2012]). However, this is not enough, even if the source code would be available, the growing complexity of modelling code makes model development progress challenging to understand and manage. In fact, if model code distribution is matter of policies (e.g. Annan et al., [2013]), external inspection and analysis of models, improvement and contribution are difficult or even impossible when the software is inadequately engineered. The implementation of many environmental processes intimately interlinked (as snow, runoff production, evapotranspiration, in the hydrological case), is usually difficult to understand per se, but models writing in traditional monolithic forms, as defined in Rizzoli et al. [2005], makes their implementations overwhelming hard to follow, and models themselves practically impossible to be verified (Quesnel et al. [2009]). As a matter of facts, the traditional modelling practices preclude easy understanding, rapid reuse and improvement of the source code, and eventually obstacle seamless advancement in science.

Part of models’ obscurity has its foundation in bad documenting practices, and many researchers’ community that rely on computational methods and techniques as part of their day-to-day activities proposed shared protocols, like the so called Overview, Data concepts, Details method (ODD, e.g. Grimm et al., [2006]), to improve documentation effectiveness. However, “reproducible-research systems” (RRSs), making easier to document any step during research from model implementation and data preparation to output analyses, would greatly help correct policies to be adopted. Actually from a RRS system we would expect, besides model codes sharing, tools to allow the researchers, on one hand, to repeat the simulations in the same conditions and, on the other hand, to spend more time on their own science.

Many of software infrastructures or modeling frameworks (MF) were actually designed and built to streamline the process of a sound scientific production (e.g. Wesselung et al. [1996], Argent [2005], Rizzoli et al. [2005]). Among those that specifically target the support of hydrological modelling are the Spatial Modelling Environment (SME, Maxwell and Costanza [1997]), The Invisible Modelling Environment (TIME, http://www.toolkit.net.au/Tools/TIME) and hydrological derivative tools like, E2 (Argent et al. [1999]), OpenMI (http://www.openmi.org/), Moore and Tindall [2005]), and the Object Modelling System (OMS, David et al. [2002, 2013]), Common Component Architecture (CCA, Bramley et al. [2000]) and Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF, Hill et al. [2004]).

However, most of the above MF require a quite significant learning curve that not all scientists, even proficient modellers, are willing to make.
Therefore, in order to ease the transition into modern programming environments, some modelling efforts and projects recently focused on providing code generation support and reducing the invasiveness of frameworks (Lloyd, 2010) into the model. Especially the third version of OMS and the BioMA project (BioMA, 2012) revealing promising perspectives.

A RSS would not be complete without including data visualization. Gardner and Manduchi (2007), among others, emphasize that in order to optimize scientific productivity, a RRS infrastructure should include not only the computational cores but also visualization and data-processing tools necessary to synthesize knowledge from high volumes of inputs and outputs.

Indeed, tools of choice for the visualization of hydrological processes have been for a long time Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Maidment [1993]; Grayson et al. [1992]). However, traditional GIS are usually designed for managing static, non- temporal information layers. They are not designed to interact with the dynamic modelling (e.g. Burrough et al. [1998]; Wesselung et al. [1996]). In fact, the interaction between models and GIS can be described as “off-line” and it is performed with integration strategies that affect either the functionality of GIS tools or the usability of models.

Instead, the MF listed above offer a proper abstraction to streamline the interaction with a GIS. They promote the separation of the model into well defined modules or components, each with a well-defined way to interact with others through specified interfaces. Through their interfaces the modules can communicate and exchange data.

Therefore it is also timely for GIS and hydrological model components to constitute a pool of interoperable tools that can be blended together to create software that is accurately tailored to geosciences."

The revised version of the paper prior to publication, in pdf format, can be retrieved from here (or clicking below the picture). The final version is here instead.

Java for Hydrologists 101

There are a few postings on Java in this blog. Since I want to teach it to my students, I am quietly starting to populate this page with presentations which, eventually, will constitute the core of an informal class (;-)) the Java for Hydrologsts 101.

The focus of the JfH-101 is not simply to gain Java knowledge from the scratch (or so), but to address those topics and issues that have to do with my experience of hydrologist. So, I will try to cover Java as well as OMS3, and at the right time Geotools, and jgrasstools, not forgetting the tools of the tool (Ant, Maven, Git)^*, but in the meanwhile I will try to address the topics related to object oriented programming.  Programming is actually very much not talking about  that but doing it, so many of the slides will actually recall to actions.

