Howard Butler

Bio: Howard Butler operates a three-person geospatial software engineering consultancy in Iowa City, Iowa called Hobu, Inc. It specializes in open source geospatial software, and it participates in many well-known projects such as GDAL, MapServer, proj.4, libgeotiff, and pgpointcloud. Additionally, its PDAL, Entwine, and Greyhound projects provide open source capability in the LiDAR and point cloud domains.

Point Clouds as Infrastructure with Greyhound, Entwine, and PDAL

While organized web delivery of vector and raster GIS data are assumed features which most software provide, the same thing for point cloud data has been thus far unsatisfactory. In this talk, we will discuss new open source capabilities that allow you to process and serve massive point cloud collections over the web using commodity cloud computing infrastructure. We will demonstrate how to use Greyhound to feed point cloud data to web applications and custom clients, we will show how to organize massive point cloud collections using Entwine, and we will illustrate processing techniques PDAL provides to make point cloud data easier to process and manage.

lidar point-cloud services PDAL