GeoSolutions Enterprise Services: Open Source meets Enterprise

• Are you looking for high-end professional support to help you with the creation of a SDI based on Open Source frameworks?
• Are you thinking about an infrastructure to support the OpenData and are you wondering if a proprietary software is the best choice?
• Are you tired of spending all your budget for licenses without creating the infrastructure you need?
• Would you like to integrate a proprietary SDI with an Open Source software?

GeoSolutions can help you! 

The GeoSolutions  Enterprises Plans offer the possibility for creating an Enterprise SDI based on the best Open Source frameworks as GeoServer, GeoNetwork and MapStore.

Thanks to GeoSolutions it is easy to meet the Open Source world, forget about licenses and decide the budget for the solutions you are looking for!
Our support plans are available in different packages because we care about who has small needs and budget and about who must manage complex infrastructures and needs high specialized support.

Don't get lost, leverage on the support from the developers of the software you are using!

Visit the web site for more information and ask us to contact you, we will discuss about how many users we can support with your computing resources rather than about how many licenses you should buy!

The GeoSolutions team,

GeoSolutions porta il GeoServer a Valenzia

Si è svolto con successo il workshop su GeoServer organizzato da GeoSolutions durante le settime giornate internazionali gvSIG a Valenzia. Sono stati molti i partecipanti alle giornate che hanno deciso di dedicare 2 ore alla scoperta di GeoServer.

Il workshop si è svolto in inglese durante una manifestazione spagnola dove la maggior parte degli interventi avveniva nella lingua nazionale, ma questo non ha fatto desistere i partecipanti che hanno mostrato al contrario un grande interesse.  

Un ringraziamento alla gvSIG association per il sostegno al software open source manifestato attraverso l'organizzazione di un evento con lo scopo di condividere esperienze a livello internazionale e per il supporto dato a GeoSolutions nell'organizzazione del workshop.

The GeoSolutions team.

GeoServer and GeoSolutions @ gvSIG Days 2011

GeoSolutions will attend the 5th edition of the gvSIG Conference, organized by the Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport (CIT) from December 2nd until December 4th at the Feria Valencia Convention and Exhibition Center.  

Ing. Simone Giannecchini will provide an introductive workshop on GeoServer, therefore make sure you take note of the exact time on the conference program and you make room in your schedule for attending the event.
Check this link for more details.

See you in Valencia!

The GeoSolutions team.

GeoServer e GeoSolutions al GFOSS Day 2011

GeoSolutions sarà presente alla conferenza GFOSS DAY 2011 che si terrà a Foggia il 24 e 25 Novembre presso la Università degli Studi.



Oltre ad essere sponsor Silver della manifestazione, GeoSolutions sarà presente con un workshop gratuito introduttivo ed una presentazione su GeoServer che si terranno entrambi nella giornata del 25 (si veda per dettagli il programma della manifestazione).

Quindi, se volete essere aggiornati sugli sviluppi del GeoServer o se volete essere introdotti al suo utilizzo da uno dei suoi creatori non vi resta che farci visita a Foggia!

The GeoSolutions team.

GeoServer Aggregating DataStore: Aggregate and republish from several data sources

When it comes to publishing data with GeoServer the most common case is to publish layers that one owns and that can store and serve fully from the local premises.

There are however cases in which a dataset with a uniform structure is handled by several different entities, each one making it available to others, but with no unified view of the data itself.

This might be due to geographical distribution of the stakeholders, separate ownerships, administrative subdivisions: a typical case is a set of local public administrations, all publishing the same, or similar, data set in a independent way.

For this use case we have developed the aggregating data store, a GeoTools store in which features pertaining to the same layer/feature type are coming from several different other stores: the store unifies all of them in a centralized view that can be accessed as a seamless whole.

The store requires the source types to be very similar, but not necessarily identical:

• they can have a different layer names
• may lack some attributes, or have some that are not shared with others
• may not have a perfect type match (e.g., the same attribute can be an integer in one store and a string in another, a conversion to unify the two will be attempted).

A "default" store is appointed that defines the structure of the whole, and every other feature is remapped onto that structure.

Each data access is performed in parallel in order to minimize data loading time, and the store can be configured to tolerate the occasional disappearance of one of the data sources.

This new store is now made available as a GeoServer community plugin for the trunk series, and can be downloaded from the nightly builds repository along with a GeoServer trunk build that allows to use it.

We are still not managing attribute renaming, though it would be quite a nice feature to add. If you are interested in the topic contact us and let's see how we can work together to improve the store.

Regards,
the GeoSolutions Team.

