OpenGeo is always looking for talented people to join our team. We offer interesting technical work, competitive salaries, great benefits, and a fantastic working environment. Most importantly we challenge our employees to build the best open source and interoperable tools for spatial data on the web.

Here’s the full list, please apply and/or spread the word!

I was recently presented with a fantastic opportunity; my manager approached me and asked:

“Hey Ian, what do you think about leading a GeoNode training in the Caribbean?”

Without hesitation, or asking for details I said, “Sign me up!”  Though my manager’s smirk should have tipped me off I had no idea how challenging the assignment would be. Nor did I realize that I would find the trip rewarding in ways other than what one typically thinks when that sunny, sandy, pina colada filled, cerulean-hued region of the world is mentioned.

The training was a part of the OpenDRI initiative and took place Feb 18-23 at the St. Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad and Tobago. The event, co-sponsored by the World Bank, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and the University of West Indies, brought together 40 GIS specialists and developers from around the Caribbean to provide them with the skills needed to better use, integrate, and extend GeoNode as a component of their specific spatial data infrastructure.

I lead a developer workshop in which 13 participants learned to install and configure GeoNode, create a custom “project”, theme it, and add new functionality related to security. We also threw in an unexpected (read: bonus) section on virtual networking (we used a
VirtualBox appliance and ran into potential problems related to running a
server with a changing IP address). In addition to my inane jokes, I shared all of my bash shortcuts and Python programming tips.

In the evening, there were discussions and presentations on topics such as OpenStreetMap, OpenDataKit, and NASA’s Pilot DRM Program. I’ll miss all of the fantastic Trinidadian food (chokas, coconut bake, roti, buss-up-shut and saltfish to name a few), along with the great people I met. Unfortunately I didn’t allot enough time to enjoy much of island but will look back on my one free afternoon in Maracas Bay fondly.

My special thanks to the World Bank, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and the University of West Indies for bringing me down. If you’re interested in such a training, or just want to fly me to nice sunny places please let us know!

We had a support ticket recently about adding / enabling the GDAL and MrSID image formats to be able to be published by GeoServer. The client’s production server was Windows Server 2012 running Tomcat as a service. Below is a description of the steps taken to accomplish this.

We followed the instructions as part of our User Manual, but here I’ve added some screenshots from the specific implementation. For more information, please see the section on Enabling GDAL image formats support

Instructions for other operating systems are to be found at the above link, but are similar to this procedure. Also, this example is specific to Tomcat running as a service—instructions are slightly different when Tomcat is run as a local user process.

Out of the box

This is what things look like with a stock installation. Notice that there is no OGR format driver among the Vector Store types, and there aren’t that many Raster Store options.

Put the GDAL JAR in place

The next step is to copy the GDAL JAR to the classpath of GeoServer, which in this case was <TOMCAT_HOME>\webapps\geoserver\WEB-INF\lib. While in our case there already was a GDAL JAR there, I overwrote the existing file to ensure that I had the latest and greatest version (at the time of writing, gdal-1.9.1.jar) .

Add the GDAL libraries to Tomcat

Now we had to add the GDAL libraries to the Tomcat bin directory so that Tomcat would pick them up. This was also pretty straightforward—I copy and paste like a champion.

As with most library changes though, the application will need to be restarted before any changes will occur.

Restart Tomcat

Restarting Tomcat gets us most of the way there. OGR is now available as a Vector Store type and the Raster Store types include some but not all of the GDAL formats. These are the open format types, the ones that don’t require any additional proprietary drivers.

Add the MrSID libraries to Tomcat

The next step installs the piece needed to access proprietary rasters, in this case JP2MRSID and MrSID format. I downloaded the MrSID binaries from the link listed in the first step of the instructions and extracted it to <TOMCAT_HOME>\bin\gdalplugins.

One more restart and MrSID is available as an available datastore and can be published through GeoServer.

Have you published any interesting data using MrSID or GDAL image formats in GeoServer? We’d like to hear about it! Tell us in the comments below, or send us a note.

Today we’re sitting down with Jeff Johnson, OpenGeo developer extraordinaire and Code For America San Diego Brigade Captain. Jeff is a talented entrepreneur who has his hands in a bit of everything at OpenGeo, but is largely focused on GeoNode. Today we’ll be sitting down to discuss his recent work with Code For America.

David Dubovsky: Hey Jeff, thanks for taking the time to talk.
Jeff Johnson: I’m happy to do so.