Topics

0 - Getting Started (mostly things to read -or start to read- before the start) (YouTube 2018 video)
1 - Your first program (You Tube Video 2018)
2 - Solving a linear equation

• Introduction (YouTube 2018)
• The linear equation (YouTube 2018)

3 -  A few diversions

• Short Intro to UML*  class diagram (YouTube 2018)
• UML - stands fro Universal Modelling Language. It is a set of graphic tools that can be used to sketch OO programs. The classical reference is Martin Fowler's, UML 2.0 distilled, 2003. It is a short and nice and time-affordable reading.
• Naming Conventions (YouTube2018)
• The Structure of a Java Class and something about Javadoc (YouTube2018)

4 - Reading  data from the system's console

• Reading data from the console 
• LiveStream YouTube Video I
• Livestream YouTube Video II

5 - Reading data from a File

• Storyboard of the classes
• Reading data from  a File (no frills, no much design) (YouTube Live Video)
• Writing data to a File (no frills, no much design) (YouTube Live Video)
• Reading and writing data to a File. Designing the classes (YouTube Live Video)
• Reading and writing data to a File with Java 8. (YouTube Live Video) 
• For getting more on Streams see the chapter 3 of Modern Java in Action (a book worth to buy).
• For Getting more on Lambdas, Chapter 6 to 9 of Modern Java in Action .
• Learning a little better what is a regular expression
•  Reading and writing data to a File with Java 8 II and III (YouTube video)

6 - Working with Git

• From command line 
• Part I
• Part II
• from Eclipse (EGit)

-----Not yet implemented: ----

7 - Programming the heat diffusion equation

8 - Making the heat diffusion an OMS3 components

9 - Building Java projects with Ant, Maven and GRADLE

8 - GEOtools essentials

9 - Commenting the programming of the GEOframe-ET

10 - The Java REPL

11 - A little on Java Modules in Java 9

12 - Setting the continuous integration in GIT (using Travis)

The source code is available for download to from GitHub.

References

Please go to this blogpost.


^* - From the links you can quite understand the I rely very much on Lars Vogel site for the basic stuff. It is not obviously the only good resource available (stackoverflow is another one, for instance, and many others will be addressed).

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.

uDig/Jgrasstools resources (in English)

uDig is very much a product for developers, but it can be also a valuable tool for users.
To know what uDig is and does, you can look at this post.
To use uDig, the first thing is to install it, following the instructions at the GIS website. After this first installation,  install the Spatial Toolbox. Now you can think  how to use it !
uDig pages are actually full of information, but I took a little of time to summarise them here too, and also to add some resources that are not available in the official website.
If you do not know what a GIS is, look first at:

• Introduction to GIS (well, for a more structured introduction, a very good introduction is de Smith et al., Geospatial Analysis a comprehensive guide, 2013 - which is available on-line)


• A presentation (just a little out-of-date) to jgrasstools and uDig
• Walktrough 1 - Installation of uDig 1.4.0
• Walktrough 2 - Editing in uDig and WFS
• To know how to work with map look at YouTube/udiggis
• Using the Spatial Toolbox
• Still in Italian:  Working with GRASS (but is going to be translated: is it true Aroon ?)
• Using the Map Calculator  by exploiting Jiffle (here its manual).

• The material about the tools to work with the Horton Machine is now in a separate post (and is still partially in  Italian).
• The material to support the culverts, and sewer systems design as well as the documentation of the nettools for the design of water supply system is instead here, but in Italian.

For learning about the scripting capabilities of uDig, one can give a look at:

• to the post by Andrea Antonello on JgrassTechTips (which is a further source of useful information)

The new version of uDig support also geoscripting, and how, it is explained here.

In any case do not forget the screen-casts at:

YouTube/udiggis

For who could help, please give a look to the post by Andrea Antonello.

