Our official final project review took place in Luxemburg on 3^rd December 2015, where we presented our software, innovation output, and achievements to our Reviewers and Project Officer. Once again, it was a pleasure to present our work, receive positive feedback, and discuss the PublicaMundi vision. We would like to express our gratitude to our Reviewers for their feedback and directions, to our Project Officer for an amazing collaboration, and of course to the European Union.

This work would not have been possible without the leadership and financial support of the European Union and the FP7 Work Programme. We are grateful for being given the opportunity to contribute, along with several other projects, in materializing our shared vision for an EU Data Economy.

We started with a simple idea: “Make open geospatial data easier to publish, use, and reuse” based on our own experiences and challenges in open data publishing. We intentionally and exclusively built upon, extended, and developed open source software. This allowed our work to benefit user communities and developers well beyond our reach. We exclusively focused and extended open standards for geospatial data, assisting in standardization and even delivering reference implementations. We worked side-by-side with data publishers and developers, with a single goal: to make their work easier, faster, and more creative.

After two years, we can be proud for our work and contributions. What we consider however as our single greatest achievement is that PublicaMundi has outgrown its original vision. The PublicaMundi software is not just a great open geospatial data catalogue, but something bigger than the sum of its parts.

PublicaMundi is a feature-complete Geospatial Data Infrastructure, handling the entire life-cycle of data sharing, discovery, and reuse. PublicaMundi is simple to use for data producers and developers, automates data handling and service provision, is compatible with the latest OGC and INSPIRE standards, extremely versatile and future-proof. Being cloud-based and inherently scalable, it is a cost-effective solution for the public and private sector across multiple domains that focus on geospatial information.

For more features you check this page, the first production deployment of PublicaMundi as a national data catalogue, and of course our source code repository.

With the project officially complete, our work continuous towards further improving PublicaMundi, extending it with even more services, and pursuing its deployment world-wide.

Feel free to contact us if you intend to use or extend PublicaMundi, contribute in its development, or have an interesting idea!

Participants also had the chance of interacting with a live full demonstration of the PublicaMundi software, starting from publishing data under various metadata schemes (such as INSPIRE and ISO), and continuing into complex mapping visualizations and on-the fly processing of ingested data. Valuable discussions have arisen from the presentations and feedback for future improvements was collected.

The majority of the audience consisted of researchers in Geo and Planetary Sciences that were able to validate the strong capabilities of the platform in terms of publishing and managing their datasets. The presentation started with a general introduction to the goals of the PublicaMundi project: publish, share and reuse open geodata. It continued with a description of the underlying software and architecture that power the platform in order to achieve these goals: CKAN, pycsw, ZOO-Project, rasdaman, geoserver etc. Next, individual features of the platforms have been presented and demonstrated, with emphasis on the Mapping and Data APIs. The final part of the presentation was dedicated to showcasing the OGC services offered through the PublicaMundi platform and their importance in interoperability and common infrastructure development.

Utilizing this precious feedback the project’s consortium was able to improve its software and fine-tune it to the stakeholders’ needs.

Now as the software components have been more mature we need your help to reassess their effectiveness, performance, completeness and ease of use.

The 2nd PublicaMundi GeoDataCamp is the event where developers and data publishers will be invited to tell us what you think:

• Developers: If you use open geospatial data to create mashups and mobile applications, please join us, try our services and API’s (Data and Mapping APIs) and see how our work enables you. Your remarks and suggestion will be most welcome.
• Data Publishers: If you are an employee of the broader public sector  or even an NGO and you are somehow involved in the open spatial data publishing lifecycle, please come and try our approach and tell us how this makes your work easier. We will provide training sessions, training material, we will help you register your own organization and publish your own datasets.

The number of seats will be limited so we urge you to register as soon as possible. You will receive a confirmation e-mail by 7th of September.

Please remember to bring your own laptop!

The 2nd PublicaMundi GeoDataCamp will be organized in the premises of INNOVATHENS, the Cluster of Innovation and Entrepreneurship established by the City of Athens.