DD: So how long have you been involved with Code For America, and how did you get involved?
JJ: Well about two years ago I was introduced to a local group called OpenSanDiego. We stood up some apps with OpenGeo tools (specifically GeoNode) to make county GIS data easier to access. I got involved because I was (and still am) dissatisfied with the applications that are stood up by our local Joint Powers Agency (SANDAG) and I thought we could do better with the data they provide.

A year later the city held an Apps Competition, and they ended up using one of the apps we setup as the data catalog of record for that competition. And then at the 2012 Code Across America event we set up a few more apps. At that point Code for America asked OpenSanDiego group to join their Brigade program and we did so happily. I was named ‘captain” of our brigade.

DD: Congratulations on the success of OpenSanDiego and being named brigade captain. Can you give us a little detail about some of the projects you’ve worked on, or are working on?
JJ: Currently we’re working on a few different projects. Including:

• eCitizens.org, a scrape, aggregate and alert system for local government documents that allows citizens to subscribe to keywords and get notified when those are mentioned in local government meetings and documents. We based its architecture on the Sunlight Foundations OpenStates and Scout projects.
• Another project we’re working on is the San Diego regional data library, which we aim to eventually federate with cities.data.gov.
• We’re also looking into helping with the City of San Diego’s Participatory Infrastructure Budgeting Program that was piloted last year and will be taken operational this year. This one is a big challenge for the city. There’s a good deal of cross cutting concerns about inclusiveness, aggregating the data, making it useful etc. I think that many of the OpenGeo tools could potentially be brought to bear on this problem.

DD: It sounds like you’re all very busy making progress on a lot of projects. Can you tell me a little bit about the event you recently hosted?
JJ: As apart of a second annual Code Across America event (held in 22 cities across the country, and coinciding with International OpenData Day) we hosted a local instance in San Diego. These events are usually hackathons (or code sprints, as most developers prefer to call them), but we ended up spending much more time building and growing relationships with our local open government and open data community.

There was representation from the San Diego Mayors office of Open Government and Civic Engagement and by staff members from the Councilmember’s office who chairs the infrastructure committee that is responsible for the CIP program. There were also attendees from our Community Planning Council and from a few different city agencies. Because of the unique attendance breakdown (non-developers outnumbered developers) we ended up having a code sprint where zero lines of code were written! To really build and deploy sustainable solutions in Local Government we need to build this support. All in all, it was not what I had planned or expected, but I think it turned out better this way.

DD: And did this event result in you speaking in front of the city council?
JJ: It was actually the aforementioned Council Infrastructure Committee chaired by Councilman Mark Kersey of the 5th district. His committee is tasked with dealing with Rebuilding and Improving San Diego’s Infrastructure.

I spoke in favor of an agenda item to create a community input policy for the cities Capital Improvement Project, a roughly $200M/year budget for making infrastructure improvements. Last year the City undertook a pilot project to solicit public input on this budget, which ended up being a seminal effort in participatory budgeting. Our CfA brigade would love to be involved in the operationalization of this policy by bringing together existing open source projects such as See Penny Work (created by Jessica Lord, Code America Fellow) and by using apps like Shareabouts (which is developed by OpenPlans, OpenGeo’s parent organization) to crowd source community input.

DD: Can you outline what you told them for us?
JJ:  One of the key things that I explained is that implementing sustainable civic technology solutions that address problems and improve citizen engagement is really a four-step process. First groups like ours must build credibility within local government, then look for champions, then find problems that we can solve and only then can you implement and deploy solutions.

There’s actually a fifth step that I did not mention, which is to make sure these solutions are sustainable. As technologists, I feel that we often focus on the third and fourth steps and neglect the others. My public comment was intended to really start working on the first and second steps such that we can make sure that we really nail it on the last one.

My primary reason for speaking was to explain what CfA is, and offer the  larger group, as well as our local brigade as a resource for Councilmember Kersey’s committee as they move forward with creating and then implementing a Community Input Policy on this CIP budget.

At OpenGeo we’re committed to helping IT professionals break out of the traditional “GIS” workflow. Our goal is not to recreate desktop GIS on the web; but to bring “spatial” into the broader IT ecosystem. One way we’re doing this are with tools like GeoScript, and by bringing processing into our platform with OGC’s Web Processing Service (WPS) specification. By combining WPS and GeoScript, a web developer can create processes that perform complex analyses using familiar scripting languages like Python or JavaScript. This enables IT professionals to build Web applications that can run spatial processes against data stored anywhere using standard web development practices.

