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Building a Geoportal with Open Source Software
posted by Satri
on Tuesday January 15, @12:41AM
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from the soon-your-10-years-old-kid-will-do-this-in-an-instant dept.
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from the soon-your-10-years-old-kid-will-do-this-in-an-instant dept.
Late last December the Fuzzy Tolerance blog ran a nice demonstration of building a geoportal with open source software such as OpenLayers, TileCache, GeoServer, PostGIS, jQuery, REST and AJAX. Here's the resulting geospatial portal. From the blog: "From a developer’s perspective, the biggest advantages I’ve found with OpenLayers-Tilecache-jQuery-REST is speed and simplicity. The beta site went from an empty text file to release in only a few weeks of actual development time nestled in between other projects, with a lot of that taken up by a jQuery/OpenLayers/GeoServer/SLD learning curve, design, web service work, software setup, etc. It is also marvelously simple, being nothing more than Javascript and HTML. From an end-user perspective, you get a much more responsive application, a nicer map interface than I usually give people via OpenLayers, and everything is free and open source." I copied below some of the previous Slashgeo stories regarding the software used in the demonstration.
Related Stories
Technology: REST and GIS Explained 5 comments
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Anonymous Voxel writes "From rajsingh.org blog: REST has been a hot topic this year in the geo world. There’s a discussion group, a geographic data server, many blog posts, and email discussions. I’ve been mulling over what this means to OGC over the last couple months, reading RESTful Web Services, and discussing with the various advocates around the community. After all this, I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t think there’s any one clear explanation (despite some nice pieces of the puzzle here and here) available, and there has certainly been little effort to analyze the REST architecture in relation to geographic information systems theory, so that’s what I’ll try to do now." See related stories below.
OpenLayers 2.5 Released
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The official OpenLayers blog informs us OpenLayers 2.5 has been released. From the blog: "As of this final release, the OpenLayers 2.5 release closes 190 outstanding tickets, more than any other OpenLayers release to date! [...] Now on to new features! SLD, client side reprojection, improved documentation and examples, tile transitions… so many neat things that 2.6 will hopefully bring." See this previous post on what's new in OpenLayers 2.5. The Earth is Square adds a post on OpenLayers working on the iPod Touch. See related stories below, OpenLayers has been covered regularly.
GeoServer 1.5.4 Released
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st_0x0ef writes "From GeoServer Blog: The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the availability of the latest stable release, 1.5.4.
This bugfix release provides a bunch of KML and templates related fixes, support for Arabic labeling, propper Google projection
support, validating GML 2.1.2.1 schemas, and a lot more. Also to note, this is the release that finally is able to be deployed on Oracle Application Server. Full changelog is located here. This release is based off the brand new GeoTools 2.3.5 stable release."
support, validating GML 2.1.2.1 schemas, and a lot more. Also to note, this is the release that finally is able to be deployed on Oracle Application Server. Full changelog is located here. This release is based off the brand new GeoTools 2.3.5 stable release."
Technology: MapServer Versus GeoServer
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Fernando Quadro writes "Who is initiating in the development of space solutions is very common the following questioning: Which server of maps is best? MapServer or GeoServer? Looking for to answer this question, I wrote an article showing some of the differences between MapServer and GeoServer." Fernando's points are interesting, I invite readers to see the previous story on choosing between MapServer and MapGuide Open Source and read the informative comments. I also copied a few related stories below.
OpenLayers Now Fully an OSGeo Project
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The OSGeo mailing list tells us the OpenLayers project graduated from the OSGeo incubation process: "Graduating incubation includes requirements for open community operation,
a responsible project governance model, code provenance and license
verification and general good project operation. Graduating incubation
is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users of
the project added confidence in the viability and safety of the project." Here's the OpenLayers website, see also related stories below.
PostGIS 1.3.2 Released
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The PostGIS/Refractions web site announces: "The 1.3.2 release of PostGIS is now available". This release includes bug fixes and some minor feature enhancements, such as improvements in the TIGER geocoder, fix for better OS/X support, fix to WKB parser to do simple validity checks, etc.
Technology: OpenLayers as Data Converter, GDAL 1.5 and URLs, and Shapefile to html
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Here's a few recent geoblog entries that I found interesting on the topic of tools to share information. First is the ability to use OpenLayers as a data converter: " OpenLayers Data Conversion is a new service that allows easy conversion from any of the formats that OpenLayers supports to any of the formats that OpenLayers supports. Simply paste your data, choose your format, and hit convert." Next is the capacity of GDAL 1.5 to import spatial references from URLs using, as an example, the SpatialReference.org website. And finally, PerryGeo demonstrate a quick way to publish a point shapefile to html, using a single command.
