GISCafe Weekly Review : June 15, 2017

Andy Dearing, CEO of Boundless, discussed the announcement of Boundless Suite 4.10 release that has been their flagship product since the inception of the company. Dearing also talked about the company’s strategic partnership with Planet.

4.9 was released last year. In the new release, Dearing says that they have incorporated MapBox styling within their platforms, leveraging that powerful styling engine and code, and are able to bring those files into their Platform. “Typically, our technical GeoServer had a styling and rendering engine based in XML,” said Dearing. “We’re able to write a more powerful styling capability with this platform.”

For their developer community, Boundless has released the Boundless SDK, a web SDK toolkit that sits on top of their visualization platform, providing open layers for developers to quickly develop web applications from their webmaps or data. In addition, there are new contributions to the community release of GeoServer. The Boundless platform is built upon open source technology and open APIs that generate actionable location intelligence across third party apps, content services and plug-ins for enterprise applications.

GeoServer 2.11 is a community OS project whose latest version includes lower load times, enabling users to load data and bring it forward, which is especially valuable to those with large datasets. Load times are reduced to a fraction of their previous time. In addition, the Geoserver is cross functional with other data formats such as Esri shapefile, etc.

Key features of Boundless Suite 4.10 include (from company materials):

The Boundless new SDK ships with Boundless Suite 4.10 and enables users to use the OpenLayers 3 library that utilizes the React framework. The SDK powers the web application builder in Boundless Desktop so users can create applications now without generating any code.

Boundless Suite 4.10 ships with GeoServer 2.11, with improved loading and OGC request times for large installations. Tens of thousands of layers can now be managed in GeoServer at faster load times. Greater EPSG support and improved identification and handling of obscure .prj files and directories of shapefiles are among the features.

Boundless has an ideas portal ideas@boundless.com for users to share their ideas in a public forum. These ideas help shape the next release of products.

Boundless’ strategic partnership with Planet enables the company to wire the Planet API directly into their API, aiming for a seamless experience for the users to access, discover and work with Planet imagery, directly in Boundless’ platform and services. Customers will be able to access the large library of Planet high quality imagery and fast loading imagery basemaps residing in the Boundless Connect ecosystem.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency made an investment in geospatial tools and Planet, as well as agriculture, providing access to data that wasn’t available before but is now available in the Open Source platform.

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When it comes to aerial imagery, government GIS departments tend to take a top-down approach. In other words, orthogonal imagery fits the bill when they view their town, city, or county.

While orthogonal imagery is a vital resource for all types of departments, oblique imagery is also beneficial. Oblique aerial images, which are captured from a 40- to 45-degree angle, make object recognition easier, especially when that object can also be viewed from all four cardinal directions.

Take this overhead shot of a building. It may look like an ordinary building. However, it’s difficult to tell what those arches are over the top.