OSGeo - OGC - ASF Code Sprint in Évora, Portugal

As the days grow longer in early 2024, the city of Évora, Portugal, played host to a major event in the open source geospatial world: the joint code sprint of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OsGeo), and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This unique gathering brought together key players in the field, including Camptocamp, a prominent contributor to the OsGeo community and a leading player in the steering committees of many of the association's projects.

OGC API Records - Facets

A highlight of this sprint was the work accomplished by the Camptocamp teams with the OGC API Records group. The proposal for Part 2 of the OGC API Records, focusing on "facets," was approved. This significant advancement, whose specifications will be drafted in spring, promises rapid implementation by the GeoNetwork and PyCSW communities.

OGC-client

Another notable achievement was Olivia's work on the Ogc-client project. This JavaScript client aims to simplify interactions with OGC APIs for web applications. During the sprint, she made substantial progress in several areas:

Using ESBuild for ES6 module compilation, accompanied by sourcemaps.
Automatic creation and publication of API documentation.
Basic support for OGC API Features & Records specifications.
WMTS support.
Release of version 1.1.0.

Openlayers Flat Styles

The Openlayers community, while working on the WebGL rendering engine of their library, introduced a new API for defining styles in JSON, named “Flat Styles.” Inspired by the Mapbox Style specification, these styles use rules based on expressions, including external variables such as temporality. Frédéric and Guillaume took this opportunity to enrich the syntax, which will eventually allow for styling dynamically generated points along a line.

This feature is particularly useful for representing hiking routes or other outdoor activities, as seen in the Swiss Mobility project.

These developments will be the subject of a specific technical blog post.

Other Contributions

The PyGeoAPI community, very active during this sprint, continues to implement standards, with notable work supporting JSON-FG, Moving Features and Coverages.

An online JSON-FG linter was developed to validate a document’s conformity to the format.

Apache Sedona made a significant step by removing its dependencies on GeoTools, which conflicted with the Apache license, in favor of Apache SIS, thus ensuring the continuity of its functionalities.

Conclusion and Perspectives

These events represent an exceptional platform for collaboration and innovation in the open source geospatial field. They highlight the importance of communities as pillars of the open source approach to software development. The next major event will be FOSS4G Europe in Tartu, promising to unveil numerous innovations in the geospatial world. This sprint in Évora is a vivid example of how collaboration and knowledge sharing can propel innovation in the open source domain.