FOSS4G

This is the last day of the conference FOSS4G2006 – Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics. There were lot of interesting topics and wonderful event at all. I was here mainly to spread the idea of geospatial appliances with MapSnack. I brough cca 28 DVD with MapSnack – UVAC edition and most of them were taken by audience after my speach on Thursday. I am glad that this idea of appliances is shared by two other contributors presenting there GDIdevL-running on GEMU and EOGEO running on miniMac. I also attended workshop for MapGuide Open Source but currently I am dissapointed by not supporting Debian and rasters on Linux…well they are going to improve soon. Among very interesting topics of the conference was ‘Sensor Enabled Web’ and ‘ICE’. Social event was ..wau.. superb – the dinner in the castle, cruise, free beer and wine on boat… Event organization – excelent… I also won a book “Mapping Hacks”. In general I am very happy I could join the conference, I got wide overview of what is going on in FOOS4G, approach of OSGeo people to geoinformatics (I attended F2F OSGeo open meeting on Monday 11th too) conference home page

Geospatial Appliance MapSnack at FOSS4G

 

Abstract

Virtualization is an emerging technology on x86 platform simplifying deployment and configuration of complex information technologies. In free and open source software for geoinformatics area, however, this trend is not yet fully reflected or leveraged.  Contribution  introduces results and experiences with FOSS geospatial virtual appliance called ‘MapSnack’. MapSnack is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured geospatial virtual appliance that runs on any standard x86 machine in a self-contained, isolated  environment.

  A vision of MapSnack is to accompany raw geospatial data which comes in different formats with functionality to explore, query, share and manage content. That is merge data with functionality logic to simplify their absorption by consumer. MapSnack  eliminates the installation, configuration and maintenance effort  associated with deploying complex stacks of software for web mapping.

  There are basically two approaches how to achieve that. First is traditional and nowadays very popular  LiveCD  appliance, second is a virtual appliance

1. Geospatial LiveCD Appliance:

This approach takes Knoppix LiveCD concept  for fast deployment on user’s machine. LiveCD on one hand simplifies deployment and readiness to use geospatial appliance but on other hand remastering and maintenance of such system is difficult since intrinsic system is read only. LiveCD advantage is however in that it can run on any virtual or real machine which supports x86 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) thus decision to let geospatial appliance run on real or virtualized (partitioned) hardware is left up to user. Another advantage of LiveCD system is embedded compressed file system which is automatically extracted during the boot up.

2. Geospatial Virtual Appliance –   Mapsnack

Recently much attention of IT have been drawn towards virtualization on x86 platform. Although there are many different levels of virtualization (hardware, operating system, application) virtualization in this contribution is treated as  ability to run multiple operating system on one CPU or one single computer. Important differentiation from the term emulation is that virtualization partition real hardware into multiple running context while emulation does it all in (higher) software layer. Virtualization is used in different areas such as server consolidation, running  legacy applications within legacy OS’es,  running untrusted applications in secure isolated sandboxes,  application mobility, clean/single service design and many others. MapSnack as geospatial virtual appliance is minimum sized Linux virtual machine with web user interfaces for deploying instant geospatial infrastructure and applications. Thus provides to the consumer advantage of quick deployment with  nearly zero-based installation and minimum skills to get it running.

MapSnack consist  of latest UMN MapServer and  P.Mapper with sample dataset. Underlying operating system is Debian Sarge 3.1r2 with latest updates. VMware Player has been chosen as virtualization platform to run MapSnack. Since it is not optimal to stick to one virtualization platform, future version will be virtualization platform independable, thus running a microinstall in the first run of appliance. Virtualized environment has an advantage that anybody can extend or modify it. User gets all necessary preinstalled and preconfigured software without even need to change his current production environment. This opens doors for Windows users who would like to combine comfort of Windows based GUI with performance and effectivity of single service virtual appliance based on Linux..

This approach of geospatial virtual appliance  answers also areas of MapSnack usability :

 1.  Portable map browsing – nowadays map browsers rely on internet connections. In case connection or server is broken and maps are urgently needed MapSnack can be quickly deployed as off-line /backup (or stand alone) map server.

2.  Encapsulating geospatial data with functionality – geospatial data providers  might want to add value to customers by providing not only processed data coming from various electromagnetic sensors  but also by providing software appliance for viewing and manipulating geospatial content.

