Presentation of terrestris & mundialis

Companies introduce themselves

terrestris is a spin-off company of the Bonn University from 2002 which focuses on the conception and establishment of spatial data infrastructure, web-based information systems and WebMapping applications. Our services and products are realised with the help of a free and open source software, whereby we are networking with national as well as international communities. Our clients operate in the public sector as well as in the private sector at home and abroad.

mundialis is a service provider for remote sensing and geo data analysis. Using free and open source software, we develop web services that as based on Earth observation data and easy to operate. With the help of those data we create innovative products for the "Newspace" economy and the public sector. The main activities of mundialis can be found in the field of Geospatial High Performance Computing (Geo-HPC), in order to transform raw data from Earth observations, especially from the EU Copernicus Programme, into services and products, which can be implemented by the clients via web services.

News from our network

FOSS4G 2016 in Bonn

The FOSS4G 2016 is the biggest international conference for Open Source GIS and Geo-Software worldwide. This year's conference will take place from 24th to 26th August. Till Adams and his organisation team are hoping for more than 1000 visitors who are interested in the conference, workshops, Codesprints and several other events.

The conference's motto is "Building Bridges" and thus, the location of the conference, right next to the bridges across the Rhine, has a symbolic meaning.

In order to "build bridges" to neighbouring disciplines and their communities, the organisation team chose the key topics "remote sensing", "Open Data", "Land information" and "Disaster Management". Those topics are connected concerning their content and on top of that they perfectly fit into the world of Open Source Geo Processing.

This can be shown with the help of the European Copernicus Programme: As a remote sensing programme, Copernicus delivers free geo data to the EU. Those data can be used to answer questions concerning Land Information and Disaster Management.
Processing and distribution of such data are the main aims of mundialis.

The FOSS4G conference is embedded in the Bonner GeoSummer 2016, the frame to an other international conference in Bonn: The EARSel 2016 ("European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratoies" - ERASel). - EARseL). Further information can be found on the website of the event and additional print media.

terrestris sponsors the conference and will be represented at the accompanying symposium with a booth. Both companies, terrestris and mundialis, will make a major contribution to the conference's programme by offering lecture and workshops.

News

DisruptSpace in Bremen

From 6th to 8th April an event called "Disrupt Space"(disruptspace.io), took place in Bremen for the first time. mundialis was very lucky to participate, as it was a great event!

Taking the word "disrupt" literally, one expects something bursting, splitting or breaking. Indeed, this says it all: the participants were asked to "break" their conventional thinking and gather ideas on new business areas and applications of the space industry.

To create a proper environment for new approaches, teams were formed the night before the event. Their task was to form something new from Marshmallows, spaghettis, paper and glue. The results were really creative as you can easily detect on the pictures. The "real" challenges, that participants had to face the next day, dealt with solutions for the world hunger, global internet and new business ideas in space.

About 200 people from all over the world took part in the event. All of them had different careers and ideas and because of this diversity, conversations were stimulating and interesting. Business ideas, products and projects and projects evolved around various things such as the production of luxurious jewellery in space under the condition of micro-gravitation, high-resolution satellite images taken by cheap and small satellites or the establishment of mining industry on asteroids. There was an atmosphere of departure during the event and several lectures pointed out that a second space age is approaching. The conference's participants did not doubt this thesis.

Two intensive days were used to work hard on solutions for the different names challenges. The event resulted in a huge number of new contacts with interesting people and organisations and the new insight that there are vast possibilities to partake in the space industry. It is certain: next year, we will again travel to Bremen!



 

Trainings

Our trainings on GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoExt, PostGIS, SHOGun, QGIS, GRASS GIS, JavaScript aso.

Between June and September 2016 we offer the following all-day trainings:

    Juni
        Wednesday 08.06.2016: „Consolidation GeoServer“
        Wednesday 15.06.2016: „Introduction to PostGIS“
        Wednesday 22.06.2016: „Introduction to SHOGun2“
    Juli
        Wednesday 13.07.2016: „Introduction GRASS GIS“
        Wednesday 20.07.2016: „Introduction QGIS“
        Wednesday 27.07.2016: „Introduction JavaScript“
    August
        Wednesday 17.08.2016: „Consolidation GRASS GIS“
        Wednesday 24.08.2016: „Introduction GeoNetwork OpenSource“
        Wednesday 31.08.2016: „Caching of Geo data services“
    September
        Wednesday 14.09.2016: „Core components of a open source geo data infrastructure“
        Wednesday 21.09.2016: „Openstreetmap: Participate and profit“
        Wednesday 28.09.2016: „Testing of your own codes: An overview“

Each training takes place in our premises, Kölnstraße 99, 53111 Bonn, from 9 am to 6 pm, including a one-hour lunch break. Participants are kindly asked to bring their own laptops, in individual cases, a laptop can be provided.

The seminar leaders are well experienced and will help the participants to complete the given tasks successfully. Extensive seminar documents (analogue and digital), non-alcoholic drinks and snacks during the workshop as well as a joint lunch are included. The price per seminar is 395€ (plus VAT).

We also organize workshops and seminars for any other topic, which may take place in your organisation if you wish so. Please contact us if you have special requests concerning the topic or the date of a seminar. We guarantee the seminars named above as soon as four people enrol.

For further information, questions or enrolment please contact Susanne Meyer (meyer@terrestris.de, 0228 / 387 580 85).

Internal News

Copernicus Sentinel Data - or: how are we going to handle such a quantity of data?