Read more about these tools after the break. And if you’d still like to find out more about GeoScript, through the web processing with the OpenGeo Suite, or anything else ‘open’ or ‘geo’ consider attending FedGeo Day this Thursday, 2/28/2013 in Washington, DC. I’ll be speaking about these topics at 1:30pm, it would be great to see you there.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week we released the 3.02 version of the OpenGeo Suite. The primary reason for this release was to fix a small security issue in GeoExplorer. We encourage you all to upgrade to the most recent release. Over the last year there’s been a good deal of updates to GeoExplorer, you can check them out online, or download the suite. As always, OpenGeo Suite 3.0.2 is available for download free of charge with a 30-day trial of OpenGeo’s commercial support.

During the last release cycle we introduced two new support offerings—Community One-Time and Enterprise Plus— and they’ve been met with enthusiasm. For anyone who may have missed the 3.0.1 post we’d like to again let everyone know about these packages. The Community One-Time and Enterprise Plus packages have been added to meet growing demand from smaller organizations seeking support for open source geospatial software. Community One-Time offers enterprise support to Community Edition users for one incident for up to 15 business days. Enterprise Plus provides a year of enterprise support for smaller production environments with straightforward support requirements, such as those publishing data from basic geospatial formats and serving a limited number of users. These offerings have been out in the wild for about three months and are growing in popularity. If you think these, or any other package, would be a good fit for you don’t hesitate to contact us.

More information is available in the release notes and our pricing page.

Over the last few months we’ve had the pleasure of creating an HTML5 application using OpenLayers and Sencha Touch. This application is specifically designed to run on Motorola Xyboard 8.2 inch tablets running Android 3.2, but we may extend support for other tablets in the future. Our initial setup included the latest version OpenLayers and rendered points using a vector layer with a canvas renderer. However, this resulted in map display performance, and touch selection issues on Android 3.

We decided to explore additional options for touch selection. Our goal was to increase performance so that when the user hit a point icon it registered the first time, every time. To meet this goal we implemented the following:

• Using an invisible (almost transparent) stroke around the points to provide a larger hit target. This approach only slightly improved things and made it hard for the user to hit the right point when they overlapped.
• Using separate markers (DOM elements) instead of a canvas. We created a new markers renderer so we could reuse the existing vector layer configuration. Touch selection improved, but since each icon was a separate DOM element the map became unresponsive to dragging.
• Leveraging the headless renderer concept. In this approach the POI overlay is rendered by a WMS, but the vector data is also available locally and used for feature selection. Whenever a touch event is received, hit points are determined by comparing their coordinate with the touch location. Then the selected feature is rendered client side with a different symbol to mark it as selected. This greatly improved touch selection and map dragging and was ultimately was the solution selected.

We also tried several approaches to improve the map’s drag responsiveness and visual feedback:

• Using accumulated drag deltas. This approach limits how often the map updates during a drag operation. This improved responsiveness, but resulted in distracting visual feedback during dragging.
• Using 3d transforms to enable GPU support. Most mobile devices have advanced graphics processing capabilities, allowing for rich graphics in mobile gaming. By off-loading the work to the GPU we observed significant performance improvements. In a follow up project we were able to further refine this approach and add smooth animated zooming to OpenLayers.
• Keep references to image tiles for reuse. While working on a separate project we created a TileManager for smart tile queuing and caching. On mobile devices setting the source of an image is an expensive operation. For example, even if the tiles shown on the map were on previously viewed locations, dragging almost always creates a new tile. With the TileManger, tiles get cached so image sources only need to be set the first time a location is viewed. The project was delivered with an early version of the TileManager.

With the exception of headless renderer all mentioned improvements have been contributed back to the project and are now available in OpenLayers. Headless renderer was left out since it is so specific to the application, but it is available as a pull request. This application turned out to be a great opportunity to further OpenLayers mobile features, and we look forward to working on them more in the future.

OpenGeo is proud to sponsor FedGeo Day, the new conference on modern, open source geospatial tools being used in and around the federal government. Earlier this week the conference schedule was announced, it’s going to be a busy day filled with interesting case studies, panel discussions and technology showcases. For more details take a look at the full schedule, it’s all happening on February 28 in Washington, DC.