Facts:

• When: Thursday, 10th September 2015, 10:00 – 16:00
• Where: Technopolis of the City of Athens, Building INNOVATHENS Aeriofulakio 2, Pireos 100, Gazi
• Programme

It brings us great pleasure to share this news since pycsw is an integral part of PublicaMundi, being extended and adapted to support scalable geospatial data publishing and discovery. Also, our own Scientific Coordinator, Angelos Tzotsos, a long time member of the pycsw Project Steering Committee (PSC), has been appointed as the pycsw project officer.

pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw implements clause 10 (HTTP protocol binding – Catalogue Services for the Web, CSW) of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification, version 2.0.2. Started in 2010 (more formally announced in 2011), pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

pycsw powers numerous high profile activities such as US data.gov/geoplatform.gov, Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), US National Geothermal Data System (NGDS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the WMO World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC).

Graduating OSGeo incubation includes fulfilling requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance, and general good project operation. Graduation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users and the community at large an added confidence in the viability and safety of the project.

The project steering committee says, “The pycsw team is thrilled to be recognized as a full OSGeo project. Being part of OSGeo is important for us since OSGeo supports the collaborative development of open source geospatial software.  There have been strong ties between the two communities with pycsw developers being involved as charter members, represented in local OSGeo chapters and helping with various FOSS4G activities. We are very happy to be included as part of OSGeo and a member of such an esteemed group of projects.”

Jeff McKenna, mentor of the incubation process says: “It has been a pleasure to work with the pycsw team throughout this process.  pycsw complements the OSGeo stack with a lightweight method to share and discover geospatial data.  I want to thank the pycsw team for their continued passion for FOSS4G.“

After investigating both APIs for some time, we thought that they are not so different for creating simple web maps, like the one used for previewing data sources inside an open geospatial data catalogue, with only few layers, basic navigation and simple controls. For such purpose, we found out that switching from one library to the other (and so playing with both javascript APIs all the time) was kind of a waste of time. We then started to think about how to wrap both, and how to forget about API differences, so we can focus on the map content and styles rather than on coding concerns.

Such an idea was recently implemented in the ​PublicaMundi Mapping API, and we’d like to show you a simple example here. The latter basically demonstrates how one can create an Openlayers map or a Leaflet map using the exact same javascript source code.

Using ​publicamundi.js, we would first setup the map and declare its options using a rather common syntax:

We can then initialize the map with the provided options in a quiet straightforward way, as follow :

In our example, we then add multiple layers to the PublicaMundi map from WMS, WFS and KLM data sources. Note that the WMS and WFS layers parameters point to some PublicaMundi unique IDs which are referring to data sources referenced by CKAN and published by GeoServer.

Basics map controls such as LayerSwitcher and Popups can finally be added using the same simple syntax. Note that the Popups are created as Overlays, rendered as Bootstrap popovers in both case.

Once we are happy with the map, it is finally extremely easy to switch from OpenLayers to Leaflet, as we just have to call publicamundi.js with the desired library as the data-library attribute on the script tag.

This example shows basic functionalities but additional features and more advanced controls will soon be added to the PublicaMundi Mapping API. ​View example and check out ​PublicaMundi to learn more.

At the 2014 edition, the first to be held worldwide, the international Earth observation community awarded prizes worth a total of EUR 300,000 in nine categories during a festive ceremony held at the Berlin headquarters of Deutsche Telekom.

The application ideas submitted to the Copernicus Masters 2014 offer a glimpse into the next generation of Earth observations services in a wide array of business and societal sectors, including health, infrastructure, disaster management, agriculture and forestry, and environmental protection.

The rasdaman technology, which enables the storage and processing of multi-dimensional arrays (“raster data”) of unlimited size in a conventional database, was one of 170 submissions from 43 countries.

Prof. Baumann comments: “It is a great honor for our rasdaman technology to be recognized on such global scale”. Rasdaman is already in use by international satellite and climate data centers on hundreds of Terabytes, where it offers analyses of snow and ice cover, atmospheric and oceanography data, geophysical information, as well as satellite data about Mars.”

