www.esdi-humboldt.eu
 

Open Source Humboldt Software

[Picture] Framework

Humboldt developments are available as free download on the Humboldt Community Website at

http://community.esdi-humboldt.eu

The Humboldt Framework is concerned with the most important part within the project – to enable organisations to document and harmonise their spatial information, supporting the implementation of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) that integrates the diversity of spatial data available for a multitude of organisations.

The Humboldt Framework has three tiers: The Humboldt Tools contain applications that can be used by geodata experts to specify conceptual schemas and to define the transformation between them. The Humboldt Services define both cross-cutting service components that allow the collaborative usage across organisations, countries and domains. The final tier of the Humboldt Framework is formed by individual transformation services, each of which can address a specific harmonisation problem.

One of the major goals of the framework is to be minimal invasive, i.e. not to replace existing systems but rather support and amend them with specific capabilities needed in the data harmonisation process. Therefore the functionalities of the Humboldt Framework are well-isolated from the interfaces by which they are accessed, resulting in components that can be adopted easily for different deployments and process synchronisation styles.

First components of the Humboldt Framework have been published under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 (LGPL v3). They are available for free download at the Humboldt Community Website. This release includes the following software components:

  • The Humboldt Model Editor, a UML editor that is specifically geared towards the creation of UML application schemas;
  • The Humboldt Alignment Editor, a tool that allows to define conceptual schema transformations;
  • The Humboldt Workflow Editor
  • The Humboldt Mediator Service, a proxy service that executes transformation chains to provide harmonised geodata;
  • The Humboldt Workflow Repository Service, a service that analyses data sets and decides which processing is required to match a target product description;
  • The Humboldt Context Service, an easy to use-service that can be used to define transformation products;
  • Several transformation services exposed as OGC Web Processing Services, such as Coordinate Transformation Service and an Edge Matching Service.

Detailed documentation for all these services and applications, such as full specifications, are available under the same license as the software itself. Furthermore, a forum, wiki and bugtracker are provided for your information and feedback.

With this first major step towards the creation of an Open Source Community the Humboldt consortium invites developers to test the design and expandability of the framework. Suggestions and contributions are highly welcome:

http://community.esdi-humboldt.eu