News
Mar 28, 2011
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. The paper, OpenTopography: A Services Oriented Architecture for Community Access to LIDAR Topography, provides an overview of the technical implementation of the OpenTopography cyberinfrastructure.
Abstract:
High-resolution topography data acquired with LIDAR (Light Detection and... more
Mar 1, 2011
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. This new search feature allows you to specifically target keyword searches on OpenTopography's data and tools databases, or across the whole site using a customized Google Site Search. We hope this new feature makes it easier for users to quickly find the... more
Feb 18, 2011
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. The new interface moves more metadata to the data discovery page, providing information about... more
Feb 14, 2011
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.
Jan 5, 2011
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. Chris and Sarah will be giving back-to-back presentations on ongoing OpenTopography work to use Google Earth to visualize high-resolution lidar topography-derived imagery for research and educational applications:
Christopher Crosby: LiDAR and Google Earth: Simplifying Access to High-Resolution Topography Data
Sarah... more
Dec 20, 2010
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. If you have questions or concerns please email info@opentopography.org and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for you patience and happy holidays from the OpenTopography Team!
Dec 20, 2010
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. This release also represents OpenTopography's first foray into hosting Terrestrial Laser Scanning data, with a dataset from the Granite Dells, Arizona. Finally, through our... more
Dec 13, 2010
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. OpenTopography provides the registry as part of our mission to enable access to high-resolution, Earth science... more
Dec 7, 2010
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:
Exhibit Hall:
OpenTopography Booth: We'll be sharing a double-wide booth this year with two other San Diego Supercomputer Center-based Earth science informatics projects (GEON and TEAM). Please stop by booth 344 & 346 for OpenTopography demos, information about recently released datasets, or just to say hi.
UNAVCO Booth demo:... more
Dec 1, 2010
OpenTopography team member Sriram Krishnan presented a paper this week at the 2nd annual IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2010) in Indianapolis on LiDAR digital elevation model (DEM) generation using the cloud-based MapReduce programming model. The paper, Evaluation of MapReduce for Gridding LIDAR Data, compares a MapReduce implementation of a local gridding algorithm for DEM generation with with the C++ version currently being used in the production OpenTopography LiDAR processing system. The paper emphasizes performance (and price/... more
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