I work for a purpose-driven organization, the social purpose of the organization aligns with my own social purposes, and the work is challenging and sophisticated.
Open source fits the profile of an intrinsically motivating pursuit (for folks of the right technical bent) exceedingly well. A great talk and visual presentation.
Since our first release of the OpenGeo Suite in January, our team has been working consistently to improve and refine the software. Much of this was based on feedback from our users, leading us to create a Community Forum where users can share their ideas and solutions. We have been periodically releasing a free Community Edition of the OpenGeo Suite, both as a testing environment for new features, and as a way for users to get the very latest in our technology.
Today, we release version 2.0 of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition. Here are just some of the many new features that comprise this software:
And of course, all components are updated to the most recent stable version: PostGIS 1.5.1, GeoServer 2.0.2, GeoWebCache 1.2.2, and GeoExt 0.7.
With the OpenGeo Suite, you have all you need at your disposal to publish your data and maps on the web, as well as create virtually any web-based geospatial application for your organization. We hope that the new version 2.0 of the OpenGeo Suite will make your work even easier.
Register now to get your copy of the OpenGeo Suite 2.0. And please let us know what you think.
Not as exciting as our first kiss, but still pretty exciting: our first OpenGeo re-seller is Spatialytics in Quebec. That means that users of the OpenGeo Suite in Quebec will be able to receive front-line support from local staff who (importantly) speak French (with the right accent)!
We expect resellers to form the backbone of the ecosystem around the OpenGeo Suite. In a world with 40 time zones and hundreds of languages there is no way one organization can be everywhere. We want to focus as much of our internal effort as possible on improving the Suite, the core Suite projects, and the learning materials that go with them. Partners will be the bridge between our core team and customers around the world.
Welcome Spatialytics, to the OpenGeo family!
(Want to explore becoming a re-seller? Drop us a line, inquiry at opengeo dot org.)
Once upon a time, a group of smart people got together to define a common standards base for geographic map services, a “Web Map Service” specification, if you will.
They wanted their map services to be interoperable, but different maps can be rendered using different projections, and in order to overlay one map onto another, they needed to know (and advertise) the projections of both.
There was an existing standard for representing map projections, called “well-known text” (which is also, confusingly, the name that describes a standard for representing geometries) but it was quite verbose. Who, after all, could remember this:
GEOGCS["WGS 84",
DATUM["WGS_1984",
SPHEROID["WGS 84",6378137,298.257223563,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","7030"]],
AUTHORITY["EPSG","6326"]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],
UNIT["degree",0.01745329251994328,
AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],
AUTHORITY["EPSG","4326"]]
More importantly, how would this fit cleanly into a URL?
Fortunately, there already existed a large database of commonly used map projections: the EPSG database. This provided a single numeric ID for each common map projection. So it was decided that all map services must advertise their projection using a unique number defined by an authority, and set EPSG as the first authority. And so ESPG:4326 came into the world (WGS84 geographic coordinates) along with ESPG:26910 (NAD83 UTM Zone 10 North), and many others.
But, unlike me, most GIS practitioners haven’t memorized the EPSG database. So they frequently ask questions like “what is the EPSG number for Oregon State-Plane South?” and “how do I find the EPSG number for this shapefile?” One could search spatialreference.org, a site for understanding spatial reference systems. My own answer used to be a fairly unhelpful set of directions for doing a text search of the PostGIS SPATIAL_REF_SYS table:
SELECT srid, srtext FROM spatial_ref_sys WHERE srtext ILIKE '%oregon%';
But today, I can provide a much simpler answer: Use prj2epsg.org. With prj2epsg.org, you can paste in full well-known text descriptions, you can type in shorter keyword searches, and you can even read a .prj file directly.
This free public service is provided by OpenGeo and our cloud services provider SkyGone. The code is naturally all open source and the service is built on top of the same GeoTools library that is at the heart of our OpenGeo Suite.
And now we’re all hopefully one step closer to living happily ever after.
We are excited to announce the OpenGeo Suite 1.9.1 Community Edition, the latest maintenance release of our leading geospatial platform.
The 1.9.1 Edition adds stability to our previous community release, featuring:
The integrated installer is now available for Linux (32 bit only), as well as Mac OS X (v10.5 or later) and Windows XP/Vista/7. The Linux installer does not yet include PostGIS.
The OpenGeo Suite Community Editions are previews of future enterprise packages. Please download, contribute issues, and participate in driving the Suite’s future on our OpenGeo Suite Community Forum. And stay tuned for the Enterprise 2.0 release of the OpenGeo Suite this month.
It’s an Ocean Biogeographic Information System, that’s what it is! It’s also our newest customer for the OpenGeo Suite.
We visited the OBIS team at Rutgers University last year and found they were already planning a system using the components of the Suite: PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers and others. As they move through implementation into production, their Suite contract will provide support for all the components. OBIS has decided to get their support publicly via our web community page (customers have the option of private lists too) so you can see the questions they are asking if you go have a look.