GET, fourth member of the PublicaMundi Consortium will participate at the INSPIRE Geospatial World Forum showcasing PublicaMundi technologies to the INSPIRE community.
INSPIRE Geospatial World Forum will take from the 25th to the 29th of May in Lisbon. This year’s conference has a theme on CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP.
“Policies, technologies and applications are the three key factors affecting growth of geospatial industry. Formulation of policies and its associated implementation requires strong engagement & propagation of innovations and practices. Public private partnership is one instrumental driver not only in bridging technological gaps, but in integrating stakeholders for maximum impact. The theme CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP aims to address the need for greater coordination among policy-makers, technology providers and users to benefit the industry, and to highlight geospatial workflows as an enabler for successful PPPs by facilitating more informed decision making among the stakeholders”.
GET will be there representing the PublicaMundi team. Firstly, under the thematic session Policy and Technology / Open Data (Thursday, 28 May 2015, 0900-1230 hrs), there will be a presentation with the title PublicaMundi, an FP7 Project Aiming to Make Open Geospatial Data Easier to Publish, View, and Reuse. Moreover, GET will have a stand (D15) at the exhibition area of the conference where you will find information material regarding PublicaMundi as well as members of PublicaMundi team who will be available to inform you for the goals, the results, the progress and the impact of the PublicaMundi project.
PublicaMundi at the INSPIRE Geospatial World Forum
pycsw now a full OSGeo project!
The PublicaMundi consortium is proud to announce that pycsw has graduated from OSGeo incubation and is now a full-fledged OSGeo project!
It brings us great pleasure to share this news since pycsw is an integral part of PublicaMundi, being extended and adapted to support scalable geospatial data publishing and discovery. Also, our own Scientific Coordinator, Angelos Tzotsos, a long time member of the pycsw Project Steering Committee (PSC), has been appointed as the pycsw project officer.
pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw implements clause 10 (HTTP protocol binding – Catalogue Services for the Web, CSW) of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification, version 2.0.2. Started in 2010 (more formally announced in 2011), pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).
pycsw powers numerous high profile activities such as US data.gov/geoplatform.gov, Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), US National Geothermal Data System (NGDS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the WMO World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC).
Graduating OSGeo incubation includes fulfilling requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance, and general good project operation. Graduation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users and the community at large an added confidence in the viability and safety of the project.
The project steering committee says, “The pycsw team is thrilled to be recognized as a full OSGeo project. Being part of OSGeo is important for us since OSGeo supports the collaborative development of open source geospatial software. There have been strong ties between the two communities with pycsw developers being involved as charter members, represented in local OSGeo chapters and helping with various FOSS4G activities. We are very happy to be included as part of OSGeo and a member of such an esteemed group of projects.”
Jeff McKenna, mentor of the incubation process says: “It has been a pleasure to work with the pycsw team throughout this process. pycsw complements the OSGeo stack with a lightweight method to share and discover geospatial data. I want to thank the pycsw team for their continued passion for FOSS4G.“
OpenLayers and Leaflet wrapped in the PublicaMundi mapping API
Some may prefer Leaflet for design, plugins or lightweight. Some others may rather use OpenLayers for specific features or simple historical reasons. No matter the preferences, they are the best two open source javascript libraries for webmapping nowadays, and they are both used inside the PublicaMundi platform.
After investigating both APIs for some time, we thought that they are not so different for creating simple web maps, like the one used for previewing data sources inside an open geospatial data catalogue, with only few layers, basic navigation and simple controls. For such purpose, we found out that switching from one library to the other (and so playing with both javascript APIs all the time) was kind of a waste of time. We then started to think about how to wrap both, and how to forget about API differences, so we can focus on the map content and styles rather than on coding concerns.
Such an idea was recently implemented in the PublicaMundi Mapping API, and we’d like to show you a simple example here. The latter basically demonstrates how one can create an Openlayers map or a Leaflet map using the exact same javascript source code.
Using publicamundi.js, we would first setup the map and declare its options using a rather common syntax:
// Map initialization options
var options = {
target: 'map',
center: [2548716, 4743375],
zoom: 6,
minZoom: 2,
maxZoom: 18,
layers: [
{
title: 'Open Street Maps',
type: PublicaMundi.LayerType.TILE,
url: 'http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png'
}
]
};
We can then initialize the map with the provided options in a quiet straightforward way, as follow :
var map;
PublicaMundi.ready(function () {
//Initialize map with provided options
map = PublicaMundi.map(options);
});
In our example, we then add multiple layers to the PublicaMundi map from WMS, WFS and KLM data sources. Note that the WMS and WFS layers parameters point to some PublicaMundi unique IDs which are referring to data sources referenced by CKAN and published by GeoServer.