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.

uDig Jgrasstools resources for urban hydrology, culverts and water supply systems design (in Italian)

Ho sempre pensato che affrontare i problemi del dimensionamento di un acquedotto e di una fognatura pluviale, potesse essere semplificato dall'uso di un GIS. L'idea, naturalmente, non l'ho avuta da solo, ma  ragionando assieme ad altri, in particolari, i miei ex-allievi di Hydrologis e di Hydromates e i colleghi Paolo Bertola e Maurizio Righetti. Hydrologis and Hydromates, già per conto loro, avevano provveduto ad implementare in uDig i nettools, una serie di strumenti che consentono l'accesso al software Epanet per la verifica delle reti in pressione. In parallelo, ho chiesto la loro collaborazione per portare il mio software di calcolo delle fognature pluviali Trento_p, nello stesso sistema.
Con l'ulteriore aiuto di Federico De Col, Leonardo Perathoner e di Bilal Adem Esmail (sempre supportati da Hydromates)   ho poi lavorato per documentare il tutto.

Ora uso il tutto nel mio corso per la laurea magistrale di Ingegneria Civile: quest'anno, per la prima volta.  Ecco dunque la documentazione che serve:

• Per le informazioni generali, naturalmente è meglio riferirsi al post principale su uDig.
• Una Introduzione ai sistemi informativi territoriali (GIS da Geographic Information System).
• Per una informazione alternativa sull'istallazione per MS-Windows, si puo' scaricare la prima parte della tesi di Federico De Col.
• Le slides sugli stessi temi di cui sopra della lezione di Bilal Adem Esmail.

Per quanto riguarda l'utilizzo dei Nettools (Epanet) si può fare riferimento:

• Al sito dei Nettools dove si trovano anche link a presentazioni e un paio di blogspots
•  Alla seconda parte della tesi di Federico De Col: Gli elementi di Epanet e la loro gestione
• Alla terza parte delle tesi di Federico: Modellazione di una rete di acquedotto con l'ausilio del GIS uDig
• Qui le slides su come usare Epanet con uDig e i Netools

Per quanto riguarda Trento_p abbiamo implementato il tutorial che si può trovare qui. Le slides delle lezioni, mirate a Trento_p, si possono trovare qui di seguito:

• Trento_p theory. Audio (16.6 Mb)
• Le lezioni  su Trento_p in uDig da parte di Adem Bilal Esmail. ^1

Naturalmente può essere utile dare un'occhiata alla documentazione del vecchio Trento_p

• Le vecchie slides su Trento_p (la teoria e la pratica) 
• Il manuale di Trento_p, il codice sorgente e gli eseguibili per windows e un caso standard di test e l'eseguibile per Mac (solo l'eseguibile). 
• La tesi di David Tamanini 

Caricheremo, con l'avanzare del corso nuovo materiale. Tenete d'occhio la pagina!

Bibliografia

Rigon, R., Bertola, P. - La progettazione con un metodo geomorfologico delle reti di drenaggio urbane, II Conferenza Nazionale sul Drenaggio Urbano, Palermo, 10-12 maggio 2000

D. Tamanini, A.B. Esmail, F. Zanotti, S. Simoni, P. Bertola, R. Rigon (2009). Trento_p : un modello
geomorfologico per lo studio del drenaggio urbano. L'ACQUA, vol. 2009, p. 73-74, ISSN: 1125-1255

_______________________________________________________________________________

^1 - La teoria soggiacente a Trento_p, oltre che negli articoli riportati appena sopra,  è spiegata nel materiale linkatonel post sulle costruzioni idrauliche ai punti 10 ed 11

Hydrological modelling with components: the OMS3 NewAge-JGrass system by Giuseppe Formetta

Congratulations Giuseppe! Your thesis is obviously a draft, since it has still to pass the screening of your committee. However, packaging all your work together is certainly a milestone. Starting from the preliminary work by Hydrologis and other former collaborators,  the thesis not only provides  components for the simulation of the hydrological cycle budgets (which is indeed a part of it) but tests independently each component before to use it in various modelling solutions. This outcome is made possible by the existence of the Object Modelling System and the interactions Giuseppe had with Olaf David, my co-advisor in this thesis. For who wants to have give a glance to the thesis, and to look to the first overall work on the Jgrass-NewAGE system, it can be found at the link behind  "The Dream" painting by Henri Rosseau.

 Some of the components of the thesis are already available at the jgrasstools site. Others will be available soon, after the necessary work of refinement, but the core is referred in the post about OMS3 resources (see: An example). Old posts cover the topics of the thesis that were already published, submitted to a journal, or exposed in some conference. 

