See description.
Enable existing Eclipse RCP applications that are connected to some kind of data sources that contain valuable information to easily and quickly integrate into the geospatial domain by visualizing geospatial information on a geographical map embedded into those applications. It is not meant to provide a fully-fledged Geographic Information System (GIS). The focus is on visualizing existing geospatial data in existing Eclipse RCP applications using lightweight components.
As we know, 80% of any kind of data is said to have some geospatial relevance.
There are many Eclipse RCP applications connected to data sources (RDBMS, EMF models, Files, etc.) of valuable information that need to be explored and visualized geographically.
Unfortunately, many users and/or developers in their respective business domains are not familiar with the rather complex geospatial topics.
But, they are the experts of those domains. The problem is how to make them get their feet wet and start exploring their data sources from a geospatial point of view.
As fully-fledged Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tend to be even more complex to deal with just to show some POIs (points of interest) on a map,
the entry barriers are rather very high.
This project aims at simplifying the process for integrating existing business applications connected to some kind of data sources into the geospatial domain.
Its intent is to provide a simple to use framework and/or tools collection for visualizing geospatial data on a geographical map embedded into Eclipse RCP applications.
The Eclipse Community is a vital, highly active and reliable open source community which is known for good quality projects.
With the LocationTech IWG the Eclipse Foundation has made a big step forward to enhance and enlarge its community's capabilities.
This project can act as a bridge between the Eclipse RCP community and the OpenLayers web community.
Furthermore, this project will profit from the good and reliable IT infrastructure the Eclipse Foundation/Community offers.
The initial code is hosted at github.com:
https://github.com/erdalkaraca/geoff
It consists of some (Eclipse) plugins and (OSGi) services.
Currently, it provides the following functionalities:
- Querying a geocoding service (OpenStreetMap's Nominatim is tested) to (manually) geocode business objects
- Packaged OpenLayers 2.12 as a resource bundle/plugin (no java code, just HTML5 resources)
- Exemplary Google Maps set up
- An SWT Composite that wraps an embedded Browser Control to load OpenLayers in, small feature to jump to a specific LatLon location at a specific zoom level
No legal issues known.
Q1 2013
- adapt/move github repository to LocationTech's infrastructure
- provide missing basic functionality (for example, transformation of geocoded business objects to KML to render on the OpenLayers map)
Q2 2013:
- provide version 0.7.0 for consumption by interested parties
Explore more business use cases to provide APIs for.
For example, provide a common API to transform (geocoded) EMF models to KML and/or GML to render on the OpenLayers map.