{"id":74,"date":"2009-12-18T00:43:52","date_gmt":"2009-12-17T23:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/?p=74"},"modified":"2009-12-18T00:56:31","modified_gmt":"2009-12-17T23:56:31","slug":"using-the-british-geological-survey-wms-service-with-mapyx-quo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/using-the-british-geological-survey-wms-service-with-mapyx-quo\/","title":{"rendered":"Using the British Geological Survey WMS Service with Mapyx Quo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Major kudos to BGS for making their 1:50,000 geological maps available online <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bgs.ac.uk\/data\/services\/wms.html\">including via a WMS Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been struggling with scanning BGS maps and importing them into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mapyx.com\/quo\/\">Mapyx Quo<\/a> for a while. Its an arduous process and the scanned maps contain the roads, placenames etc as well as the OS topographic map I have in Quo so its not as pleasing to use as it could be.<\/p>\n<p>I was thus motivated to write a little Windows .Net programme to access the BGS WMS and automate the import into Quo. The process is not completely automated (partially because Quo uses a non-XML file for storing the user-loaded maps) but is still quite simple.<\/p>\n<p>The programme is not as polished as it could be &#8211; its good enough for me &#8211; and has only been written with the BGS service in mind (although it could well work with other services).<\/p>\n<p>I am making the Windows installer (I use XP still) available (no warranty blah blah) but please do not distribute it (refer people to this web address instead): <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-content\/2009\/12\/setupwms2quo.msi\">download installer<\/a> (about 350k)<\/p>\n<p>Usage is simple:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In Quo set the coordinates to WGS 84 decimal degrees<\/li>\n<li>Right-click and copy the location of interest to the clipboard<\/li>\n<li>Paste it into WMS2Quo (my programme)<\/li>\n<li>Choose which layers you want. e.g Bedrock and Superficial (bedrock is the default)<\/li>\n<li>Click &#8220;Fetch&#8221;. This uses the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geonames.org\/\">geonames <\/a>service to find the name of a nearby location. This will be used in the name of saved files. You can edit\/change this in a text-box.<\/li>\n<li>(the segment of the geological map should appear)<\/li>\n<li>Save the map and a Quo calibration file<\/li>\n<li>In Quo &#8220;Explorer&#8221;, select the &#8220;Loaded Maps&#8221; tab and use the document-with-green arrow icon to import the map image. This will cause the image AND saved calibration file to be read. I usually now change the transparency to 80%. You should see the geological map in Quo.<\/li>\n<li>You can &#8220;query&#8221; the map one layer at a time to find the kind of rock (etc) at a given point by clicking the mouse on the image. This information is remembered and can be saved out as a GPX file containing &#8220;waypoints&#8221; for each location. Import this into Quo and set it to show the waypoint &#8220;note&#8221; and you will get geological labels showing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is a &#8220;settings&#8221; button which can be used to alter the save location, image size etc. Take care and NB that the BGS WMS server will sometimes return a blank image if your image size\/map size combination are out of its range. A known bug also means you need to restart the programme if you change the save location. <em>I recommend you change the save location<\/em> as the first thing you do. Also, watch out for your firewall blocking web access; if you get an error on &#8220;Fetch&#8221; this is the first place to investigate.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to acknowledge Paul Dixon (paul@elphin.com) as I adapted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nearby.org.uk\/tests\/GeoTools2.html\">code of his<\/a> (GPL Open Source) for the coordinate transformations that are used. This is JavaScript whereas I used C#.Net. I&#8217;ve uploaded this for use, adaption or what you will under the same licence: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-content\/2009\/12\/gpscoords.dll\">DLL<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-content\/2009\/12\/gpscoords.cs\">Source code<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you would like the C# source code for the &#8220;WMS2Quo&#8221; app please contact me. Similarly, I&#8217;d like to hear of any bugs (you know what I mean by &#8220;like&#8221;).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Major kudos to BGS for making their 1:50,000 geological maps available online including via a WMS Service. I&#8217;ve been struggling&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geology-and-mines","category-gnss","post-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hilltop-cottage.info\/blogs\/adam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}