3. Education of OGC standards (WxS) on stable and ‘always available’ source of geospatial content.

MapSnack can be downloaded from :http://mapsnack.mendelu.cz

 

 

 

 

First drop of term “Geospatial Virtual Appliance”

I am very suprised that no one ever used term “Geospatial Virtual Appliance” on interent – at least Google returned only 2 references… So from now on I will start to monitor number of Google responses on this term…try it too.. btw. MapSnack (Geospatial Virtual Appliance) got ‘HONORABLE MENTION’ sign by VMWare in ‘Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challange’ competition. check here

Portable GIS

I like the idea ‘zero time installation’, or ‘on demand available’. One way (the big one) is to make virtual machine and with VMWare player just run it or what you got preinstalled and configured – this work fine for complex software, where installation and configuration maight take vast amouont of time. However the second way for small applications (‘tools’ or desktop applications) it is enough to have them just on portable media and run it directly from it. flash disks has great potential as a ‘HW platfrom’ for running these apps. I recently come to blog of James Fee about portable GIS experiemnt with QGIS. I tried it (just copied extracted files from dwonload site to flash disk) and it just work – running out of my flash disk driver. There is bunch of portable applications on portableapps too, mostly for office apps, browser, file managers, etc. And I am sure most well writen applications/tools can run directly from flash disks, just they don’t think it is a ‘great feature’ to list it in specs, but it is !

Enterprise Mobility Week 2006

I’ve attended Enterprise Mobility Week 2006 held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I was there as technical consultant regarding mobile solutions provided by Intergraph (InService, TrackForce, G/Tech Mobile Viewer, IntelliWhere OnDemand, etc…) I must admit it was quite useful meeting and I had chance to talk directly to decision makers or managers who needs certain solution for deployment of mobility solution at their enterprise. Event was very well organized and IQPC staff was excelent (no more details ;)!. Brochure of the event can be downloaded here . For more information please follow link

MapSnack – your fast map viewer

I’ve tested AJAX based approach for displaying maps on web page. I took sample area north to Brno  20x 20 km covered by various geodata including VHR IR images. I had to intercept HTML requests to  map server to see what it takes to generate map of particular range and layer. (I had no access to map server, nor I took care what mapping engine serves maps, but it was not in format of WMS). I found quite simple prototype of AJAX display on mike page and I bend it little bit to work with geographicaly referenced maps (actually I needed JTSK system used here in Czech Republic). Conclusion is that AJAX approach for map display has lot of potential since is is elegant, extensible and transparent for end user (just save your page and you may run locally your client or include your client on your own page. Also more about AJAX vs. Flas approach for map displaying see David Blasby’s blog On my sample you may zoom in/out and pan. In zoom level 4 you will get IR aerial images. tested on IE6 and NN6.
enjoy it…

MapSnack launched

I am excited to announce born of MapSnack. I and my colleague Jachym have created experimental Live Linux CD with GIS capability called ‘MapSnack’..your fast food for GIS. Interesting fact is that it can be run directly on HW or as virtual machine from VMware. The reason to do it was to give data consumers not only processed data but also basic functionality to view, analyse and publish them. Moreover installation time is either zero (in case of live runing) or just copy ISO file to your computer to run it from VMware. But may be it is crazy … you go for a shoping and buy an ice cream and you get fridge for free…:))
download iso [669 MB] – you can burn ISO on CD and run as Live Linux
download VMX config [1 KB] to run ISO file as virtual machine
If you don’t have VMware Workstation, go to VMware player to download free virtual machine player either for Windows or for Linux so you can enjoy running LiveCD on top of your host OS.
Details to run MapSnack in VMware Player: Download both files (ISO + VMX) into the same folder – named for example MapSnack. When you double click on VMX file you will get VMware player running and asking you to create new identifier…just confirm. Then MapSnack enters full screen mode…to get out back to your host OS pres Ctrl+alt.

GeoSpatial World 2005

Atttended GeoSpatial World 2005 in SanFrancisco. I was mainly interested in section Geospatial Resource Management so I attended relevant sessions. One of the most wonderful thing there was on-site tour to Sacramento Municipal Utilities where InService in action was presented. I had oportunity to see stages for Mobile Crew, Dispatcher, Call center..etc… Another nice issue was G/Tech 9.3 presentation and InService 7.9.

Remastering Knoppix

I bought my first OS system today in bookshop, it cost me 3 EUR. Interesting live distribution called ABCLinux based on Knoppix. I was particulary curious how this would run in VMWare as well directly on my HW. Booting to HW was OK, booting in VMWare as well (using kernel 2.6.x). Now how to make your own live distribution with bunch of favorite packages (instead of using those predefined). There ara many articles refering to remastering Knoppix, I have used : linuxdevcenter and tina-knoppix. Now I run my master Knoppix from HDD (using Grub loader from Debian) inside VMWare being ready for remastering.