Direct Solar Radiation Models by Formetta et al. 2012-2013

This paper presents two new modelling components based on the Object Modelling System v3 for the calculation of the shortwave incident radiation on complex topography settings, and the implementation of several ancillary tools. To understand it, it can be useful to give a look to the previous post on radiation of few weeks ago. The first component, NewAGE-SwRB, accounts for slope, aspect, shadow and the topographical information of the sites, and use suitable parametrisation for obtaining the cloudless irradiance. A second component, NewAGE-DEC-MOD's is implemented to estimate the irradiance reduction due to the presence of clouds, according to three parameterisations. To obtain a working modelling composition, suitable to be compared with ground data at measurement stations, the two components are connected to a Kriging component, and, with the use of a further component NewAGE-V (verification package), the performance of modeled is quantitatively evaluated. The two components (and the various parametrisations they contain) are tested using the data from three basins catchments, and some simple verification test is made to assess the goodness of the methods used. The components are part of a larger system, JGrass-NewAGE, their input and outputs are given as geometrical objects immediately visualisable in a GIS (for instance the companion uDig), and can be used seamlessly with the various modelling solutions available in JGrass-NewAGE for the estimation of long wave radiation, evapotranspiration, and snow melting, as well as stand-alone components to just estimate shortwave radiation for various uses. The modularity of the approach is shown to be extensible to more accurate physical-statistical studies aimed to assess in deep the components performances and to extend spatially their results, without the necessity of recoding any part of the component but just making use of connective scripts.

This is, obviously not the first effort in such direction, and some other good softwares were produced as 
SolarFlux (in ArcInfo GIS) (Dubayah and Paul, 1995; Hetrick et al., 1993), Solar Analyst (Fu and Rich, 2000), SRAD (by Moore, 1992, and documented in Wilson and Gallant, 2000- but you can see this), Solei (Miklanek, 1993 - see this) or r.sun (Hofierka and Suri, 2002), and often integrate the models in GIS. 
Our modelling, making treasure of these previous efforts, is also in line with those tools that try to respond to the increase demand of modularity and interchangeability in hydrological and biophysical models and have been developed in the last decades.

Executable, Data, and Documentation of the system can be found following this link (not yet operational - give me a little time for preparing it, with the objective that everyone can reproduce the results of the paper). Source code is partially available through the jgrasstool page. 

uDig-JGrasstools Resources (in Italian)

Per usare uDig, la prima cosa è ovviamente installarlo seguendo le istruzioni. Fatto questo, il secondo passo è quello di istallare ed usare lo Spatial Toolbox.
Quindi non resta che usarlo!
Riepilogo qui alcune risorse alle quali gli utenti italiani di quel che fu JGrass possono fare ricorso

• Introduzione ai GIS (well, for a more structured introduction, a very good introduction is de Smith et al., Geospatial Analysis a comprehensive guide, 2013 - which is available on-line)
• Introduzione ad uDig con i JGrasstools (tutto il materiale è sperimentale se trovate omissioni, errori ed altro, per cortesia segnalatelo)


• Una presentazione di introduzione dei JGrasstools e uDig (slides di lezione)
• Walktrough 1 - Istallazione di uDig 1.3.1 (traduzione del documento ufficiale in Inglese)
• Walktrough 2 - Editing con uDig e WFS (traduzione del documento ufficiale in Inglese)
• Una presentazione di sintesi dei due primi Walktrough: come lavorare con le mappe
• Walktrough 4 - Installazione dello Spatial Toolbox (non è distribuito dagli sviluppatori di uDig)
• Walktrough 5 - Lavorare con i formati di GRASS (non è distribuito dagli sviluppatori di uDig)
• Usare il Map Calculator e Jiffle (messo "su carta" quello che già c'e', in inglese sul web)

• Il materiale sulla Horton Machine, ovvero per il trattamento dei dati digitali del terreno, è, ora, in un post separato
• Il materiale di supporto alla progettazione di acquedotti e fognature è invece qui.

In questo link potete trovare anche il manuale di JGrass 3.0 ... che è sorpassato: ma, ad esempio, come costruire le legende si trova solo qui.

Per quelli che sono interessati alla capacità di scripting di uDig, allora è il caso di dare una occhiata:

• al post di Andrea Antonello su JgrassTechTips (in Inglese)

Altre risorse sono certamente utili. Per esempio,  la serie di screen-cast che si puo' trovare su 

YouTube/udiggis

benche' siano in Inglese. Quanti volessero aiutare, li invito  a leggere il post di Andrea Antonello.

