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

Sat May 26 02:02:03 PDT 2012

Hi all,

I was present in the discussion Brian mentions and I agree with him.
EOxServer seems to be a well organized project and I feel it should be 
included in the disk, initially as beta software for version 6.0. This 
would mean no default installation but installable by the user with 
instructions through a quickstart document.

Stephan already created an installer for the disk and I had a chance to 
test it against alpha2.

Best regards,
Angelos

On 05/26/2012 03:52 AM, Brian Hamlin wrote:
> Hi Cameron, OSGeo Live list, all
>
>   I had the good fortune of working with Stephen briefly today.. I got 
> a quick look at the project source code, and I happen to work with 
> technology similar to some parts of EOxServer, here in California.. so 
> I have some way to understand what I see.
>
>   The good news is that EOxServer is *small* and the server portion of 
> it can certainly work within our Live parameters for web servers.. My 
> first impression is that EOxServer is an agile and well organized 
> suite of software that simplifies reading, processing and displaying 
> some kinds of raster imagery, onto an OpenLayers web map. The scope is 
> specific, the project appears to be well run.
>
>   SISS - I had not seen that SISS page before.. perhaps some of those 
> on the cc list are very involved. .
> I can take a guess .. SISS appears to be more of a certified stack of 
> large software apps/platforms, along with their supported standards - 
> different than a single small app written for a specific purpose..  
> The naming of GML signals to me that SISS is aimed at large 
> institutions and research bodies..
>
>
>   best regards from Berkeley, California
>     -Brian
>
>
>
> On May 25, 2012, at 4:00 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>
> ==
> Brian Hamlin
> GeoCal-ish
> OSGeo California Chapter
> 415-717-4462 cell
>
>
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-- 
Angelos Tzotsos
Remote Sensing Laboratory
National Technical University of Athens
http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos