Geoportal.md was launched and made publicly available cadastral plans, ortophoto and other data

http://www.geoportal.md was launched to provide various data to the public, most popular being at the moment cadastral parcels overlayed with ortophoto. I will not talk here about all the social or political aspects of this event because you can read about this in the main stream media as there was a press conference about it.

I want to highlight the some aspects of performance and server load of the event. The server runs on 1 pretty standard machine (not a server):

• CPU - Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz
• Memory - 6 GB
• Hard disk - 1 TB
• Ethernet: 100 mbit/s

After the press published news on their sites the server got hit by the users, google analytics registered that day from 16:30 till 00:00 the following data:

• 3402 visits
• 3154 visitors
• 13861 page views

The problem was a spike right after the media sites published the news and the site started to lag. In general I did not knew what amount of users to expect, the approach was "let's wait and see", sure I ran various "ab" benchmarks but I did not knew how many users will actually use service and where the bottle neck will be CPU, RAM, IO or Bandwidth. We also have other services like WMS/WFS that are CPU and RAM heavy, the problem with static tiles is that 1 visitor produces about 30 http requests when he zooms.

Munin grapths for the event:

As you can see from the graphs the problem was in the IO, our hard disk just could not handle the load, the traffic was pretty high too. All in all I am pretty happy with the results, and I now have a better understanding on how to scale the portal horizontally in case the load grows, but thats for another post.

Adding a WMS Server in MapInfo

To access a WMS server, you must add it to the list of available servers.

1. From the Options menu select Open Web Service and then Open WMS...
   
   
   
   
2. Click Servers then Add to display the WMS Server Information dialog box. Here you can add the new web server address and description in the fields provided.
3. Type the WMS's URL in the Server URL field. Click Test URL to ensure that MapInfo Professional can locate the server. Click Get Description to get the server provided description or type in a description. Agency of Land Relations and Cadastre has the following server url: http://geoportal.md/ro/default/wms/private
   
   
   
   
4. When you have completed these selections or entries, click OK.
5. In the WMS Servers List, click Set Default to select a default server. The default server will be selected the next time you open the WMS Table dialog box. When you set a default WMS server, a check mark displays beside it. If you do not select a default server, MapInfo Professional displays the first server in the list when you begin your WMS Server session.

Retrieving Map Data from Web Map Services

1. Choose a format for the layer from the Image Format drop-down list. The options that display in this list may differ depending upon the formats the server supports, image/jpeg is your best bet if you don't need transparency.
2. The Coordinate Reference System Projections drop-down list displays all of the projections that the selected layers have in common, EPSG:4026 is for MOLDRREF99 and by default it's not in the projections list. Here is a post on how to add MOLDREF99 in MapInfo http://iacovlev-pavel.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-add-moldref99-into-mapinfo.html.
3. To enter a name for this table, do one of the following:
   
   
   
   1. Click the button at the end of the Table Filename field to display the Please specify a TAB filename dialog box. Select the path and type the file name in the Filename field and click OK.
   2. Type the path into the Table Filename field
4. Click OK to generate the WMS map request.

How to add MOLDREF99 into MapInfo

Open Mapinfo projection file (C:\Program Files\MapInfo\Professional\MAPINFOW.PRJ) and add the following line at the begging of the file

"--- Moldavian projections ---"
"MOLDREF99\p4026", 2008, 33, 7, 28.4, 0, 0.99994, 200000, -5000000, 0, 0, 400000, 400000

Restart Mapinfo.

The workshop "Geographic Information for Economic Development"

The workshop "Geographic Information for Economic Development" that took place in Chisinau between October 15-16th 2009 marked the closing of the 3rd phase of a larger project - Moldova Ortophoto. It was said numerous times that the impact is significant, with which I just partially agree because:

• Local authorities, universities, ministries and other governmental organizations don't have access to it, it's only used in ARFC and it's sub devisions
• It's very expensive
• Product cannot be bought or used as a WMS service

and ARFC is to blame for this.

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recently decided to provide approximately 1 million euro for a 2 year project "Moldova - Line Maps for Development", which will cover 20% of the territory as a pilot area. With this last funding decision, Norway will when this last project has been finalized have contributed a total of more than 2 million euro to the mapping of Moldova.

Using ogr2ogr when working with vector data

This program can be used to convert simple features data between file formats performing various operations during the process such as spatial or attribute selections, reducing the set of attributes, setting the output coordinate system or even reprojecting the features during translation.

Download and install FWTools. If you don't have MOLDREF99 projection defined open C:\Program Files\FWTools2.3.0\data\epsg.wkt and add the following lines to the bottom

#MOLDREF99
4026,PROJCS["MOLDREF99",GEOGCS["GRS 1980(IUGG, 1980)",DATUM["D_unknown",SPHEROID["GRS80",6378137,298.257222101]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295]],PROJECTION["Transverse_Mercator"],PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],PARAMETER["central_meridian",28.4],PARAMETER["scale_factor",0.99994],PARAMETER["false_easting",200000],PARAMETER["false_northing",-5000000],UNIT["Meter",1]]

Now lets try to convert a MOLDREF99 esri shape file into a WGS84 mapinfo tab file. Create 2 folders "in" and "out", put your input data in your "in" folder in my case this are RoadL.shp, RoadL.dbf, RoadL.shx. Run FWTools Shell from your desktop and type

bin\ogr2ogr.exe -s_srs EPSG:4026 -t_srs EPSG:4326 -f "MapInfo File" out\roads.tab in\RoadL.shp

Ogr2ogr support numerous formats some of which are ESRI Shapefile,
MapInfo File, GML, GPX, KML, PostgreSQL. To find out more about ogr2ogr
visit GDAL homepage.

Flood simulation

I wrote a simple web interactive flood simulation application. The flood area and statistics are being created by GRASS r.lake.

Check it out at http://flood.iap.md/flood.php

Fire hydrants project

I participated in Mr's. Denislam Maşaev project involving the creation of the electronic map of fire hydrants. The purpose of his degree work was to collect geodata about hydrants in Botanica, Chisinau and upload it to the City Hall of mun. Chişinău database RINEDAC. A special user group in the system was created for Civil Protection and Exceptional situations with the following abilities:

• Editing the hydrants layer
• Searching by address
• Viewing imagery

This work will help fire brigades to raise their efficiency and intervention time.

We also received a letter of congratulation for the work we performed from Michael Harabagiu.