GeoBliki's Blog

We just took over a new Open Source project as part of our new GeoBPMS effort: Rools: a pure-Ruby Rules Engine. As we design processing workflows, Rools is the business logic side component. Analysts will add intelligence to the workflows using Decision tables in Excel (or as ruby rules). Integrated with OpenWFERu and XForms, GeoBPMS is garnering strength to support the geospatial business enterprise while remaining easy to integrate.

Please join us on Google Groups (Rools-dev or Rools users) to provide us with some feedback and join the community.

Monday I spoke with David Young and Scott Burton from Joyent on what it will take to add Slingshot to the GeoBliki codebase. The first thing as I suspected is that we have to have GeoBliki up and running with the current version of Rails. Currently we are using Rails 1.1.6. I had started a Rails 2.0 workspace a couple of months back and will need to finish getting that up and running before trying Slingshot.

Just-in time delivery of custom data products is becoming a must to support a broader range of users involved in humanitarian assistance, disaster recovery, emergency management such as fire management.

EO-1 hyperion data can be custom-processed to detect fires, floods, contaminants, oil slicks… This requires sophisticated workflows involving many web services across many organizations and cooperating universities. This technology borrows heavily from the Business Process Management world.

GeoBliki geospatial Business Process Management System (GeoBPMS) is composed of many open source components including Ruby on Rails, OpenWFEru, XForms, Business Rules and a few others…

Many developers have asked for details on how to integrate those components with Rails. Here is our first installment. Based on your feedback, we could take this in many different directions and even start a dialog.

Please, give us some feedback if this strikes your interest or if you have comments/questions/ideas.

We want to hear from you.

GeoBliki is involved in the Joyent Slingshot Early adopter program.

Paraphrasing from the Joyent announcement: Slingshot enables GeoBliki to work the same on and off(with synchronization) the internet. You will be able to drag and drop file into/out of Geobliki. Slingshot currently works with Windows and Macintosh OS X platforms.

Some technical information on Slingshot is available here

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for updates on our integration progress.

We know how to mass produce and disseminate data. We can even alert you when it is available based on your subscription.

But We cannot stop there.

With new capabilities such as Hyperspectral imagers from space or UAV’s, we opened up Pandora’s box. There is now an infinite way of looking at a particular scene. Are you interested in Fire, Water, Plume/Clouds, Contaminants, Oil Slicks…?

Are you Red Cross, USCG, Forest Service, USDA, First Responder or even NORTHCOM? This might be for you!

Our next challenge is to customize data products to your requirement and deliver it just-in-time for free (if we can).

This might include tasking a satellite or UAV! This might include using the expertise of scientists from NASA JPL or GSFC or even tap into one of many universities cooperating on this project (UMD, WUSTL, UAH, GMU…)

What is the secret sauce we are working on?

OGC standards… of course. and GeoRSS…

Think Workflows (but not BPEL:). Thanks John for your support and a great product with OpenWFEru

and down the road: BPMN…XPDL 2.0?…but that’s another post.