Azavea a company based in Philadelphia that provides products for geographical data, has published an open source product called GeoTrellis under GNU GPL v3 license. GeoTrellis is an
open source data processing engine for high performance applications.
The purpose of geographic data which is collected in increasing volumes is to better understand the environment and to draw conclusions at a faster pace. For processing such large amounts of geographic data, sophisticated GIS (Geographic information system) systems are commonly used. GeoTrellis claims to provide the same capabilities.
According to the press release the GeoTrellis software architecture was designed to solve three core issues:
Create scalable, high performance geoprocessing web services
Create distributed geoprocessing services that can act on large data sets
Parallelize geoprocessing operations to take full advantage of a multi-core architecture
Its designers developed it using Scala and Akka, and providing the following features:
- spatial operations allowing different ways to interact with geospatial data,
- leveraging multi core hardware and distributed servers for accelerating geoprocessing tasks,
- and can be deployed as a installable software package, embedded within other software, or to a cloud environment such as Amacon EC2, Google App Engine or as a VMware Virtual Appliance.
Companies that can not use the GPL v3 licensing model may also buy a commercial license from the company.
Interested readers may download GeoTrellis from its GitHub repository. GeoTrellis user groups are available for those that want to share experiences.
