News
Nov 12, 2010
UCSD Press Release issued November 10th, 2010:
The OpenTopography Facility, a collaboration between the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego and Arizona State University, will participate in a five-year, $4.4 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to form a collaborative software framework for analysis of geographic data that will benefit many fields of research, from archaeology to urban planning.
"The overarching goal of this project is to establish CyberGIS as a fundamentally new software framework encompassing a seamless integration of cyberinfrastructure,... more
Nov 11, 2010
OpenTopography will be performing maintenance on servers associated with our standard DEM download system on Friday, November 12th. During this time, DEM downloads will be unavailable. Please check the "LiDAR System Status" box in the left hand menu under the "Data" tab for updated information related to the outage. This maintenance does not effect other aspects of the OpenTopography system, and therefore users will still be able to download LiDAR point cloud data and generate custom DEMs, as well as access other OpenTopography resources. Thank you for your patience.
Oct 26, 2010
The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has announced a new and unique volunteer internship program for undergraduate students entitled Computational Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU). As part of this program, students will be paired with an SDSC mentor and will work as part of a research team dedicated to a particular area of computational research. The OpenTopography team has submitted two projects to the CREU program:
CloudStor: Data Intensive Computing on the Cloud
Project Overview: The objective of the CloudStor group is to explore... more
Oct 26, 2010
Today, OpenTopography released a relatively small 47 km2 (~357 million points) LiDAR dataset covering the Granite Dells, near Prescott, Arizona. These data were collected by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) on behalf of David E. Haddad (Arizona State University) as part of a Seed Grant awarded to him in 2009. David's MS research project, "Geologic and Geomorphic Characterization of Precariously Balanced Rocks" used these data and TLS datasets to understand the geologic and geomorphic settings in which precariously balanced rocks form in low-seismicity regions. The... more
Oct 21, 2010
The 2010 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting will be held October 31st to November 3rd in Denver, CO. This year, there are a number of sessions related to LiDAR topography data, and OpenTopography team members will be making several presentations:
Pardee Session (Invited): Seeing the True Shape of Earth's Surface: Applications of Airborne and Terrestrial LiDAR in the Geosciences
THE STATE OF ONLINE ACCESS TO LIDAR TOPOGRAPHY DATA AND FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES, CROSBY, Christopher J.
TECTONIC GEOMORPHOLOGY, STRUCTURAL GEOLOGY, AND PALEOSEISMOLOGY OF FAULT ZONES FROM HIGH RESOLUTION... more
Sep 29, 2010
Today we corrected a significant bug in the OpenTopography point cloud access and processing system that was introduced at the OT 2.2 release two weeks ago. The bug, which we missed in beta testing, also went unreported by users over the past two weeks despite significantly impacting data products generated by OpenTopography. Specifically, the bug interfered with the ability to select a subset of point cloud data based on point cloud classification type (e.g. "ground only"). This means that regardless of what classification was selected by the user, the system returned all points in a... more
Sep 15, 2010
OpenTopography is pleased to announce another update to our system. This release - OpenTopography v 2.2 - provides a much needed improvement to our standard digital elevation model (DEM) download interface. The new system makes it considerably easier to select and download many files at once, and also fixes issues that were causing stalled downloads in the previous system. We've also updated the OpenTopography Points2Grid algorithm to improve processing speed on custom DEM generation from LiDAR point cloud data, and have made a number of tweaks to the OpenTopography website design and... more
Aug 5, 2010
OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release of 840 sq kilometers of lidar point cloud data collected between January 21st and January 27th, 2010, in response to the January 12th magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake. These data were collected by the Center for Imaging Science at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Kucera International under sub-contract to ImageCat, Inc., and funded by the Global Facility for Disaster Recovery and Recovery (GFDRR) hosted at the World Bank. These data have been publicly available via open FTP linked from the RIT Information Products Laboratory for... more
Jul 28, 2010
Napa Watershed Data Release:
OpenTopography is happy to announce that point cloud LiDAR data for the Napa Watershed in northern California is now available. The Napa data were collected in 2003 by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM). This was one of the original NCALM data sets and digital elevation models derived from these data have been available via the NCALM Data Distribution Center for quite some time. However, this release of the data by OpenTopography marks the first time that the full Napa point cloud data set has been available for download. The Napa data set... more
Jun 25, 2010
This week, a paper by OpenTopography team members related to the design of the OpenTopography point cloud database system will be presented by Chaitan Baru at the 2010 International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM) in Heidelberg, Germany. The paper, entitled Database Design for High-Resolution LIDAR Topography Data is one of 41 papers that will presented at the conference and published in a Conference Proceedings volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The citation for the publication is:
Nandigam, V, Baru, C., and Crosby, C.J., Database Design for... more
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