// WMS Railway Layer
railway = map.createLayer({
title: 'Railway Network',
name: 'railway',
type: PublicaMundi.LayerType.WMS,
url: 'http://labs.geodata.gov.gr/geoserver/wms',
params: { 'layers' : 'publicamundi:c0b70f0a-515d-4a0a-a894-abc412d5239e',
}
});
// WFS Blue flag beaches Layer (initially hidden)
beaches = map.createLayer({
title: 'Blue Flag Beaches',
name: 'beaches',
type: PublicaMundi.LayerType.WFS,
click: onFeatureClick,
visible: false,
url: 'http://labs.geodata.gov.gr/geoserver/wfs',
params: {'layers' : 'publicamundi:ad815665-ec88-4e81-a27a-8d72cffa7dd2' }
});
// KML Ancient theaters Layer
theaters = map.createLayer({
title: 'Ancient Theaters',
name: 'theaters',
type: PublicaMundi.LayerType.KML,
click: onFeatureClick,
url: 'data/kml/archaia_theatra.kml',
});
});
Basics map controls such as LayerSwitcher and Popups can finally be added using the same simple syntax. Note that the Popups are created as Overlays, rendered as Bootstrap popovers in both case.
//Initialize optional layer switcher
map.setLayerControl();
//Initialize popup handler
popup = map.addOverlay(document.getElementById('popup'));
$(document.getElementById('map')).click(function() {
$(document.getElementById('popup')).popover('destroy');
});
Once we are happy with the map, it is finally extremely easy to switch from OpenLayers to Leaflet, as we just have to call publicamundi.js with the desired library as the data-library attribute on the script tag.
This example shows basic functionalities but additional features and more advanced controls will soon be added to the PublicaMundi Mapping API. View example and check out PublicaMundi to learn more.
rasdaman technology developed at Jacobs University wins at international Copernicus Masters
The rasdaman Big Data technology, developed under the lead of Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science, has won the Big Data Challenge at this year’s prestigious Copernicus Masters competition. October 31, 2014
At the 2014 edition, the first to be held worldwide, the international Earth observation community awarded prizes worth a total of EUR 300,000 in nine categories during a festive ceremony held at the Berlin headquarters of Deutsche Telekom.
The application ideas submitted to the Copernicus Masters 2014 offer a glimpse into the next generation of Earth observations services in a wide array of business and societal sectors, including health, infrastructure, disaster management, agriculture and forestry, and environmental protection.
The rasdaman technology, which enables the storage and processing of multi-dimensional arrays (“raster data”) of unlimited size in a conventional database, was one of 170 submissions from 43 countries.
Prof. Baumann comments: “It is a great honor for our rasdaman technology to be recognized on such global scale”. Rasdaman is already in use by international satellite and climate data centers on hundreds of Terabytes, where it offers analyses of snow and ice cover, atmospheric and oceanography data, geophysical information, as well as satellite data about Mars.”
“This scalable array engine enables fast and user-friendly big data analysis that is optimised for geo-information from satellites and other sources”, says Dr Jurry de la Mar, Account Director Global Accounts & International Business at T-Systems International GmbH. “Among other industries, it is designed for oil and gas and insurance. While the engine significantly reduces the volume of data transferred and processed in complex queries, such queries can also easily be managed thanks to their basis on international standards.”
In his opening speech at the competition’s awards ceremony, ESA’s Earth Observation director Prof. Dr. Volker Liebig said: “The Copernicus Masters is an outstanding platform for promoting user uptake and raising awareness of the benefits of the Copernicus data and information,” declared. “I am pleased about the high quality exhibited by this year’s ideas which reflect the potential Earth observation data and global environmental information present in countless new areas of application.”
This year’s Copernicus Masters awards ceremony was accompanied by the Satellite Masters Conference for the first time, which gave the winners the chance to present their ideas to the global Earth observation and navigation industry and share innovations in aerospace technologies and services.
For the complete winner description see: Copernicus Masters 2014 Winners
More info on the conference: www.satellite-masters-conference.eu
More info on the rasdaman technology: www.rasdaman.org