GeoSolutions Talks @ FOSS4G 2011

Dear All,
it looks like we will have some busy times at FOSS4G this week.
If you check this search you can see a few interesting talks that we will give, let's group them by topic:

GeoServer

• The State of GeoServer Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:00pm - 1:30pm
• GeoServer on steroids Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:30pm - 2:00pm
• Advanced cartographic map rendering in GeoServer Wed, 09/14/2011 - 2:00pm - 2:30pm
• Raster data in GeoServer and GeoTools: Achievements, issues and future developments Wed, 09/14/2011 - 3:00pm - 3:30pm
• The status of GeoServer WPS Thu, 09/15/2011 - 2:00pm - 2:30pm

GeoTools

• Raster data in GeoServer and GeoTools: Achievements, issues and future developments Wed, 09/14/2011 - 3:00pm - 3:30pm
• Status of the GeoTools project Thu, 09/15/2011 - 10:30am - 11:00am

It is worth to point out that Wednesday there will be a full immersion on GeoServer with 3 talks in a row that will go from a general overview of the project to an in-depth analysis of rendering and production set up.

Are you curious to know more about the latest developments we have done? Interested in knowing how we can help your organization reach your goals? Contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,

WorldFile explained (or at least we tried!)

There is a lot of confusion around about what world file represents therefore we thought it would have been nice to put together a couple of clarifications.


The World File
World File is a de-facto standard from early days of ESRI desktop GIS applications. Originally it was composed by at least two files, a raster file, let' say a file.tiff,  and another file (most part of the times called file.wld)  that contains numbers that define the affine transformation between the image and the target spatial reference system. This implicitly means that we are talking about georectified raster data. This wld file is what should be properly called the world file. Other extensions that could be used on behalf of tfw are wld tifw, etc... Moreover some other formats beside tif can be used, like gif, png, jpeg, jpeg2000, etc..and the extensions for the world file become pretty fancy (gifw, pgw, etc..).

The concept behind this couple is as follows. An image (e.g. a tif) plus its world file represent a geospatial georectified raster in some spatial coordinate reference system (CRS). The mapping between the raster space (the intrinsic Image space of rows and cols) and the associated model space is represented by an affine transformation whose coeffficients are contained inside the accompanying world file (see here ). This way, practically any image format can be made spatial-aware just adding a world file containing an affine transform that maps image points onto a crs. Here is a good explanation of what a world file contains.

The Projection File
One would now ask, ok, but what coordinate reference system I am supposed to use. The best answer would be "the one the person who produces the image + the world file was using"! Seriously many people make assumptions on the CRS used for the georeferencing affine transform contained in the world file, but in fact this can lead to all sort of problems. The best way to transmit the information about the spatial coordinate reference system is providing a third file with extension prj which contains the well known text (WKT more info can be found here) representation of the user spatial CRS. The Spatial Reference website can be extremely useful for associating the proper WKT to a certain CRS.


Recommendation
Notice that usually the raster space has x going right and y going down while in model space things DEPEND on the spatial CRS, specifically, axes order and axes directions!
ALWAYS ASK YOUR DATA PROVIDER TO DESCRIBE EXACTLY THE SPATIAL COORDINATE REFERENCE SYSTEM THAT WAS USED TO GEOREFERENCE YOUR DATA.

The GeoSolutions Team,

Servizi di Supporto Professionale offerti da GeoSolutions

GeoSolutions è orgogliosa di offrire quattro piani di servizi enterprise incentrati sulla piattaforma GeoServer per aiutare i propri clienti a costruire una SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) di classe enterprise, attraverso l'integrazione e l'armonizzazione dei migliori framework geospaziali offerti dal mondo Open Source, la OpenSDI suite.

GeoSolutions grazie alla sua vasta esperienza nella costruzione e nel supporto di infrastrutture geospaziali di classe enterprise, fornirà alla vostra azienda uno straordinario livello di supporto durante tutto il ciclo di vita del progetto per ottenere con facilità un deployment ben riuscito!


Maggiori informazioni possono essere reperite qui.
Ci potete contattare qui.

GeoSolutions presentation @ Italian GFOSS day 2009

During this year's italian GFOSS day Ing. Alessio Fabiani has given a presentation on GeoServer and INSPIRE, specifically "GeoServer per la gestione interoperabile dei dati geospaziali: introduzione, e casi d'uso con cenni ad INSPIRE". I am posting it here in case someone is interested. Watch out, it is in Italian!

GeoSolutions Gfoss 09 Presentation

View more documents from GeoSolutions.

Ciao,

Simone.

NATO Catharsis exercise support

We have been doing on-site support this week for an NATO excercise which is being held in Marciana Marina, on the Elba Island in Italy. The exercise focuses on testing and trials with AUVs to map the sea bed looking for interesting features, like this one!

GeoSolutions has been involved to provide GIS support via its product SAS Mission Manager (temporary name, sas stands for Synthetic Aperture Sonar) in order to preprocess, ingest, manage and visualize the data acquired by the sonar sensors mounted on the AUVs. Here below you can see a screenshot of the architecture which comprises of:

1. GeoBatch for mission data ingestion and preprocessing (which includes mosaic balancing)


2. Cluster of 2 GeoServer with Hibernate catalog (experimental second level cache activated)


3. geoSDI-ERA customization for the user interface

Here below, some screenshot of Ing. Daniele Romagnoli on-site during the exercise providing support to the operational activities.

