OpenGeo

The US National Weather Service has a lot of weather to watch! They have sensors all over the continent, and in space, ranging from simple thermometers to orbiting satellites. When weather happens (and let’s be honest, weather is always happening, it’s happening on me right now) it happens fast — how does the NWS take in the whole situation at a glance and make decisions? On a map, of course.

The NWS Central Region Headquarters has built a test-bed for putting their situational information onto web maps, and the toolset they used is the OpenGeo suite of applications: PostGIS, Geoserver, OpenLayers. They also used raster-data standby GDAL for handling gridded data conversions.

A paper on their work (”Development of Web-based GIS Applications for Decision Support and Situational Awareness“) was presented by Brian Walawender at the  American Meteorological Association Annual Meeting this week.

This week, OpenGeo released version 1.0 of our OpenGeo Suite.

When we initially announced the OpenGeo Suite, it was a notion — a collection of individual software pieces we would professionally support as a whole. Now, it’s a product in the conventional sense — one download that provides all the pieces in a simple installer for Windows, Mac, or Linux:

• GeoServer — a geospatial data and map server;
• GeoWebCache — a map accelerator;
• OpenLayers/GeoExt — user interface libraries for building map applications;
• (New!) GeoExplorer — a browser-based map composer and publisher;
• (New!) Styler — a WYSIWIG editor for map styles (SLD);
• (New!) Recipe Book — code samples and documentation for building your own map applications;
• Full documentation for all components; and
• (New!) Dashboard — a unified administration panel for starting and managing the components of the OpenGeo Suite.

Up to this point, we have concentrated on clients already adept at downloading, integrating, and using the pieces of the Suite. With version 1.0, anybody can start publishing their data and building applications right out of the box.

This ease of entry aligns with the OpenGeo mission.  As an organization, we want to democratize mapping. That means offering tools available under non-discriminatory legal terms, like open source. It also means lowering barriers so that more people can use, build, and grow these tools.

Both novice and expert benefit from the seamless integration of the OpenGeo Suite.  By placing everything together in one place — software, documentation, examples, administration — the Suite offers a central resource to navigate, configure, and support the various pieces of your mapping application.

At a decision making level, we provide a corporate entity tightly bound to the software, providing support, expertise and training services to the community of users and administrators.

Version 1.0 is the first step in a long journey, but we know where we are going. Every day we ask ourselves: can we make our product easier to use? can we make it easier to learn? can we make it easier to try? We would love your feedback, so download the free 30 day trial and let us know what you think!

We’re looking forward to an exciting 2010, meeting those goals and growing our community.

We are pleased to announce the launch of GeoNode.org, the official website of the GeoNode project.

The GeoNode project is a partnership between the World Bank’s CAPRA initiative, OpenGeo, and other organizations from around the world.  Our aim is to take the principles and practices of openness which have empowered the modern web, and use them to build a spatial data infrastructure solution appropriate for large NGO’s and government agencies.

The GeoNode is both an organizational partnership and an open source software project, built on the familiar projects of our OpenGeo Stack (GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoExt, etc.) as well as Django and GeoNetwork.  After several months of incubation and prototyping, GeoNode.org is the kick off to our new focus on the GeoNode community.  Look there for the latest news on GeoNode technology, partnerships, and community resources.