“This scalable array engine enables fast and user-friendly big data analysis that is optimised for geo-information from satellites and other sources”, says Dr Jurry de la Mar, Account Director Global Accounts & International Business at T-Systems International GmbH. “Among other industries, it is designed for oil and gas and insurance. While the engine significantly reduces the volume of data transferred and processed in complex queries, such queries can also easily be managed thanks to their basis on international standards.”

In his opening speech at the competition’s awards ceremony, ESA’s Earth Observation director Prof. Dr. Volker Liebig said: “The Copernicus Masters is an outstanding platform for promoting user uptake and raising awareness of the benefits of the Copernicus data and information,” declared. “I am pleased about the high quality exhibited by this year’s ideas which reflect the potential Earth observation data and global environmental information present in countless new areas of application.”

This year’s Copernicus Masters awards ceremony was accompanied by the Satellite Masters Conference for the first time, which gave the winners the chance to present their ideas to the global Earth observation and navigation industry and share innovations in aerospace technologies and services.

For the complete winner description see: Copernicus Masters 2014 Winners

More info on the conference: www.satellite-masters-conference.eu

More info on the rasdaman technology: www.rasdaman.org

Jeffrey K. Harris, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said: “We wish to express our deep appreciation for the extraordinary contribution you have made to the OGC community and to people around the world who are the ultimate beneficiaries of improvements in the development, management and use of geoscientific data. Devoting your time and bringing your dedication, expertise, critical thinking and leadership to OGC working groups has resulted in significant and enduring advances in technical standards.”

Peter Baumann has been closely working with the Open Geospatial Consortium for more than ten years. He is editor of twelve adopted standards around the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite of Big Geo Data standards. Recently he has been instrumental in establishing a new Big Data Domain Working Group with the OGC which he also co-chairs. As a consequence of this engagement, Peter Baumann has been invited by the European Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative, INSPIRE, as well as ISO to provide expertise in geo service and query language standardization.

Peter Baumann’s research focuses on large-scale scientific information services, in particular: massive multi-dimensional data cubes. He has architected the rasdaman (“raster data manager”) technology which in fact has pioneered a new research field, Array Databases. With rasdaman, spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data of any size can be accessed and explored interactively through Array SQL which offers a “what you get is what you need” interface to scientists, engineers, and other data users.

About the Kenneth D. Gardels Award The Award is named after Kenneth D. Gardels, a Research Specialist at the Center for Environmental Design Research (University of California), who passed away in 1999 at the height of his career. It was conceived to memorialize the spirit of a man with a passion for making the world a better place through open communication and the use of geospatial information technology to improve the quality of human life.

About OGC The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 473 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. More info: www.opengeospatial.org

SQL has been tremendously successful in running any-size databases in business and administration. However, the “Big Data” in science are structured differently. Instead of simple tables, they often consist of multi-dimensional “data cubes”. In Geo sciences, for example, this encompasses 1-dimensional sensor data, 2-D satellite imagery, 3-D x/y/t image timeseries as well as x/y/z geophysical voxel data, and 4-D x/y/z/t weather data. In Life sciences, there is laserscan microscopy and brain scans. And it can grow as large as simulations of the whole universe when it comes to astrophysics.

But SQL is not able to find, filter, and process such arrays, and consequently today arrays largely are maintained outside databases. Recognizing this shortcoming, Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University Bremen, and his group have long been researching on ways to extend SQL appropriately. The rasdaman system which the group has established effectively has coined a new technology, Array Databases. In a recent technology demonstration, more than 1,000 computers have collaborated in a cloud to jointly compute the result of one single database query. This “distributed query processing” means a massive speedup, and research challenges on multi-Petabyte data cubes can be answered that hitherto were unsolvable.

Meantime, international data centers use this tool to allow scientists gain unanticipated insights into their spatio-temporal data cubes, and rasdaman installations can be found at NASA, ESA, British Geological Survey, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Deutscher Wetterdienst, and many more.

In Beijing all national bodies participating in the SQL working group of ISO unanimously have agreed on the importance of arrays in SQL. Following thorough assessment of all options available, the group has accepted the proposal of Baumann for further elaboration. The new standard will be named ISO 9075 SQL/MDA, for “Multi-Dimensional Arrays”.