Geobrowser tools and features

Intelligent Map tools

To simplify the user view on the map, all the map tools buttons are hidden. To show them, simply move the mouse cursor to the left side of the map.

Spatial Filters

Some Opensearch Descriptions have special standard parameters, for some of them the Geobrowser has a set of widget to allows users to easily and visually change the parameter values. For example, the geo:box parameter (filter by rectangle) and the geo:geometry parameter (filter by a custom shape in wkt) have some spatial buttons inside the map tools. From these controls, users can directly draw on the map the shape to perform the spatial query.

• Edit the search area by drawing a polygon on the map
• Edit the search area by drawing a rectangle on the map
• Edit the search area by selecting a point as AOI
• Allow to enter a WKT or upload a shapefile, a kml or a geojson to be displayed on the map as search area

Geocoding

The Geocoding control allows users to:

• find some places on the map (giving a place text);
• perform a spatial query on the data by a place found.

A place text could be a country, a city name, a street, a mountain, a river, and so on.

Tile Layers

The geobrowser can show multiple Tiled layers if there are features exposing tiled layer information on the current search result. Currently it manages WMS and Titiler services.

In order to improve the performance and the User experience, when an result of a search includes tiled layers, some of them can be active whereas others can be hidden. This behaviour happens after a certain level of zoom, moreover the actual number of the active layers is dynamic and depends on the number of tile requests necessary to show the layers on the current view on the map.

A User can interactively choose to see a hidden layer, by clicking on it on the Results Panel or directly on its footprint on the map. Footprints are indeed always visible on the map. Furthermore, a User can decide to "lock" one or more layers to study, for instance, correlations between them.

Here below, a legend shows the possible statuses for a product in the result table:

On the map, products containing active/hidden tiled layers differ as shown:

Time Slider

If the Current Opensearch Description exposes the standard temporal query parameters (time:start, time:end), and if the thematic app allows it, a Time Slider is added on the bottom of the map.

This widget is useful to visually select a time range for a time restriction on the current search. Moreover, the Time Slider contains visual representation of the data distribution over the time.

Search Terms

The Search Terms is a default standard Opensearch Parameter. The geobrowser represents this with a simple input text widget, always visible on the top left of the map. It's a "keypress" triggered input, users don't need to press a confirmation after typing, the search is automatically launched as users stop to type the text to search.

Full Screen

A simple button to switch to full screen.

Point Info

With a right-click on an empty point on the map a context menu will open to show some actions like "Center map here" (pan in the selected zone on the map), zoom in, zoom out, and a useful utils "Show coordinates". This utils will show a popup with information about the coordinates of the point selected on the map, in different formats.

Box Zoom

It's possible to directly zoom in a specific area on the map, descripted by a bounding box. By holding the SHIFT button and users can dragging a rectangle on the desiderate area on the map, once finish the interaction the map will directly zoom on box.

Swapping overlapped layers

When on the same area there are many overlapped layers it could be difficult to select a specific layer from the map. To have much control on the overlapped layers on the map there is a little interaction tool to directly put the first visible layer on the bottom. By doing SHIFT+click on the active layer, the layer will be swapped behind other overlapped layers, showing the immediately layer under the layer previously clicked one. Furthermore, if users continue to perform SHIFT click, all overlapped layers will be on the top, one by one.

Compare Layers

If two or more features exposing tile layer are selected, a new menu item is added on the features selecting dropdown menu: the Compare Layers button.

By pressing this button an interactive visual comparing tool is opened, showing only the selected layers with a Vertical Slider Bar. This tool is useful for juxtaposed layers to allow easy comparison and detection of changes.

Layers control

On the top-right of the map there's the layers control: collapsed in a button, by going over it a panel will expand, showing the list of all layers and layers groups in a scrollable panel.

There are two types of layers:

• base layers, that are mutually exclusive (only one can be visible on your map at a time),
• overlays, which are all the layer put over the base layers. Usually a base layer is a global map like streetview.

