A gentle introduction to actinia: geoprocessing in the cloud
2021-09-27, 09:00–13:00, Chavela Vargas

Actinia (https://actinia.mundialis.de/) is an open source REST API for scalable, distributed, high performance processing of geographical data that mainly uses GRASS GIS for computational tasks. Core functionality includes the processing of satellite imagery (both single scenes and time series), as well as the processing of raster and vector data, even from external sources. The existing big Earth observation open data pools (Landsat, Sentinel, etc.) are growing day by day along with a plethora of other sources. Actinia is designed to follow the paradigm of bringing algorithms to the data, saving users from locally downloading and processing huge amounts of data. Actinia is an OSGeo Community Project since 2019. It can be deployed with docker-swarm on a workstation, and also in OpenShift and kubernetes.

In this workshop we will give a short introduction to REST API concepts and some cloud processing background. This is followed by an introduction to actinia processing along with hands-on to get more familiar with the topic by means of exercises (from terrain analysis to QGIS visualization; from aerial image to classification with vector export; controlling actinia from a GRASS GIS session). This workshop is geared towards those with basic experience in geospatial analysis. And we are looking forward to enlarge the actinia community!

Don't forget to register before we run out of tickets!

References:

Authors and Affiliations –

Neteler, Markus (1), Tawalika, Carmen (1), mundialis GmbH & Co. KG, Bonn, Germany (https://www.mundialis.de/)

 Level –

1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed.

 Requirements for the Attendees –

actinia workshop: required software for the hands-on-part

  1. RESTman: a browser extension (works in Google Chrome / Chromium and Opera):
  1. JSON Formatter: browser for the readability of JSON (works in Google Chrome / Chromium and Opera; in Firefox included):
  1. curl and jq: command line tools

Linux users may install "cURL" (to make REST calls) and "jq" (to make json more readable) :

# Debian / Ubuntu:
apt-get install curl
apt-get install jq

# Fedora / Centos
dnf install curl
dnf install jq

Advanced Windows users can also install cURL, via different installers:

OSGeo4W for example,
but the best is MSYS2 which also offers jq ( pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-jq )
or the new-ish Linux Subsystem in Windows 10
  1. GRASS GIS and QGIS

In this workshop, you will be using GRASS GIS (and some QGIS for visualization as well), so if you plan to try the exercises, you need to install it:

  1. Three additional Python packages (python3-click, python3-requests, python3-simplejson):

On Linux :

pip3 install click requests simplejson

On Windows :

Via installer: OSGeo4W > Advanced installation> Search window:
    python3-click, python3-requests, python3-simplejson
Markus Neteler

Markus Neteler is co-founder of mundialis in Bonn (https://www.mundialis.de/). His main interests are Earth observation, geospatial analysis of massive amounts of data and development of free and open GIS, especially GRASS GIS.
Carmen Tawalika