Plant a Seed, Watch It Grow: Improvements to GeoServer
By Chris
Holmes, The Open Planning ProjectLast year, Google's Open
Source Programs Office funded the
GeoServer
Project to add support to output data to
Google Earth. In the venture capital world, there
is a notion of 'seed funding': putting capital into a new, usually risky, project to try out
an idea and help it reach a state of sustainability. Google wanted to promote the idea of
using '
Network
Links' in
KML to enable organizations
to put large amounts of existing geospatial data onto Google Earth. They found fertile ground
in the open source GeoServer Project, where the seed would not have to grow in isolation, but
instead could flourish alongside other improving components.
GeoServer
was started by a non-profit called
The Open
Planning Project (TOPP) in 2001, with the goal of making geospatial data more
available through open standards - not just images but the actual data, the 'source code' of
the map. This opens the information to enable analysis, modeling and user corrections. Today
it is a vital open source project, with many outside
contributors. The
latest
release (
download) contains a number
of new
additions for
Google Earth, which the community has helped shape and improve over the last
year.
New features include the ability to easily
customize placemark
pop-ups from existing data,
support for
'
Super-Overlays',
powerful
time
visualization, and automatic
generation of
legends. These are all available from a variety of data sources, including PostGIS,
Oracle Spatial, DB2, ArcSDE, Shapefiles, GeoTiffs, and ArcGrid, with more being added every
day by the community. There are also several related improvements, including the ability to
overlay data dynamically on Google Maps, as well as
GeoRSS and
GeoJSON output.
Other Google Earth-related news: TOPP is participating in a
testbed put on by the
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to
help figure out what the next version of the KML specification may look like. The GeoServer
team is very excited about KML becoming an OGC open standard, as GeoServer already implements
the main OGC standards. For the testbed TOPP will build support for the new version of KML in
to GeoServer and
OpenLayers, an excellent
AJAX mapping client. To follow and participate in the work being done on the next version of
KML, subscribe and contribute to the
ogckml page on
del.icio.us.
