LocationTech: An Initiative Helping Enterprises Build Location Aware Systems

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.”