Madrona

Madrona 4.1 released

2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Since the initial release of Madrona 4.0, we have been working on many projects with 2D mapping interfaces (OpenLayers or Leaflet). Much of the work to the Madrona core is related to the Enhanced 2D Layer Management which allows knockout-based Javascript client apps to seamlessly incorporate advanced mapping interface elements.

Updates in the 4.1 release include:

New layer_manager app for managing 2D tiled map sources
By default, enforce_supported_browser set to False (may cause minor change in browser detection behavior in some 3D apps)
Clean up json import situation
Preliminary Multipolygon support (server-side)
Several minor bug fixes and tweaks

The 4.1 version is live on PyPi so updgrading is as easy as pip install --upgrade madrona

Enjoy.

Printing web maps made easier

2013-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

One of the most requested features for any web mapping application is printing. Map bookmarks get you most of the way there for sharing your map view, but people want the digital equivalent of a hard copy.

The simple answer has always been to take a screenshot in your operating system of choice. But wait you want it as a PDF, with a title on it, and a legend, and 300dpi? And so more sophisticated server-side print capabilities were developed a la ArcGIS Server printing and GeoServer printing. But these are pretty heavy-handed solutions, often needing access to your original datasets and/or a map engine to be able to render them all together in a single print image. What if you don’t have access to the original datasets? What if a number of the data layers in your application are map tile services from third-party providers?

Our developer Edwin knew there had to be a simpler way. He saw that people were using PhantomJS with its headless Webkit engine to load web pages and make screen captures. What if he thought, we could develop a lightweight print service that given the state of the users map, could load up the same exact map view the user sees in their browser and export it in a variety of formats and sizes (PNG, JPEG, PDF, etc.)?

So Edwin created just that, a standalone print service for the Mid-Atlantic Data Portal and it’s pretty sweet.

This module, available on GitHub, was created using NodeJS and integrates with the Madrona and Django-based Mid-Atlantic Marine Planner. To try it out yourself, go to this map bookmark visualizing waterbird density around Great Bay and click the print button in the top right corner of the map. Here’s an example output.

Look for this printing module to become its own project in coming months, and a core feature of Madrona.

To learn more about the development of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal and its integration of a number of data layers published by ESRI, NOAA, and The Nature Conservancy, visit its Project Log

Enhanced 2D data layer management

2012-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

The latest revision of the layer manager functionality extends Madrona’s support for 2D mapping environments.

We’ve developed a rich server-side model for managing data layers and themes and added client-side user interface elements for organizing/visualizing data layers that can incorporated into any 2D OpenLayers-based madrona mapping application.

Features of the user interface include:

Data Layer list with an accordion view organized by theme.
Full text search of layers and themes.
Support for basic metadata and source attribution.
Active layers list for managing opacity, visibility and layer ordering of the current map.
Legend support.

Test it out with our live madrona 2d demo

The functionality relies on OpenLayers, Knockout, Bootstrap and jQuery-ui. To set up a 2D madrona application to use the layer manager widgets:

Populate the Layers and Themes with some data (we include a comprehensive fixture in madrona)
Set up some basic javascript variables and load the required js/css files
Include the interface elements via django include template tags

For full instructions on configuring the layer manager, see the docs

The 2D layer manager functionality has been merged into the madrona master branch and will be the highlight of the upcoming Madrona 4.1 release.

New Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal Released, built on Madrona

2012-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Version 2 of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal recently went public providing new information and tools for comprehensive regional ocean planning by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council for the Ocean (MARCO). The portal was developed in partnership by Ecotrust, The Nature Conservancy, Rutger’s Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis (CRSSA) and Monmouth University.

The MARCO Portal is the most robust 2D-mapping tool to date developed using Madrona. It integrates a number of data layers published by ESRI, NOAA, The Nature Conservancy. In addition to our typical ArcGIS, Arc2Earth and OpenLayers data publishing workflow, this project takes advantage of up and coming tools and technologies including Tilemill, Tilestache, Knockout JS, UTF-grids and more. A number of new Madrona modules were also developed as part of the project including the Layer Manager and Data Catalog.

Read the full blog post from Ecotrust developer Scott Fletcher on the MARCO Portal Project Log

The Pacific Northwest: The New Frontier for Open Source

2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

URISA’s 50th annual conference, GIS-Pro 2012, was this year and I joined Bibiana McHugh from Trimet, Darrell Fuhriman of Renewable Funding, and Skip Newberry from the Technology Association of Oregon to give the crowd a broad sweeping sense for the exciting work in open source and open data going on in the Pacific Northwest.

Madrona made an appearance with its strong support for not only open source and open data, but also open and transparent planning. The most interesting part of the session was definitely Darrell’s history lesson on the emergence of open source hacking from the big tech firms of the early days like Intel, Tektronix, and now IBM. If you’ve never seen the Silicon Forest Universe poster before you should check it out.

Madrona honored as Top 10 Katerva Award Nominee

2012-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier in 2012 Madrona was invited as a nominee for the Katerva Awards, recognized as the pinnacle of global sustainability recognition. Today we discovered that Madrona had successfully made it through their rigorous filtering process to be selected as one of their top 10 Ecosystem Conservation nominees. Unfortunately, the project did not make it on to be a top 5 finalist but we are humbled by the recognition received and will continue to use and improve Madrona for creating game-changing planning tools in sectors and geographies around the world.

UTFGrids and Madrona

2012-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

UTFGrids are an elegant solution to providing scalable access to thousands of map features, and they’re a key interactive element of the 2D maps we’re developing with Madrona. However, the workflows for creating UTFGrid JSON files with Tilemill and Tilestache have until now been pretty intimately tied to the cartographic rendering of map layers.

