adding elevation datasets

[moovida]

Hi all, I am pretty new to WW (even if several years java GIS developer).

I browsed I think the whole wiki and didn't find a good answer to the possibility to add and use elevation models.

What I found:
- the dstile way to import the dem data from an existing gdal-compatible format

What I would like to do:
- create a way to serve the GRASS binary raster format as a possible WW elevation datasource

What I need:
- someone that tells me if that is feasible or if I just didn't understand many things
- an advice if it is better to do some coding or if it is better to use external stuff (gdal) to prepare the data and just add them as layers as explained in the dstile tutorial
- a next point for documenting myself. Any link, idea, hint, document would be of great help.



I am very templed as the final solution to extend the AbstractElevationModel to support GRASS workspaces and raster files, but I am not yet sure if that would be ok, since I am not sure how I will be able to use that one instead/overriding the default one in the area of the dataset.


I am havin lots of fun with WW and GIS data. vector integration is fairly easy, but elevation models seem to be a bit more complicated.

Thanks for any advice you may give me.
Andrea

[moovida]

Alright, I gave some ton of distributed documentation a go and ended up trying out the procedural image classes of Murris.

The result was direct reading and tilecache creating from a GRASS workspace and map. That is amazing and I found it for now the easiest way to produce tilecache for WW
You can watch a screen of this proto here.


But, and there is a big bad but, it is not what I wanted. I wanted to do exactly the same but instead of producing image tiles, I would love to produce high resolution terrain elevation tiles.

So my question is: would it be possible to produce bil files with the elevation information instead of pngs and save them (for example) into the srtm data folders? Wouldn't that work and substitute the elevation with the high resolution one?

[what_nick]

Loading terrain up via BIL

Geoserver does not support GRASS datasets yet (but GDAL does and if you could read it via GDAL and produce a procedural layer then you can read them in Java) - can produce bil terrain tiles. You might consider contributing GRASS support to Geoserver.

Cheers,

what_nick.

[JasonInVegas]

Moovida,

What I think you were looking for (back in March of 2009) was auto-generating a WW compatible elevation source from your grass binary rasters...have I effectively restated your objective?

Because the SRTM elevation files used in WW are just bil formatted rasters, just as GeoTIFF rasters that can hold elevations are, I strongly believe you are only looking for a grass extension such as r.out.bil (which doesn't exactly exist yet.) with a -srtm option would be even nicer!

Please reply to clarify if this thread is still active and this is still a need; perhaps I can accommodate.

Regards,
Jason S.