We’re looking forward to seeing case studies on how these tools are currently be used, and the discussions on where they are going in the future. We’re also excited to hear from agencies that have been making the shift to open source technology, and why they’ve chosen to do so. Be on the look out for presentations from the DNC, NOAA, NGA, The Department of State, The National Park Service and more. We’ll be listening closely during the panel discussion on how federal geodata needs to change to better serve the public, as well as the panel on challenges of, and successful strategies to, deploying open source geospatial tools in the federal space.

There will also be interactive demos that explore specific open source tools and applications, our talks include:

• Eddie Pickle will present on the OpenGeo vision and the future state of open source geospatial tools in the government.
• Alyssa Wright will be showing attendees how to take your geospatial deployments to the next level with OpenGeo’s brand new enterprise console.
• Ilya Rosenfeld will be demonstrating new server-side processing (WPS) functionality–which allows you to do more than ever with the OpenGeo Suite–and discuss how these advances are altering the landscape for ‘traditional’ GIS,

We hope you’ll join us to find out more about these new and exciting geospatial tools. To register visit fedgeoday.eventbrite.com. More details on the schedule and event specifics are at fedgeoday.com. You can follow conference news by subscribing to @fed_geo on Twitter.

OpenGeo is looking for talented people to join our team. We offer interesting technical work, competitive salaries, great benefits, and a fantastic working environment. Most importantly we challenge our employees to build the best open source and interoperable tools for spatial data on the web.

Here’s the full list, please apply and/or spread the word!

Here at OpenGeo, 2012 was an exciting year. We had major releases, components upgrades, a good deal of growth and more. While reviewing our 2012 blog posts, the sheer amount of news became abundantly clear to me. I decided to take a dive into the analytics and look for which posts you found the most interesting, which caused the greatest reaction and which were tweeted, shared, and commented on the most. With a little bit of effort, I was able to pull up the top posts of last year and compile them in the list below. Maybe you missed them the first time, or perhaps you’d like to give them another read.

1. OpenGeo Suite 3.0 Released!
   Coming in as the number one post of 2012 was the announcement of OpenGeo Suite 3.0. No surprises here as the 3.0 release brought a ton of exciting new features to the table, including server-side processing, security enhancements, and upgraded components.
2. Creating a GeoServer Split Polygon WPS Process (Part I)
   In the number two entry, Martin Davis lays out the steps on using WPS to split polygons in GeoServer.  It was a particularly compelling post at the time since WPS had just been introduced to GeoServer and was about to be added to the OpenGeo Suite. In case you were wondering, the follow up post was published one month later.
3. Visions for OpenLayers 3
   Last summer Tim Schaub, our CTO and OpenLayers PSC member, laid out a plan for OpenLayers 3. For more background information check out the follow up post Why OpenLayers 3.0?. After successfully raising funds, including a a great showing through the indiegogo campaign, the OpenLayers team has enough in their coffers to begin developing OpenLayers 3 and will be meeting in the spring of 2013 for a sprint. Our thanks to everyone supporting OpenLayers 3.
4. Adding Layers to GeoServer Using the REST API
   In this post Sam Smith, our support guru, offers detailed instructions on how using the REST API to add layers to GeoServer can save time and headaches.
5. PostGIS 2.0 Released
   It looks like many of you were excited as we were about Paul Ramsey’s announcement of the PostGIS 2.0 release.
6. PostGIS 2.0 New Features: Typmod
   In the sixth most popular post of 2012, Paul Ramsey is showed off new features that made it into PostGIS 2.0. Later he released a similar post called PostGIS 2.0 New Features: 3D/4D Indexing
7. Surface Interpolation in GeoServer
   At number seven, Martin Davis is showed off new processing features, specifically rendering transformations.
8. Distributed versioning for geospatial data
   In this post, Chris Holmes weighs in with his series of white papers exploring distributed versioning for geospatial data.
9. Thematic map creation with SLD is now much easier
   No one ever said SLD was easy to learn. With new transformation functions, and this post, we hope to ease some of your pain.
10. Five things you didn’t know about GeoExplorer
    Rounding out the list is a great introduction to GeoExplorer, the map composition tool that comes bundled with the OpenGeo Suite.

That’s the top ten in 2012. As always, we appreciate your feedback. If you enjoyed something you read on our site or our blog please feel free to leave a comment or contact us at any time. Thanks for reading! We hope you stick around for 2013.