Posted by Adam S on May 4, 2010 at 1:53pm
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) provides lots of spacial data. Through Drupal what is the best way to start to utilize this data by incorporating it into a Drupal database? Here is what is available. Any ideas?
http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/index.htm
http://www.charts.noaa.gov/RNCs/RNCs.shtml
http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/hsd/awois.html
http://www.csc.noaa.gov/tools.html
http://www.weather.gov/geodata/
Comments
Re: How to use NOAA information?
Although it's not with Drupal, my current work involves airport data (some provided by NOAA NGS). The biggest hurdle has been parsing the various text formats the data is provided in.
What are you trying to accomplish with the data?
I don't know what to do with
I don't know what to do with NOAA data. I have 13,000 captains, crew and marine industry professionals who use my website. I was just wondering if somebody has done something with NOAA gis?
Marine job board with Drupal 7 at http://windwardjobs.com
I'm far from an expert but are VERY avid to learn and understand
I'm far from an expert but are VERY avid to learn and understand.
First I think you need to find a way to download the info you want from these sites and if they don't have it in an easy way/format to download you need to Scrape it somehow, but ask them first. Maybe Services would be a help for you http://drupal.org/project/services and there is a group http://groups.drupal.org/services. Then you have to find some map modules that can show it in Drupal and a lot of people are saying that OpenLayers should be the way to go http://drupal.org/project/openlayers. I haven't tried ANY of these technics myself have just read about them and seeing some ScreenCast from drupalcons.
As I couldn't find map modules to do what I wanted I just made it without and you can see my testsites here for one Municipality http://www.tinemuller.dk/test_drupal/node/6 and the same info for radius http://www.tinemuller.dk/test_drupal/node/1180.
Are going to join a session about OpenLayers http://cph2010.drupal.org/sessions/mapping-drupal-openlayers in DrupalCon Copenhagen 21-27 August and maybe will learn a lot - I hope. :-)
Maybe what I suggest is just nonsens but I tried at any rate. Better than nothing. :-)
I'm just trying to think of
I'm just trying to think of was to do a mash up of data. I think the data becomes more relevant if related to other sets of data. I'm an ocean guy and NOAA does produce a lot of GIS material.
I created another thread for my response here. http://groups.drupal.org/node/86954
Marine job board with Drupal 7 at http://windwardjobs.com
Re: How to use NOAA information?
I don't know enough about your users to give a good guess to what might be useful, but I'll toss a few things out.
User locator - If you combine AIS data with what ships users are assigned to, they could find out who else is going to be at the same port as them.
Wreck/Obstruction map - Plot this data onto Google Maps or Google Earth and show the sonar images if available as an overlay.
Raster overlays - Google Maps will let you replace the tiles on the map with other image sources. You could use the NOAA raster charts as the actual map rather than road map data.
Here are a few examples of how others have used the data:
MarineTraffic.com uses live AIS data to overlay ship information onto a Google Map: http://marinetraffic.com/ais/
SailFlow has wind direction and strength plotted over a map: http://www.sailflow.com/
NOAA has a mapping application for their observation system here: http://osmc.noaa.gov/Monitor/OSMC/OSMC.html
I have a demo I did with NOAA's airport data. It's not Drupal-driven though, and all it does is provide basic airport, navigational aid, and obstruction mapping.
I would like to know how to
I would like to know how to overlay Raster Navigational Charts created by NOAA on an Openlayers map? http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/index.htm That would be cool.
Marine job board with Drupal 7 at http://windwardjobs.com
Re: How to use NOAA information?
I'm not sure there's an easy off-the-shelf solution for this. One of the first things you'll need to do is convert the nautical charts from BSB format into something that's usable on the web. GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) can do that.
Then you'll need to slice them up into map tile images and store meta data about the tiles. Assuming the chart borders are consistent, it may be possible to automate the slicing since there's some meta data about what the area the chart covers and its projection in the BSB file header.
OpenLayers has a wiki page about using custom tiles here: http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/UsingCustomTiles