[OSGeo Africa] Fwd: [OSGeo-Discuss] News: NASA World Wind Selects MapServer as Engine

[Gavin Fleming]

*NASA World Wind Server to Leverage MapServer Open Source Engine*

Moffett Field, CA. 16 October 2012

The NASA World Wind project team has selected the MapServer Open Source
mapping engine to serve its many digital raster formats to World Wind
clients.  MapServer will serve images and raw data through the Internet
by various Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.  Providing large
amounts of spatial data (including world-wide coverage of digital
elevation models, DEMs, and aerial imagery) to World Wind clients
requires a high performance architecture that will now use the MapServer
engine, caching of images, and load-balanced servers.  Technical
expertise for MapServer will be provided by Mapgears (Chicoutimi, QC)
and Gateway Geomatics (Lunenburg, NS). Due to MapServer compliance with
OGC standards and World Wind Server standards, except for possibly the
increased performance provided by MapServer, this transition will be
entirely transparent to the World Wind user community.

“MapServer will allow the NASA World Wind a smooth transition to a
mature Open Source engine,” said Patrick Hogan, the NASA Project Manager
of World Wind.

Daniel Morissette, President of Mapgears, added “We are thrilled to have
this opportunity to work with the NASA World Wind team to help push the
limits of the technology and to contribute with MapServer to the next
generation of NASA World Wind Servers that will deliver the data of
organizations around the world for years to come.”


Jeff McKenna, Director of Gateway Geomatics, said “Our long-time focus
on assisting organizations publish their spatial data through MapServer,
especially on the Windows platform, adds a key piece of an innovative
solution with the Mapgears team.  Together we will help to allow the
World Wind community to visualize and analyze large amounts of data
efficiently through MapServer.”  Jeff also believes that this project
will help both the MapServer and World Wind communities grow.

About NASA World Wind
---------------------

NASA World Wind (http://goworldwind.org/) is a three-dimensional
geographic information system developed by the National Aeronautics &
Space Administration (NASA), its partners, and the Open Source
community.  The World Wind client is an interactive 3D geographic
visualization system, where Earth and other planets can be explored in
their full 3D native context. World Wind was released as Open Source in
August 2004, and is being extensively used by corporations and
government agencies throughout the world.

About Mapgears
--------------

Members of Mapgears' (http://www.mapgears.com/) team have been active
for over a decade in the development of the MapServer Web mapping engine
and related open source technologies of the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation (OSGeo). Mapgears offers professional, yet personalized
services to assist application developers and integrators who made the
choice of MapServer and other OSGeo technologies such as PostGIS,
GDAL/OGR, OpenLayers, GeoExt and GeoPrisma.

About Gateway Geomatics
-----------------------

Gateway Geomatics (http://www.gatewaygeomatics.com/) is an innovative
company on the East coast of Canada, assisting organizations publish
their spatial information openly, through MapServer.  With the hugely
popular MapServer for Windows (MS4W) suite, developed and maintained by
Gateway, organizations of all sizes can quickly share their spatial
information on their own servers.  The director of Gateway Geomatics,
Jeff McKenna, also focuses on the user-side of Web mapping, and offers
hands-on training with the MapServer project all around the world.

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