Technology: TileCache 2.0 Released
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The Technical Ramblings blog informs us TileCache 2.0 has been released. From the announcement: "* ArcXML Layer:
The ArcXML layer adds support for speaking ArcXML style requests
directly to a server. This layer type is experimental, and was
designed and tested using the MassGIS ArcIMS server.
* MGMaps Service:
The MGMaps service accepts requests in the format used by the MGMaps
client, a mobile map browsing client.
* WMTS Service:
The WMTS service is a (tile only) implementation of the current
WMTS discussion paper release by OGC." Spatially Adjusted discuss TileCache's ArcIMS support. See also our introduction of TileCache 10 months ago.
Technology: zigGIS 2.0 Announced
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xanadont writes "zigGIS brings view and edit capabilities of PostGIS to ArcMap. Read the announcement here." Update: 01/18 19:32 GMT by S : A little more from the announcement: "For over two years zigGIS has enabled ArcView to view and analyze PostGIS layers. New to version 2.0 is the ability to edit PostGIS data as well as support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008. [...] Such improvements include ArcGIS 9.2 updates, proper handling of renderers, and support for on-the-fly reconciliation of spatial references. Lastly, to be introduced with zigGIS 2.0, is editing of PostGIS data from within ArcMap. In short, zigGIS exposes PostGIS to the full capability of ArcMap. [...] Personal and educational licenses are free. The source code will remain open."
Technology: GeoServer 1.6.0 Released
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cholmes writes "The GeoServer team is excited to announce that GeoServer 1.6.0 has been released. There are a host of advances from 1.5.x, and many GeoServer users have been testing the release candidates and giving us great feedback, so this final release should be very stable. Advances from 1.5.x include greatly increased performance for rendering maps, 'versioning' of feature data, WFS 1.1, a new security sub system, better google maps and earth integration, a WFS datatstore for Cascading WFS and Component WMS, and a number of other bug fixes and improvements." See also related stories below.
Technology: Update on ESA-FAO's GEOPortal
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Introduced last February, the EOPortal runs an article named the ESA-FAO GEOportal – Operational Gateway to GEOSS. From the article's introduction: "The GEOportal is one of the three candidates developed in response to a set of requirements from the GEO Secretariat aiming at the implementation of a GEO Web Portal serving the GEO User Community.
As part of the Initial Operational Capability of GEOSS, the GEOportal constitutes a main access point to worldwide information on Earth Observation capabilities and services including the ones proposed and implemented in the framework of GEO activities. The GEOportal includes a number of common functions and solutions to search and discover services and provides news and other relevant information to the GEOSS user community. The Community concept is extended to a global community and across all GEOSS users providing an entry point to the resources no matter where the user is located and no matter the nature of usage within the GEOSS areas of application." Some related stories copied below.
Virtual Earth and StreetView Widgets in OpenLayers 1 comment
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I found no major news on the OpenLayers front since the 2.6 release last April, but these two Fuzzy Tolerance blog entries, published earlier this summer, explain how to include Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google StreetView widgets within OpenLayers.
From the first entry: "With OpenLayers you can dump the standard VE or Google Maps tiles in your application, but the VE obliques are a bird of a different feather. Hence the need for a little widget rather than adding a VE layer to OpenLayers.
I had seen the Google Maps and Virtual Earth Side by Side stuff before, but I couldn’t find a good tutorial on doing it with OpenLayers. I also only wanted a one way handshake - navigating on OpenLayers would navigate on VE, but you can pan/zoom VE without effecting OpenLayers.
As it turns out, it so easy to do it’s almost silly. You can see the end result here (the VE map is behind the second “+” on the right)."
GeoServer 1.7.0 Released
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GeoServer 1.7.0 has been released.
From the GeoServer blog: "Security in 1.7 has been improved by allowing access control at the layer/feature type level, in addition to the service level. This allows users to secure data in a much more granular way. There has also been much work done to better performance for GeoServer 1.7. The short of which is faster rendering with WMS, as well as faster data access with Shapefile, PostGIS, and ArcSDE. For those interested in the specifics check out the presentation given by Andrea Aime at FOSS4G this year in South Africa. Also of note for this release is a retrofit of the built in OpenLayers map preview. The preview interface now allows for filtering and controlling various rendering aspects such as anti-aliasing and image format.
The folks from GeoSolutions have also been quite busy as usual and have once again made some great improvements on the raster/coverage side of things. GeoServer now supports additional raster formats such as ECW, MrSID, and JPEG 2000."
Read the rest on the blog entry directly.
See also related stories.
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