How to Integrate OpenStreetMap Nominatim Search into a Webpage or OpenLayers Map

Here' a concise example on how to integrate Nominatim search into a webpage:
http://jsfiddle.net/gimoya/yp8hmog7

And here's a live Openlayers example:
http://gimoya.bplaced.net/Openlayers/Bergfex/bergfex.html

QspatiaLite Quicktip: Convert MULTILINESTRING to LINESTRING

One often encounters the problem, that after digitizing or running processing algorithms, the output geometry is MULTILINESTRING, but we rather wished to have the geometrytype LINESTRING. Until know I used a quite cumbersome, multistep workflow for conversion between these geometry-types - however, as we will see, all of this becomes ridicously easy with spatial SQL:

select 
   replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(astext(Collect(t.geometry)), 'MULTILINESTRING((','§'), '))', '%'), '(', ''), ')', ''), '§', 'LINESTRING('), '%', ')'
) as geom
from (
    select MultiLinestringFromText('MULTILINESTRING((-1 -1, 0 0), (1 1, 4 4))') as geometry
) as t

resulting in:

LINESTRING(-1 -1, 0 0, 1 1, 4 4)

However, if your orginal line was something like MULTILINESTRING((-1 -1, 0 0), (0 0, 4 4))
you'd end up with:

LINESTRING(-1 -1, 0 0, 0 0, 4 4)

which contains double vertices, which we certainly don't want!

So be aware, that the ordering / direction of the linestring will be as in the segments of the original layer! And as we saw, gaps between subsequent end-/startnodes will be closed in the new geometry!! It is adviseable to doublecheck before / after conversion!

If you deal with a multilinestring (or a combination of any type of linesstrings) which share end/startnodes nodes things are even easieruse this SQL:

SELECT AsText(Linemerge(MultiLinestringFromText('MULTILINESTRING((-1 -1, 0 0), (0 0, 4 4))')))

resulting in:

LINESTRING(-1 -1, 0 0, 4 4)

QspatiaLite Use Case: Query for Species Richness within Search-Radius

Following up my previous blogpost on using SpatiaLite for the calculation of diversity metrics from spatial data, I'll add this SQL-query which counts unique species-names from the intersection of species polygons and a circle-buffer around centroids of an input grid. The species number within the bufferarea are joined to a newly created grid. I use a subquery which grabs only those cells from the rectangular input grid, for which the condition that the buffer-area around the grid-cell's centroid covers the species unioned polygons at least to 80%.

Example data is HERE. You can use the shipped qml-stylefile for the newly generated grid. It labels three grid-cells with the species counts for illustration.

Import grid- and Sp_distr-layers with QspatiaLite Plugin

Run query and choose option "Create spatial table and load in QGIS", mind to set "geom" as geometry column

select 
    g1.PKUID as gID,
    count (distinct s.species) as sp_num_inbu, 
    g1.Geometry AS geom
from (
 select g.*
 from(select Gunion(geometry) as geom
           from Sp_distr) as u, grid as g
 where area(intersection(buffer(centroid(g.geometry), 500), u.geom)) > pow(500, 2)*pi()*0.8
) as g1 join Sp_distr as s on intersects(buffer(centroid( g1.Geometry), 500), s.Geometry)
group by gID