The latest version of Nexus is now available for all users! Version 1.5 contains many improvements under the hood and new features in the webviewer, mostly focused on user friendliness and scalability. Here are the highlights.
Webviewer support for linked features
The webviewer now supports drilling down through ‘linked features’: features that are part of, or otherwise related to, another feature. Common situations are for example buildings with many apartments, monitoring stations with multiple sensors or constructions with many structural parts.
Data harvesting
The file size limit for harvested data sources is increased to 80 GB per individual file (before the limit was 40GB per file). Also, Nexus now supports harvesting nested zipfiles (dealing with odd situations that do really happen: zipfiles within zipfiles within zipfiles), incremental scraping (from websites or APIs that don’t disclose the total result count) and approximate geometry joining (combining datasources based on approximately matching geometries). Due to 30+ smaller code optimizations and further parallel code execution in the data transformation pipeline, the average data synchronization speed is about 350% faster than before. This is especially useful for super large data sources and high-frequency syncs. Finally, data backfills (loading historical data within a Nexus World) are now simplified and easier to execute.
Revised role and permission system
Next to the existing ‘Client’ and ‘Data Expert’ roles in Nexus, there are now two additional external roles supported: ‘Data Supplier’ (for people outside of your organization periodically providing proprietary data) and ‘Data Consumer’ (typically data engineers, data scientists and engineers doing lightweight data consumption). This more fine-grained role system allows users to access all application parts they need, without an overwhelming amount of complexity or unnecessary priviliges.
Support for location photos
The webviewer can now display location photos. Each location may be linked to an arbitrary number of photos, which are then automatically displayed in the webviewer when selecting the location. Photos are also synchronized with the Timeline, meaning that the most recent photo prior to the chosen time will be displayed. This also allows users to animate timelapses for situations where for example a camera in the field takes one photo every day.
Reducer = Postprocessor
The Reducer has now been renamed to Postprocessor, as this seemed a more fitting name after all. It also gained several new capabilities, such as timeseries resampling. The Postprocessor is able to stack rasters on-the-fly, perform simple vector data and timeseries transformations (such as unit conversion) and extract zonal statistics from sets of rasters. In addition to polygon geometries, the zonal statistics routine now also accepts point geometries.