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52°North Software on OSGeo Live DVD 6.5

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OSGeo-Live 6.5 has been released! For this release, geospatial applications have been updated to their latest stable release. A strong focus was the quality of the quick start documentation. Here, consistency and readability has been improved through step-by-step testing.

With this version, you can try running instances of the following 52°North service implementations:

  • 52°North SOS version 3.5 Just go to Geospatial → Web Services → Start 52°North SOS to start testing. Firefox will open with three tabs:
    • a client to test the SOS
    • a quick start page to get things started
    • a documentation page about the 52°North SOS implementation
  • 52°North WPS version 3.1.0 Just go to Geospatial → Web Services → Start 52°North WPS to start testing:
    • a simple client to test the WPS
    • a quick start page to get things started
    • a documentation page about the 52°North WPS implementation
  • 52°North WSS version 2.2.0 Just go to Geospatial → Web Services → Start 52°North WSS to start testing:
    • a client to test the WSS
    • a quick start page to get things started
    • a documentation page about the 52°North WSS implementation

Just give it a try and test a lot of geospatial applications without installing any of them. The OSGeo Live DVD contains software for the following categories, and it is all FOSS:

Online demo resources are available on the communities’ demo servers:

I hope you enjoy testing our SOS, WPS and WSS.

Feel free to comment and get involved!

Making Use of Low-Cost Air Quality Sensors

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Filed Under: Citizen Science, Sensor Web Tagged With: , ,

Last year the sensemake.rs community started their AirQuality Monitoring and Sensing  project on kickstarter. In september the Institute for GeoInformatics (IfGI) and 52°North held a workshop together with the designers of the platform to discuss further use and evolution of this project (see post). We had the great luck to receive 20 beta devices of the AirQuality Egg.

In the last months, we tried to convert the existing approach of “balcony-mounted” devices to a more autonomous solution. Instead of the nanode-rf we connected an RFBee Wireless device (based upon an ATMEGA 168) to the SensorShield. Like the nanode, the RFBee has an Arduino bootloader and can be programmed to fit your needs. The solution we propose is equipped with a GPS receiver to provide a location;  a LiPo battery and a solarpanel provide power to the sensor-platform. By adding these components, the AirQuality Egg turns into a sophisticated Wireless Sensor Platform. Data are sent to gateways which forward it into a Sensor Observation Service (SOS).

AirQualitySenseBox Mesh Network

more >

A look into WPS branches – Today: Spacebel

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Filed Under: Geoprocessing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The 52°North WPS implementation shares one important property with the specification – it is very flexible and can be used for many different use cases. A number of parties contribute, which  results in a number of active development branches for code. We will present a selection in blog posts over the next few months.

Spacebel takes the 52°North WPS to space.

Their extensions target the requirements of satellite data processing with service oriented architectures for a future proof and flexible infrastructure. A processing on-demand WPS extension allows the user to dynamically deploy and un-deploy processes, as well as auxiliary data, steer the execution of processes, monitor/audit the executed processes, download processing results, and discover processes and workflows.

These features are developed to support the Heterogeneous Missions Accessiblity (HMA) on-demand processing scenario [1], in which earth observation (EO) data shall be processed. This is mostly satellite data and therefore comes with a few challenges, most importantly, the sheer size of the data. The volumes are so large that this will never work without processing power close to the data (no remote internet access) and a parallel processing infrastructure, such as a Grid Computing or Cloud environment. This way, an analyst/a scientist must not run his own processing facilities, but can remotely start and control processes. Overhead for data transfer are also minimized. Such a framework additionally allows users of the processing chains to share deployed processes.

Moreover, these developments allow more >