My Past Research on Hydroinformatics, GIS and Modelling by Components

Research in the aforementioned sectors was also carried out with the implementation of  open-source software, coded in C and Java and distributed with a GPL (v 3) license.  Involvement in this topic has been deemed necessary to easy cooperative research, and to improve reuse of codes among researchers and students,  and allow an incremental development of modelling solutions (avoiding to implement again and again the same algorithms at any new generation of students).
The software has been accurately documented [eb1 to eb13] so that it can be easily reused and modified for both research and didactic purposes.  The software originally included a series of C libraries for reading, writing and insertion of comments in the data files, dynamic allocation of memory, the statistical treatment of data aimed  especially at hydrology, hydraulics, and geomorphology, but not limited to these.  On the basis of these libraries, called "Fluid Turtles" and now obsolete, was implemented the initial version GEOtop model [j24, s3]  and an initial version of  the  Horton machine [e.g. eb-3, s3].

However, the traditional software architecture of the Fluid Turtles presented various limitations. Mainly: the lack of an interface for the processing of  input data and the treatment of output data and the difficulty of maintaining and testing the software and its parts each one independently from the others, with the growing number of processes being described [e.g. A44, A49]. In fact, with the increasing number of people working on the code, and with the success of the modelling ideas among users, it became necessary to be able to test and use groups of parts of the models separately (as in JGrass-NewAGE).  It was also envisioned necessary to predispose the models  to be linked (in the future) to external models, such as, for example, those simulating the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer, or belonging to other domains than hydrology (for instance to build a Decision Support System).
These, and other reasons [J40], have brought through a decade of work, trials and errors, on the one hand, to the development of a new GIS,  JGrass, eventually embedded in uDig,  and, on the other, to the adoption of suitable informatics infrastructure in order to restructure the models in components according to the OMS standard.

In the latest version, JGrass has partially contributed to the uDig "core" [eb10, A49, J41], while the modeling part is migrating to the jgrasstools environment (based on OMS) called Spatial Toolbox.
The last version of the tools has been actually embedded in Hydrologis' S.T.A.G.E which is a stand-alone application connectable, in principle, to any Java GIS (thinking to future versions of uDig or GvSig). The tools for terrain analysis included in STAGE  (a.k.a "The Horton Machine") are well covered by [a57]

Along the years various prototypes where developed around the above infrastructures to connect models to SQL/Geographic databases (Postgresql/Postgis), to visualise results on the Nasa World Wind virtual globe, and to allows scripting to interact with models which were presented in various conferences, and on which we could discuss with those interested.

References

In English:

[ J24] - Rigon R., Bertoldi G e T. M. Over, GEOtop: A distributed hydrological model with coupled water and energy budgets, Vol. 7, No. 3, pages 371-388

[A49] Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O. and Rigon R., The informatics of the hydrological modelling system JGrass-NewAge, 2012 International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software Managing Resources of a Limited Planet, Sixth Biennial Meeting, Leipzig, Germany R. Seppelt, A.A. Voinov, S. Lange, D. Bankamp (Eds.) http://www.iemss.org/society/index.php/iemss- 2012-proceedings, 2012

[J40] - Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O., and Rigon R., Hydrological modelling with components: A GIS-based open-source framework, Environmental Modelling & Software, 5 (2014), 190-200

[a57]- W. Abera, A. Antonello, S. Franceschi, G. Formetta, R Rigon , "The uDig Spatial Toolbox for hydro-geomorphic analysis" in Geomorphological Techniques, v. 4, n. 1 (2014), p. 1-19.

[eb2-b] Ghesla, E. and R. Rigon, A Tutorial for the Management of Digital Terrain Models, pg. 131, University of Trento, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, ISBN 10: 88-8443-155-7, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb3] - R.Rigon, E. Ghesla, C. Tiso and A. Cozzini, The Horton Machine, pg. viii, 136, ISBN 10:88-8443-147-6, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb4-a] Ghesla E and R. Rigon, A Tutorial for preparing GEOtop Input Files with JGrass, pg. vi, 62, ISBN 10:88-8443-153-0, University of Trento, 2006

* [eb05] Dall’Amico, A., Endrizzi, E., Gruber, S., Rigon R., The GEOtop Manual, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

In Italian:

[A44] Antonello A., Franceschi S., Formetta G., Rigon R., L’infrastruttura NewAGE per la previsione e la gestione dei bilanci idrici a scala di bacino: I - La struttura informatica in Atti XXXII Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, Palermo, 14-17 Settembre 2010

