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GIS Manager Overview

The GIS manager provides the ability to work with GIS maps within the Workbench. It offers a number of visualization options as well as tools for spatial processing.

Similar to any other Workbench manager the GIS manager is organized around 4 different components:

  • The GIS explorer that provides functionality for organizing GIS data (e.g. feature classes and rasters)

  • Map data view for visualizing spatial data

  • A property control that displays properties of the selected spatial object

  • And a tools explorer that contains a list of available tools for spatial processing based on the selected spatial object.

Data storages and data processors

Data used in GIS manager can be stored in different types of storages and some tools are implemented using different data processors.

Not all data storages supports ale bellow mentioned data types.

In some tools different data processors can be selected. As default, processor based the PostGIS is used, but in some cases, memory based processor is also provided.

  • PostgreSQL and PostGIS on maintained server Supports all types of data

  • PostgreSQL and PostGIS in Azure Do not support mesh database

  • SQLite Only feature classes including temporal supported

  • MSSQL Only feature classes including temporal supported

  • Remote file Based raster data Raster including temporal supported. DHI 2D rectangular grid (dfs2) and NetCDF (nc) formats are supported. Not all variants of NetCDF supported. Data are not stored in MO database but dynamically loaded from files.

  • Cloud Raster including temporal, Mesh and non-temporal feature classes supported.

  • Dfsu Mesh Provider Mesh data are not stored in MO database but dynamically loaded from Dfsu files. Only data visualization and animation supported

Terminology

The following terminology applies:

Temporal element is element, having additionally to the geometrical representation also date time information typically in form of the time steps. Additionally to the static elements, temporal elements provide possibility to time depending animation in map and some temporal analysis.

In case of GIS manager, temporal elements are typically created by loading of the computation results (Dfsu and Dfs2, NetCdf, …) or from set of files, containing individual time steps.

A Feature class is the GIS data holder. A feature class may be of type point, line or polygon. A feature class contains feature geometries and a set of associated attributes.

In case of temporal feature, each feature also contains time stamp. Based on it, one entity can change geometry and attributes in time.

Feature class geometry type is in GIS explorer indicated by icon. In case of temporal feature class icon containing the arrow, indicating possibility to animate.

Feature classes are managed using the GIS explorer in feature class groups.

Each feature class defines various attributes such as id or name1. The value for an attribute may vary, and usually varies, from one feature to another. Each row in the attribute table represents a specific feature.

In case of temporal feature class definition contain one additional not editable field

A Feature layer represents how a feature class is represented in the Map data view.

A Feature is a specific point, line or polygon within a feature class that is displayed in the map.

The legend is the list of feature layers and that appears in the Map data view. The layout of a Feature layer is controlled by clicking a feature layer in the legend and modifying the feature layer properties in the properties control.

A raster is a set of values arranged in a regular grid.

There are two general types of rasters. One is an image where the values represent colors (e.g. a picture or satellite image), while the other is called a grid where the values represent some measure, such as elevation or rainfall. The grid is usually made of square cells which have a predefined size and extent.

In case of temporal raster data are organized to bands represented by 2D array. Each band correspond to the one time step.

Raster is described by set of the parameters describing geometrical position (for details see World file - Wikipedia), data type, in case of temporal raster number of time steps, Source coordinate system and eventually variable and units represented by grid values. More info about variable and units can be found in import/export tool description.

Rasters are displayed in the GIS Explorer in a node representing a raster provider.

A raster provider is a plug-in component of the Workbench which knows how to read and display raster data.

A raster layer represents how a raster is represented in the Map data view.

A Mesh object represent multidimensional storage created by set of the geometries, items, and time steps in form of the double values array. For each geometry element, item and time step the one value exist.

In this case of Mesh database in Postgres for the performance reason data are stored in block defined by the Block spatial size and Time block size.

Edit Provider(s) Connection(s)

The GIS manager supports reading spatial data from other storages than the MIKE OPERATIONS database.

In order to configure external spatial data sources, select Edit Provider(s) Connection(s).

In the dialog, configure providers, select the provider to configure among the providers loaded and set the connection string.

Refer to the provider documentation of the selected provider on how to configure.

Use Alias as short name for the provider to be displayed when working with the provider.