The new EU Copernicus Programm with its "Sentinel" environmental satellites is a mile stone in the European annals of space history. For the very first time, high-resolution remote sensing data are accessible for free, independent of time and space. Such data provide urgently needed information on the current condition of the Earth's surface. The information taken from the data conduce e.g. to show problems in forest growth when it comes to spatial planning.

But how are those satellite data delivered to politicans, administrative bodies, planning engineers or the citizens?

The Copernicus Sentinel-satellites, which circle the Earth on a polar orbit, only take 90 minutes to travel around the Earth. If you consider the fact that while circling the Earth, the satellites "photograph" a strip of the Earth's surface, which is 300 km wide, you may already forefeel that a giant amount a data is produced in this process. As the Earth itself turns, each circulation of the satellite results in the capture of different strips on the Earth and step-by-step, the whole of the Earth's surface is being "photographed". The optical Sentinel-2A satellite captures the Earth's surface several times per month and generates about 0.7 terabytes per day. Since November 2015 the satellite produced almost 30,000 images and more than 160 terabytes.




 Copernicus Sentinel-2A Satellit (Figure: Rama, Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-SA-2.0-FR)


But what does mundialis do with those data? Even though, the data provided by the Sentinel satellites are accessible for free for every citizen, most people will probably face some difficulties: first of all, the amount of data is overwhelming. Furthermore, the extraction of information, which are of interest for environmental planning, biodiversity research or the analysis of time series (those are needed to recognize changes just in time), from the raw material can be extremely challenging.

Currently, mundialis establishes the necessary IT-infrastructure, to identify and process nearly cloud clear and cloud clear Sentinel data on the ESA servers. After the download of the file, which is about 7 GB in size, the atmosphere needs to be corrected - a process that is very computationally intensive. The atmospheric correction aims at the transfer of undisturbed images for further processing. This corrective invoice itself takes several hours on a high-performance computer. Taking into consideration the before mentioned amount of 32,000 images captured by the Sentinel-2A satellite, it becomes clear that the atmospheric correction would last several weeks without an appropriate computer architecture. After that, the actual analysis would follow and extend the process again.
Because of this, mundialis decided to parallelize the processing in order to be able to quickly evaluate a massive amount of data. While, until recently, it was common to operate computer systems (HPC Clusters) by oneself in air-conditioned rooms, it is now much more economic to rent computing services whenever they are needed. mundialis cooperates with cloud-based computing power providers. Furthermore, high-performance computing specialist knowledge is required in this context - something mundialis does have and offer.




mundialis' computing power


Within the last months, we established a complete process chain behind an attractive web interface. Using this web interface. Using this web interface, users can chose and order images they are interested in online on a world map. Thereby, an automatic processing is being started which ends with an E-Mails notification containing download links for the data demanded. Moreover, the users receive links to the web services that are needed to implement the data into their own systems.
Each step - the download of several gigabytes of raw data, the atmospheric corrections and the analysis - is automatized by our system and processed in the cloud. Currently, we are constantly working on our performance!

Please have a look at: maps.mundialis.de


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Source: sentinel.esa.int

Practice / Hands on

Hands on Geoserver

One of our current projects aims at the publication of more than 300 different layers from a data bank in the GeoServer and the individual adjustment of their names. The first thought of any developer usually is: "How can I solve the problem in an automatized and reproducible way?" Publishing and configuring about layers manually in the GeoServer GUI is extremely time-consuming. Luckily, the GeoServer has a REST-interface that we already use for our SHOGun-Framework. With the help of that port/interface, many operations, which are carried out on the user interface, can be automated. An overview of the REST-interface offers a good documentation of the GeoServer, which also contains some practical examples and inguiries for the REST-interface. Quite quickly, the matching code was found to publish the layer for a certain data store:

curl -v \
-u user:password \
-XPOST \
-H "Content-type: text/xml" \
-d "name_of_the_table" \
http://myserver.com/geoserver/rest/workspaces/myws/datastores/myds/featuretypes

For reasons of simplicity, the command-line tool curl is used in these examples. Using a HTTP request or a java-based GeoServer manager, you will achieve comparable results. With the help of this request, a database table, which contains a column for geometry, can be published as a layer. The next step is slightly difficult: the ending of the published layer, especially the name. In this case, we did not want to use the table's name. While checking the documentation, we did not find any information how the GeoServer distinguishes between the name that simply indicates and the name, which is used as a reference for the database table. After carrying out the necessary research in the source code, via GitHub we found two significant hints: the methods getName() and getNativeName(). As a logical consequence, the following code line established:

curl -v \
-u user:password \
-XPUT \
-H "Content-type: text/xml" \
-d "beautiful_displaynamenamename_of_the_tabletrue" \
http://myserver.com/geoserver/rest/workspaces/myws/datastores/myds/featuretypes/name_of_the_table

Packing the code into a loop was the key to the publication and re-naming of hundreds of layers "at the touch of a button".

Calendar of events

EARSEL, FOSSGIS, FOSS4G and many more

You can find us on the following events:

- Geospatial World Forum
  23.-26. Mai 2016
  World Trade Center, Rotterdam

- DLR Oberpfaffenhofen
  31. Mai 2016

- EARSel Symposium 2016
  -Frontiers in Earth Observations
  20.-24. Juni 2016
  Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University Bonn

- FOSSGIS 2016
  04.-06. Juli 2016
  University Salzburg

- FOSS4G 2016
  24.-26. August 2016
  World Conference Center Bonn

Job market

Job vacancies, internships, etc.

Currently, there are no jobs vacancies or internships available. You are very welcome to send an unsolicited application to into contact with us. Please send complete application documents including a cover letter, CV and job references via email to:
info@terrestris.de Contact person: Mrs Meyer / Mrs Reisch