[Live-demo] Re: EOxServer - an Open Source WMS/WCS for Earth Observations & OSGeo-Live

Fri May 25 16:00:47 PDT 2012

Some of the people involved in Australian/New Zealand Earth Observations 
(Andrew, RobA, Bruce, Jim, RobertG, David),

As per below, Stephan has proposed that EOxServer be included in the 
OSGeo-Live DVD distribution, which will provide valuable marketing reach 
for EOxServer. I'm forwarding this on to each of you as I'm interested 
to understand whether the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and 
CSIRO are aware of EOxServer. Have you considered using EOxServer?
What have been your conclusions about such considerations?
How does EOxServer compare against the SISS stack?

Stephan,
Note that BOM/CSIRO have been investing heavily in what they are calling 
the "Spatial Information Services Stack" (SISS), which consists of:
PostGIS
GeoServer
GeoNetwork
THREDDS
HollowWorld
FullMoon
https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/wiki/Siss/SpatialInformationServicesStackHandbook

Stephan,
I'm interested to know whether participants in the EOxServer have been 
in touch with programs working on the SISS stack?
Are there any areas for collaboration?
What are the benefits of EOxServer over SISS?

On 26/05/2012 1:21 AM, Stephan Meißl wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 21:27 +1000, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> We are starting to build the 6.0 OSGeo-Live DVD which will be released
>> in September 2012, ready for FOSS4G 2012 as well as many other spatial
>> conferences. This upcoming version will be built upon the stable
>> Xubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release. Documentation will be
>> translated into eight languages, now also including Chinese and
>> Catalan.
>>
>>
>> Any new applications?
>>
>> We would like to hear from anyone wishing to add new projects to
>> OSGeo-Live, anyone wishing to extend or add extra translations, or
>> anyone who has ideas on how we should shape the upcoming release.
>> ...
> Hi Cameron,
>
> we'd like to propose the inclusion of the EOxServer [1] project in
> OSGeo-Live. Three weeks ago we released our version 0.2.0 and even
> though it has a rather low version number we think it would add some
> value to OSGeo-Live. However, as this is a proposal and we're surely not
> aware of all policies we fully understand different opinions. It would
> be great to hear your advice.
>
> Here are the details about EOxServer following the wiki at [2]:
>
> Name: EOxServer
> URL: http://eoxserver.org
> License: MIT
> Description and value added:
>
> EOxServer's mission is to provide an Open Source software framework to
> ease the online provision of big Earth Observation data archives via
> Open Standard services for efficient exploitation by users.
>        * Open Source: MIT-style license
>        * software framework: Entirely based on Open Source (Python,
>          MapServer, Django, GDAL, etc.)
>        * ease online provision: Admin GUI and command line data
>          registration
>        * big Earth Observation data archives: Operators register existing
>          raster data archives
>        * Open Standard services: Open in the sense of freely available;
>          Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); WMS, WCS, EO-WMS, EO-WCS
>        * efficient exploitation by users: User defined sub-setting; view
>          and download
>
> OGC standards: WMS, WCS, EO-WMS, EO-WCS, WCS-T; All versions are
> supported that are supported in MapServer. However, focus is on WCS 2.0
> and WMS 1.3 and their respective Earth Observation (EO) application
> profiles.
>
> Language: Python and a small bit C
>
> Version: 0.2.0 (maybe 0.2.1 if we need to change something for example
> the packaging)
>
> Risk adverse organisations: EOxServer has been partly funded by the
> European Space Agency (ESA) which is currently evaluating the
> operational use. Also some European Commission supported projects are
> evaluating the usage of EOxServer.
>
> User community: There is a user mailing list [3] but not yet much
> traffic. According to the Python package index [4] there have been 96
> downloads in the last three weeks and according to the website
> statistics for eoxserver.org there have been around 3400 unique visitors
> with about 7800 visits in 2012.
>
> Developer community: Again we have a mailing list [3] with a bit more
> traffic and nine committers. Please see ohloh [5] for more statistics.
>
> Stable release: Our latest stable release is 0.2.0.
>
> Testing: We make extensive usage of Python's and Django's unit test
> framework and have about 900 tests included in our autotest instance.
> Additionally there are some selenium based tests of the web client and
> admin gui.
>
> Mature code: Again please see ohloh [5] for these statistics.
>
> User interface: In EOxServer we distinct between two user roles:
> operators and users. Operators can register data and control the server
> via the command line and the Django provided admin gui. Users can
> explore the available data via a simple web client based on OpenLayers
> and jQuery.
>
> Presentation at FOSS4G: There have been talks at the German speaking
> FOSSGIS and the recent FOSS4G-CEE conference. Please see the EOxServer
> documentation [6] for a list of presentations.
>
> Volunteers for liaising: Stephan Meissl and Stephan Krause
>
> Application installation: Since EOxServer is a Python application the
> recommended way of installation is using pip. However, since we're using
> setuptools we can easily provide .deb packages if needed.
>
> 512 Meg of RAM: Yes, EOxServer can be run in 512MB of memory. However,
> the image rendering will be limited to the capabilities of MapServer and
> GDAL.
>
> Disk space: The current base package extracts to 22MB but includes 15MB
> of documentation. Our autotest package which we'd propose for a
> demonstration (see below) extracts to 130MB but 90MB of this are
> expected results for the tests which can be safely ignored. If needed I
> believe we can shrink the test data to under 10MB to still provide a
> meaningful demonstration. Usually we also copy the OGC schemas to speed
> up XML validation but this might not be necessary here. The packages are
> available here [7].
>
> Other dataset: We have to explore the already included demonstration
> data but at a first glance we think we need to include some EO data in
> order to show off the capabilities of EOxServer.
>
> Project Overview and Quickstart: Will of course be produced and
> provided.
>
> Windows and/or Mac installers: Not needed.
>
>
> Thanks for your consideration,
> Stephan on behalf of the EOxServer Team
>
> [1] http://eoxserver.org
> [2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_Apply
> [3] http://eoxserver.org/doc/en/users/mailing_lists.html
> [4] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/EOxServer/
> [5] https://www.ohloh.net/p/eoxserver/
> [6] http://eoxserver.org/doc_trunk/en/users/presentations.html
> [7] http://eoxserver.org/wiki/Download
>
>

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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