From the layers control users can switch between the base layers (defined on the thematic app configuration), and can show/hide the overlay layers. On the geobrowser there are some predefined overlay layers:

• Data Results: the layers group bound with the Current Search
• Features Basket: the layers group bound with the Features Basket
• Related Search: the layers group associated to a correlated search (if available)

Moreover, users can also set the opacity by clicking on the opacity button and set the opacity slider.

Geobrowser Clipboard

The geobrowser clipboard is a facility used to pass data between the geobrowser components, in particular from the current search status and results to the WPS services fields. The Geobrowser Clipboard consists in a set of adaptable and dynamic information stored in a temporary buffer during the user interaction. For example, if the user selects one or more features, some selected feature information (such as start time or identifier) are stored in the clipboard for a reuse of the values. Another clipboard type can be a search value, like search start date or end date.

Each clipboard element has a identifier, a value, a clipboard type (feature or search) and a data type. A value could be an array, for example, if the user selects 10 fields, the search:startDate geobrowser clipboard item stores 10 start dates.

The WPS service field has a clipboard menu, used to retrieve the clipboard values previously stored.

Drag'n drop Features

A feature (or a set of features) selected from the Results Panel can be dragged to use it as a WPS service parameter value, or to add it to the features basket. For the first operation it's necessary to have the WPS service opened with the allowed target WPS field parameter visible, simply by dropping the feature(s) on the WPS field, this field will be set with the feature identifier. This operation is available for the features basket result too: it's possible to add a feature from the features basket on a WPS field parameter. For the second operation (add to features basket), users can add selected features from the results panel to the features basket panel simply by dragging the features and dropping them into the features basket tab icon.

Enhanced raster visualization functions

All features containing geographic information are always represented on the map as geometric shape (like a rectangle, a point, a polygon and so on). Moreover, some of these "spatial features" also contain raster data, like images or tiles. For these features there are some visualization function, located on the Details Panel of the selected feature (by doing double click on a raster feature from the results panel). These function are visible as an expandible section called "Raster visualitazion functions".

For all raster features (all features containing raster data) there is always a subsection called "Filters", including some customizable graphical settings, like brightness, contrast, opacity, saturation, and so on. The changing of these filters is immediately visible, and the settings are saved for current session. Users can reset the filters to the default value and can also choose to apply the settings for a feature to all visible raster features.

An additional subsection called "WMS Styles" can be visible for raster features represented by a WMS service (this is the case for most of the processing results on the GEP). Users can switch among a set of available WMS styles pre-loaded by the operator in the user workspace. By clicking on a WMS style icon, the style is applied to the selected WMS feature and for all similar features.

For raster features represented by a Titiler tiled layers, an additional subsection called "Titiler options" is visible. This is widely described on the Titiler widget page.

WPS import/export parameters utility

When users select a WPS process to execute, they can set all parameters by filling the relative form. However, in some cases can be useful to set (or to get) all parameters in a single block structure. In this way users can prepare the wps parameters in an external application (like a text editor), or they can take the wps parameter of an existent wps Job, to create a new WPS job with the same or a portion of the same paramaters. To perform this there are 2 utilities: import and export parameters. On the WPS process description (and form) there is a "Import Parameters" button. Once clicked, a popup form with a JSON structure (auto filled with sample values to help users) in the textarea of the form. The JSON is a simple key-value pairs object, with single string value for single parameters, and array of strings values for multiple parameters. After filling the textarea, by pressing the "import button" the popup is closed and all WPS form parameters are filled by matching the parameters set in the specified JSON.

On the WPS job description under the parameter values list there is a "Export Parameters" button. Once clicked a popup is opened, showing in a text area the JSON representing all WPS parameters set for the selected job. Users can copy this JSON in the clipboard, for example to change some parameter values and re-import these parameters in a new WPS job.