For the MARCO Marine Planner project, we found ourselves just wanting to generate the UTFGrid JSON files directly from a shapefile. It turns out this wasn’t too difficult to do using Mapnik’s UTFGrid support. Our senior developer Matt Perry whipped up a utility called create-utgfrids in a couple of hours.

NPLCC Prioritization Tool preview

2012-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Ecotrust and the NPLCC have partnered to develop a conservation decision support system for Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and Californian coastal temperate rainforest. This system will enable stakeholder to engage in strategic planning and program delivery of conservation and restoration priorities for the North Pacific Region.

The prioritization tool is based on Madrona 4.0 and leverages the analytic framework established with our aquatic priorities tool. In addition to extending the tool to work with new data sources and a much wider geography, we are enhancing the core Madrona prioritization tool in several key ways:

The analytical framework has been modified to accept user-defined selection of geography. This allows you to specify an area and prioritize watersheds within a region of interest as opposed to prioritizing across the entire study area (which may not be relevant to all users).
User input of prioritization targets will be greatly simplified by using a single slider bar to represent relative importance of the species.
With the recent addition of GeoJSON support in Madrona, we are transitioning the tool to use a javascript-based 2D map interface. Amongst the many improvements, this means we can run the application on nearly any platform (including tablets and mobile devices), use different base layers for improved cartography and utilize our recent work on OpenLayer’s UTFGrid support.
The user interface has been reworked to provide a simplified and directed workflow. This was accomplished using the bootstrap and knockout frameworks on the client side. In addition to improved user experience, the new interface shows greatly improved speed and performance.

We are currently in the alpha release of the software and are working on collecting region wide data for mammalian, aquatic and bird species as well as climate change and watershed condition indices. The public release of the tool is expected in fall of 2012… stay tuned. To track the technical details of the project, follow us on the NPLCC github page.

New Layer Manager App

2012-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

We have added an optional application within Madrona to handle basic layer management. If you develop an application that requires displaying multiple data layers on the map, it will be easier to create, edit, save, and access the data of the layers. This will be very useful for creating layer controls for displaying, organizing and changing visibility of layers.

Currently we’re supporting layers organized by themes: a data layer displaying an ocean’s sediment grain size could be associated with an “Ocean” theme, or a “Soils” theme, depending on your needs. The relationship is many to many, so it could belong to both, and each theme can be associated with other data layers.

Currently, the Theme model includes a name field and can return a list of layers associated with it.

The Layer model includes fields for:

Name
Layer type (WMS, Vector, XYZ, etc…)
URL location (can be local or pulled from a different server)
Themes
Legend
And several more

As you can see, there’s a lot of room for this to grow. We will be sure to update this as our needs develop, but we are also excited to see what you do with it!

View the code now: Layer Manager

Madrona in the News

2012-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to share a few of the news stories covering the public release of Madrona. Being a software framework and not a traditional software end-product, it can be hard to explain exactly what Madrona is and the power and flexibility it provides. The more we talk about it, the better the messaging will get. We appreciate all of your feedback.

And, if you’re curious about what we’re doing with mobile with Madrona, read a bit about our Digital Deck project getting underway. Things are starting to get interesting, stay tuned.

Oregon Business - Creating Value with Mobile Apps

Madrona version 4.0 released

2012-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

After months of development, Ecotrust is pleased to announce the first public release of Madrona, version 4.0. Madrona is the evolution of MarineMap, a tool for web-based marine spatial planning developed by the MarineMap Consortium which included the University of California Santa Barbara, Ecotrust, and The Nature Conservancy. MarineMap reached end-of-life with version 3 in 2011. Learn more about Madrona’s history

Read about the release on the ecotrust blog.

Updates and fixes in the 4.0 release include:

Map bookmarks
GeoJSON support for the Madrona Feature API
New analysistools app
Switched to new-style Django url and absurl template tags
Reorganization of setup code
Overhaul of setup.py and associated installation procedures
Added flatblocks to manage content
Added create-madrona-project.py script as a madrona replacement for startproject
Fixed several bugs in raster_stats - improved tempfile and cache handling
Improved study region loading via management command
Improved geometry validity handling in manipulators
Improved logging system
Install_media command flag to handle admin static files
Numerous bug fixes and lots of code cleanup

Enhanced 2D mapping support

2012-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Improved support for 2D mapping libraries such as OpenLayers and Leaflet has been added to the Madrona platform through the addition of GeoJSON support for the Madrona Feature API. What’s unique about this implementation is that it supports arbitrarily nested feature collections, something that is not defined in the GeoJSON spec. It does this by allowing an empty geometry within a FeatureCollection with a special feature_set property. That property is the id of another FeatureCollection. This means that traversing the hierarchy requires knowledge of this convention, so we make it optional.

This enhancement is within the GeoJSON spec and the benefit is that like KML Network Links, the server doesn’t send the entire tree structure, just the child features of a given collection. This requires additional requests overall in order to get a full view of the tree but allows better performance to be maintained for large trees. We’re curious what people think about it. Kudos to Matt Perry for working this through, it was one of the more memorable brainstorming sessions with the team around the whiteboard.

Learn More

The intention going forward is for server-side features to support both 2D and 3D mapping clients giving you the flexibility to choose the one you want. Look for the map bookmark and layer manager apps to support 2D mapping clients over the next month.

Version 3 of the Madrona appliance is out

2012-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Based on your feedback from the workshop last month we’ve made some updates to the Madrona appliance. Notable changes include:

Updated to Madrona 4.0b1 (with GeoJSON output)
Installed Virtualbox guest additions allowing you to resize the screen and do basic things like copy and paste text between the guest and host.
Added some niceties to the app initialization process

Test drive Madrona if you haven’t already