[eb1-a] Antonello, A., S. Franceschi, A. Vitti e R. Rigon, Il Manuale JGRASS 2.0 (In Italiano), pg. 176, ISBN 10:88-8443-144-1, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb2-a] Ghesla, E. and R. Rigon, Un tutorial per il trattamento di modelli digitali del terreno con JGRASS - A Tutorial for the treatment of DEMs with JGRASS (in Italian), ISBN 10: 88-8443-146-8, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb4-b] Ghesla E and R. Rigon, Un tutorial per la generazione dei file di input per GEOtop utilizzando JGrass, pg. vi, 62, ISBN 10:88-8443-154-9, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

* [eb6] Rigon R., Formetta G., Zini M., Franceschi S., Antonello A., La Horton Machine, Università di Trento, in press, 2013


* [eb7] Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Iemma A., Franceschi S., Antonello A., Jiffle, una breve introduzione, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb8] Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Franceschi S., Antonello A., Peakflow: teoria e pratica, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb9] Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Antonello A., Trentop, Manuale d’uso, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb10] - Antonello A., Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., uDig: Installare lo Spatial Toolboox, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

[eb11] - Iemma, A., Antonello A., Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., uDig walkthroughs, Lavorare con i formati di GRASS in uDig, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

Open Topography

The site

http://www.opentopography.org/

hosts free LIDAR data, and tools contained in OpenTopography for their treatment. Data are usually provided in form of points clouds that can be subsequently treated with their tools to obtain DEMs, and in already treated DEMs. They also provide a ciberinfrastructure for the storage and delivery of those data that can be of interest for those who wants to manage professionally a data storage service.
Woth to note is that you can use the jgrasstools for manage them.

JGrass-NewAge system first publication

JGrass-NewAGE started as a project for Adige River Basin Authority. The goal was to study, besides the peak flows, droughts, and integrating it with a database, a GIS system, still maintaining the possibility to change parts of the whole system at the necessity. Indeed all the ideas expressed in the  GEOFRAME talk
at 2008 CUAHSI meeting.  The pillar on which we wanted to base that effort was also to have open source, multiplatform, software, possibly developed with open source resources.

We chose to use up-to-date software engineering solutions and therefore we looked for developing software by components.  As explained in another posts we first chose OpenMI and eventually OMS v3 as components framework. We are currently happy with this choice and finally the whole system seems to work incrementally.

The publication on GMD hopefully speaks by itself about what the system does (but many aspects of this enterprise will be explained in other papers). What we hope that this effort can attract the work of other producers of components to enrich the choices that users can do.

The presentation I gave last friday in Montpellier

I was guest of Roger Moussa, and in the committee of the graduation of  Dennis Hallema. My talk summarize my efforts in modeling except the recent Boussinesq equation related work. The title was

The main ideas is that we need different types of models for different scopes, and that this models can be implemented with sound informatics, and without having to redo it again from the scratch. The talk, in a sense, complements the post I made on my future research activities, by specifying the "methods" with which I will envision to do them.  Many live for the motto: getting the right answer for the right reason. I support the idea that for getting the right answer you need sound models. The link under the picture will bring you to the presentation. 

udig got a spatial toolbox

I think to it as a milestone to which I contributed a little during the years, even if the full merit needs to be done to Andrea Antonello and Silvia Franceschi: "the Hydrologis".

The idea was to give a transparent (encapsulated) way to add spatial models to a GIS. As told in previous blogs, the way was found in following the OMS3 framework ideas, after having tried hard with OpenMI. Andrea did more by using OMS3 annotations to automatically create the input-output interface, and manual like help, to any OMS3 compliant module. Any information can be found at

udig spatial toolbox a.k.a. OMS3box. However, do not use the 0.7.1 code but use the more recent one that can be found at the jgrasstools download page.

I do not know if Andrea and Silvia fully realize the importance of what they created. It is a big jump to a new type of GIS where the usual paradigms for connecting models, data and visualization, are suddenly changed.

Researchers can now program their model following the OMS3 lines, and having them fully endowed with graphic I/O, help, without taking care of the details of making it.

Certainly programming a Jgrasstool is still a challenge for novices, and much work has to be done to smooth the learning curve of it. Especially writing manuals ;-)

Great work Andrea and Silvia: congratulations !