Samweli Mwakisambwe
I'm a software developer currently living in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science with Statistics. I have been working in software development since 2015, building web applications and plugins for QGIS. I have been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and have published or participated in various geospatially related Open Source projects.
I'm passionate about software and always striving to improve my software development skills. In my free time I play board games, especially a Tanzanian version of checkers.
Sessions
STAC or SpatialTemporal Asset Catalog is now a popular option for providers wishing to create accessible catalogs of spatiotemporal asset data for end users. STAC aims to create a standardized and performant way for providers to expose their spatiotemporal asset data, and for users to ingest that data.
A 'spatiotemporal asset' is any file that represents information about the earth captured in a certain space and time.
Since the development of STAC started in 2007, the STAC ecosystem was not able to use the STAC data in desktop softwares. Recently through collaboration between Kartoza and Microsoft, a QGIS (a desktop GIS application) plugin called “STAC API Browser” was developed to bridge the gap between QGIS users and STAC data.
Now using “STAC API Browser” users can access, download, analyze and use a vast amount of imagery data offered by various STAC specification providers, such as Microsoft Planetary Computer.
The aim of this talk is to introduce the “STAC API Browser” plugin, give a guide on how to use the plugin inside QGIS, showcase cool things that the plugin supports and how users/developers can collaborate on the plugin project. On top of all, we will also look at how to use the QGIS temporal controller feature with the added STAC data from the plugin.
QGIS is a freely downloadable open source GIS software suite that contains a desktop option, mobile, and web component. QGIS is free to download and use, it is released with a GPL v3 license which is a non commercial license allowing users to download and use it without concerns compared to other commercial GIS software.
Up to QGIS version 3.12 there was no core support for temporal data, users were required to install a plugin called TimeManager in order to visualize temporal data inside QGIS. Through a collaboration between the Canadadian Government, Kartoza and North Road, efforts were made to add core support for temporal data inside QGIS.
As a result the QGIS version 3.14 was released with a Temporal Controller feature which was now responsible for handling all the temporal layers inside QGIS. The initial role out of the Temporal Controller contained support for raster, vector and WMS-T layer providers.
This session will explore how to use the QGIS Temporal Controller to do animation and visualization of the WMS-T layers, this will include how to setup a standard WMS server that will be serving time based layers.
In the session we will also learn about the Temporal Controller API, how to use it through QGIS python bindings and create a simple QGIS plugin that will show the API in action.