OpenTopography

Students

A number of students are involved in OpenTopography related work:

• Sarah Robinson (Arizona State University) - Topic: Utilization of lidar data for earth science education.



• ASU School of Computing and Informatics undergraduate Capstone project: CSE 423: OpenTopography Cyberinfrastructure

Students:
Eddie Beaumont
Jennifer Dischler
Paul Gambill
Clint Helling
Gatha Nair
John Samuelson

Project Description:
The task that our team has undertaken this year was proposed by a collaboration of Ramon Arrowsmith (ASU, School of Earth and Space Exploration) and Christopher Crosby (OpenTopography / San Diego Supercomputer Center) to continue work on an existing project called OpenTopography.  Part of the proposed project was for us to not only learn about and develop the processes that make OpenTopography run but to also get real world experience working in a team with people in different physical locations (use of video conferencing). 

The major components proposed by this project include incorporation of libLAS tools into the OpenTopography workflow, to develop advanced high performance gridding and meshing tools for x, y, z coordinates, incorporate on-the-fly PostGRES/POSTGIS SQL relational database systems, and to have high performance and light 2D/3D modeling software of the LiDAR point cloud data.  These tools are the major goals associated with this project at the time of the proposal, however the requirements can change as needed.  Beside the above goals our team will also learn about some earth science topics, as they sometimes are important in order to understand how to create the tools.  The team will also have to learn a suite of programs that earth scientists use to model the point cloud data that is taken from the aerial LiDAR data.  The major programming languages needed to accomplish all of this are C++, bash, and PostGRES/POSTGIS SQL.