Development

Over last years, handheld devices have made important advances. Increasing processor speed, emerging platforms with dual processors, improved memory resources, power graphics and more than acceptable programming capabilities have open these platforms to the development of general purpose applications. Of increasing interest on mobile application are virtual globes, GIS applications, maps browsers etc. We present a framework for virtual globe development for familiar iOS and Android mobile devices. Some salient features of our framework are the use of OGC standards, design of server-side information and pre-processed data to enrich the applicability on mobile devices.
Since available CPU and memory resources in mobile devices are generally limited, we have designed our algorithms and data management aiming at simplicity, efficiency and scalability. We implement a LOD strategy for both, textures and elevation data. Special focus has been given to user interaction with the globe by using multi-touch screens and realistic 3D geometric criteria. We include a complete set of finger gestures to afford smooth and pleasant interaction with the globe.

Our implementation guarantees a fine-quality and real time navigation over the virtual globe. The software architecture is an open framework, thereby facilitating the implementation on familiar iOS and Android mobile devices, including some of the most known smart phones and tabs. We show some tests and demos over these devices to provide evidence of the quality of the developed virtual globe.

Future projected work includes gateways to open API’s on the web as climate, geonames, Twitter, Facebook, Tuenti, etc.

MapMint is a comprehensive task manager for implementing and managing a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). It will be presented to the community to showcase its complete and robust platform to organize, edit, process and publish spatial data to the Internet.

MapMint is based on extensive use of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, and allows an orchestration of Web Feature Services (WFS), Web Mapping Services (WMS) Web Map Tiling Services (WMTS) and Web Processing Services (WPS) through a modular and intuitive Web application.

MapMint server is mainly based on ZOO-Kernel 1.2.0 and MapServer 6.0.0. Most of its functions are run as WPS requests, calling both general services (for configuration, data and project management, user permissions etc.) and geospatial data management services based on MapServer 6.0.0 (transactional support, .map file writing/editing, symbology and classification). Further, geoprocessing services are available through GDAL/OGR and GRASS 7.0 (for format and projection management, vector and raster operations, spatial analysis). MapMint also contains a set of document production services based on the OpenDocument server.

MapMint client is built upon jQuery, jQuery-UI and OpenLayers. It provides a complete and user-friendly back-office to the user, to control and deploy SDI services in a standardized way with data from local or remote datastores, process it, create new layers, and finally organize Web mapping projects to be published online.

MapMint architecture and features will be introduced in this presentation, and its five inter-connected modules will be described, with an emphasis on which OGC standards they are using and which OSGeo software they are running.