WMS Performance shoot-out @ FOSS4G

Lately, I have been helping out Ing. Andrea Aime with the tuning of GeoServer for the WMS performance shoot-out. I am pasting here below the latest announcement to spread the word about the event for which I will be one of the GeoServer representatives.

GeoServer, MapServer, and ArcGIS Server will be competing for the title of "Fastest Web Map Server (WMS)" at the FOSS4G 2009 conference at the end of October. The Web Mapping Performance Shoot-out compares Web Map Servers in a variety of real world use cases.

....

The performance shoot-out will see GeoServer, MapServer, and ArcGIS Server compared in terms of how long they take to generate a map image, from a common set of spatial data. The data formats used will be shapefile, geotiff, ECW, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, and SDE on Oracle. Benchmarking scripts will be executed on a common platform running Red Hat Linux.

GeoServer will be represented by Andrea Aime (OpenGeo) and Simone Giannecchini (GeoSolutions). "With the rapid expansion of GeoServer's capabilities each year, these benchmarking exercises are an excellent forum for us to test it in new and challenging ways," said Chris Holmes, Managing Director of OpenGeo and founder of the GeoServer project.

So, yeah, let's see how it goes, in the end we can't do worse than a branze medal!

GeoServer presentation @ Italian GFOSS day 2008

During last year's italian GFOSS day (see here) I gave a presentation on GeoServer, specifically "GeoServer, interoperabilita' à la carte". I have found it laying around on my hard drive therefore I am posting it here, in case someone can't sleep because he is not able to find it. Notice, it is in Italian!

GeoServer presentation @ Italian GFOSS day 2008

View more documents from GeoSolutions.

Job offer @ GeoSolutions

We are looking for talented
software engineers to fill a couple of positions.
Qualifications as follows:

- good knowledge of Java both JEE and JSE
- good knowledge of c++
- knowledge of most important OGC specifications and concepts (WMS,
WFS, WCS, coverage, etc...)
- working knowledge on at least 2 of the following projects: Geotools,
GeoServer, Gdal, OpenLayers
- at least 2 years of experience in the above languages and projects
- being fluent in English, both written and spoken

We offer a variety of contracts, working remotely is the preferred option.

Please send a detailed resume together with a letter of presentation
at jobs at geo-solutions.it

FOSS4G 2009 Abstract selected

I have just received notice that one of the abstracts I submitted to FOSS4G 2009 has been voted enough to make into a presentation. The title is "GeoServer, GeoTools and GeoBatch: supporting operational Meteorology and Oceanography" and you can find more info here.

So, yeah , see you in Sydney!

Hibernating GeoServer: seeking for scalability and robustness

I thought it would have been worth spending a few minutes to let people know about this development that we are bringing forward at GeoSolutions.
Being not only GeoServer developers but also GeoServer hungry users, we have been a bit unpleased in the past by the scalability problems that it was showing by the fact that:

1. GeoServer was keeping all its configuration into memory
2. GeoServer was making use XML files to handle its internal configuration

Now a lot of work has been lately for the upcoming 2.0 version of GeoServer, however, while 2 has been made less evident by GSIP 36 1 has not been touched yet.
If you use GeoServer the way we use it, with thousand of layers and with 10 to 100 new layers added daily (usually remote sensing data), you might agree with us that we need to:

1. Not load and keep the entire configuration in memory
2. Use a database store the configuration

In a few words, we need to improve scalability and robustness while tring to not jeopardize performance.

At GeoSolutions we have decided to tackle this problems by implementing a new GeoServer internal catalog that leverages on Hibernate as its persistence engine and that would also not bring the whole configuration into memory. Our goal is to be able to support at least Postgis, Oracle and H2 as the target database, but as you know, many more are supported by Hibernate.
The range of features that this work would open up is pretty wide, just think about using Hibernate distributed caching, simplified GeoServer replication, etc., etc.

The work is in progress, we have started to describe the details on the GeoServer wiki and we will be committing a first version beginning of September.
If you are interesting in supporting somehow (funding or human resources) this effort, please, drop me a few lines at simone.giannecchiniATgeo-solutions.it.

GeoSolutions is supporting the G8 meeting @ l'Aquila

GeoSolutions, in coordination with the geoSDI team, has helped to build and set up the geospatial portal and SDI used by the Italian Civil Protection and the G8 help desk, as you can see here and here, to support the G8 meeting at L'Aquila, Italy. The building blocks are well-known open source projects, GeoServer, GeoNetwork, geoSDI-ERA, OpenLayers, Hibernate.

For those of you that don't have access to the portal I am posting here below some screenshots of the portal showing data from various WMS servers.



In the pictures above you can se the portal overlaying WMS layers from differentWMS servers which have been accessed and catalogued to gain access to a wide range of information.

A special thanks goes to Dr. Dimitri Dello Buono, the head of the geoSDI project and to Francesco Izzi, the leader of the technical team, working with them on these challenging scenarios is always a pleasure.