4DGeo

4DGeo is an open-source, modular, super lightweight, web-based interactive dashboard application for visualizing your geodata time series captured with a continuous and even ongoing 3D environmental monitoring station (e.g. LiDAR, 3D photogrammetry, smartphone).

About

4DGeo enables users to create and share their own dashboard layout to visualise their custom 4D geodata using various available visualization and user-input modules. The project is designed to be flexible and extendable, making it easy to adapt for different use cases such as landslide detection, insect monitoring, and other environmental observations. It can be hosted on a simple server or with Github Pages. The structured input data is read from a user-defined web source and is updated automatically at regular intervals, as specified in the refresh timer. This enables the 4DGeo dashboard to work particularly well with continuously updated data, such as that from monitoring systems that repeatedly scan an area of interest in addition to static or archive data that does not need constant refreshing.

Get started in 2 minutes: Visualise your point clouds

To show how easy it is to visualise your data with a 4DGeo dashboard, we've prepared a short Python Notebook tutorial. It demonstrates how a series of point clouds can be projected into images and displayed within the dashboard.

The process involves just two simple steps:

Prepare your data: Convert your list of images into the 4DGeo data model. This is what's done in the above mentioned Python Notebook.
Configure your dashboard: Either load a predefined layout or create your own with our dashboard creation page

To run this Notebook yourself, just open a command line in your target directory and follow the conda environment installation steps

Key Features

Controlled visualization of your results, for example from various 3D and 4D change analysis methods
Time-series support
Customizable and shareable dashboards
React-based modular UI
Automatic data refreshs
Easy integration with your data using a self-designed data model

Development & Installation

To run 4DGeo locally, follow these steps:

Clone the repository:

    git clone https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/4DGeo.git
    cd 4DGeo

Install dependencies (Check if Node.js is installed on your computer. If not, download it from this link):
```
    npm install
```
Start the development server:
```
    npm start
```
Open your browser and navigate to:
```
    http://localhost:3000/4DGeo
```

Hosting Options

To host this application on your own, there are 2 main options:

We recommend to fork this repository and copy our Github Action workflow for deploying it to Github Pages which is favorable in a production or testing environment and very easy to set up. For that you need to consider the points raised in the fork section below.
For a quick and simple locally hosted server, you can also use a static web server setup with, for example, the built-in Python library http.server and used in our examples notebooks like here.

Forking

If you want to fork this repository in order to work on it independently, it is necessary to make some adjustments to the settings and content. To assist you in navigating this process, please find below a list of key changes to consider.

For the application to run:

Update the config.json file to reflect your repository's name (e.g., replacing "4DGeo" with your preferred name). This file includes information like the path to the app icon, the app name and also the list of template, which should all be modified accordingly.
Adjust the "name" field in the package.json file.
If you also want the documentation to run on your fork, adjust site_name, repo_url, site_url and the 4DGeo (Web) navigation link in the mkdocs.yml file.

If you want to also deploy the application to your Github Pages:

Adjust the "homepage" field in the package.json file. The "homepage" is needed for the Github Pages deployment to work properly. For a better understanding of this workflow, we recommend this article.
The Github Action for deploying the Github Pages doesn't need any further adaptations. But if you have trouble starting the workflow or its not showing up in the "Actions" tab, create a new workflow in your repository and copy the content. This way the workflow will be Github will definetly recognize it as a new working workflow.

Documentation

As a starting point, the main features of this software are described in the 4DGeo manual. Additionally, to understand how you can use this app and incorporate it into your own Project, you can have a look at the Example Notebooks. The current usages and implementations are described in detail there:

Conda environment installation

For these notebooks to fully work, you need to create a conda environment with the correct dependencies installed.

Clone the GitHub repository in a local folder

git clone https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/4DGeo.git

create the Conda environment with the provided .yml file

cd 4DGeo/docs
conda env create -n 4DGeo --file 4DGeo_doc.yml

Activate the environment
```
conda activate 4DGeo
```

Contact / Bugs / Feature Requests

Have you found a bug or have specific request for a new feature? Please open a new issue in the online code repository on Github. Also for general questions please use the issue system.

Scientific requests can be directed to the 3DGeo Research Group Heidelberg and its respective members.