As part of OpenTopography's ongoing efforts to provide quick and reliable access to lidar data and derived products (e.g., high-resolution DEMs), our latest system update (OT v. 3.1) features a number of improvements to the data access and processing system designed to improve performance and make OpenTopography more reliable under growing processing loads.
A paper highlighting the Services Oriented Architecture implemented by OpenTopography to enable lidar data access and processing has been accepted for presentation at the 2nd International Conference and Exhibition on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application (COM.Geo) on May 23-25, 2011 in Washington DC.
As OpenTopography continues to grow, adding new data, resources, and links to tools, it became apparent that the site would benefit from a more visible and full-featured search feature. To that end, we've released an integrated search capability, prominently located in the header bar in the upper right-hand part of all webpages.
OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release (OT v 3.0) of an updated data discovery interface which we hope will make it easier to for users to learn about hosted data and to access available data products. The new interface continues to rely on the familiar Google Maps display, but now users are able to select an area on the map, discover data that covers that area, and then link directly to the appropriate page to download and process data. Results for a selected area appear below the map.
OpenTopography will be making a number of system updates to both our user interface and back-end systems on the evening of Monday, February 14th. During this time, access to the OpenTopography Data tab may be occasionally impeded. Access to other parts of the OpenTopography site should not be impaired. We hope that the system will be back to normal by Tuesday morning, February 5th. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you.
OpenTopography team members Chris Crosby (SDSC) and Sarah Robinson (ASU) are visiting the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA this week for the Geological Society of America Penrose Conference: Google Earth: Visualizing the Possibilities for Geoscience Education and Research.
On account of the winter holiday break and San Diego Supercomputer Center and University of California, San Diego campus-wide closures, OpenTopography will be providing reduced support between December 20th and January 2nd. OpenTopography systems will be fully available and users may run jobs as they normally do. However, responses to email, system outages, and bug reports may be delayed.
OpenTopography is happy to announce the release of five new LiDAR point cloud datasets. These data cover a range of spatial scales, geographic areas, and acquisition technologies. This release includes two small footprint airborne LiDAR datasets, including the highly anticipated El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake (4 April 2010) Rupture LiDAR Scan covering 372 km2 just south of the US/Mexican border in northern Baja, Mexico.
OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release of our new Tool Registry. The OpenTopography Tool Registry provides a community populated clearinghouse of software, utilities, and tools oriented towards high-resolution topography data (e.g. collected with LiDAR technology) handling, processing, visualization, and analysis. The Tool Registry is designed to facilitate the high-resolution topography user community's ability to share and discover software relevant to their research.
The annual American Geophysical Union fall meeting will run December 13th to 17th, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. OpenTopography will be active at the meeting via our booth in the Exhibit Hall, and through presentations in various scientific sessions:
