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LocationTech: An Initiative Helping Enterprises Build Location Aware Systems

by Abel Avram on Feb 08, 2013 |

The Eclipse Foundation has announced LocationTech - a new initiative meant to help enterprises build location aware systems.

Established as an Eclipse Industry Working Group and operating under the governance of the Eclipse Foundation, LocationTech is a platform providing enterprises and developers the infrastructure and governance needed to develop their location aware systems:

Infrastructure:

A distributed code repository (Git)
A bug tracking system (Bugzilla)
A continuous integration server (Hudson)
A build server farm
A code review system (Gerrit)
Project dashboard (Drupal)
Web hosting (Apache & Drupal)
Download site

Guidance on:

How projects are formed and released.
Providing openness to anyone, even competitors.
Making design or roadmap decision.
Becoming a committer.

Trust for:

Validating code provenance
Detecting license conflicts
Trademark search and management
Analysis of dependencies and transitive dependencies

Currently, LocationTech hosts three projects in the phase of proposals (see the Eclipse Development Process):

Geoff (Geo Fast Forward) - Enabling existing Eclipse RCP applications to visualize geospatial information on a geographical map embedded into those applications.
GeoScript – Provides APIs to access GeoTools – an Open Source Java GIS Toolkit – functionality from other languages such as Groovy, JavaScript, Python, and Scala.
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) – a desktop application providing support for using, manipulation, exploration and analysis of GIS data

The LocationTech founding members are: Actuate, IBM, OpenGeo, and Oracle, the initiative being “open to any organization with an interest in adding location awareness to their business.”