by ASF Members Martin Desruisseaux and Sergio Fernández

The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache Community of Open Source software projects. Various recent Apache projects have a geospatial focus.

One of them, the Spatial Information System (SIS) project, has from the beginning been committed to the implementation of OGC standards. SIS is a free software Java language library for developing geospatial applications. SIS enables efficient representation of coordinates for searching, data clustering, archiving and other spatial functions. The library implements OGC GeoAPI Implementation Specification 3.0 interfaces for use in desktop or server applications.The Apache SIS project recently released version 0.6 of their Java library, with support for ISO 19115 metadata and ISO 19111 referencing by coordinates. This library is among the first implementations of ISO 19162, also published as the OGC Well-known text representation of coordinate reference systems. Apache SIS also provides support for reading and writing Coordinate Reference System (CRS) objects from GML documents and performing map projections with those CRSs. The Apache SIS metadata model has been updated to the ISO 19115-1 standard published in 2015 while maintaining compatibility (as deprecated methods) with the older version published in 2003. This update also integrates the ISO 19115-2 extension for imagery.

Recently developers of Apache Marmotta, an Apache Software Foundation project that provides an open platform for Linked Data, have been working, in collaboration with the Google's Summer of Code 2015, to extend their triplestore (KiWi) to support GeoSPARQL. KiWi is a high performance transactional triplestore backend for Sesame building on top of relational databases. It has optional support for rule-based reasoning and versioning. The new extension to KiWi makes use of the spatial support that PostgreSQL provides with the PostGIS extension, providing a full open source GeoSPARQL stack. This new feature is expected to be shipped in the upcoming 3.4 release, providing new geospatial support for querying data in many of the publishing scenarios in which Marmotta is being used (e.g. tourism).

There is interest on organizing a dedicated geospatial track in the upcoming ApacheCon in Vancouver. The community invites everybody interested in the topic to submit a talk --the Apache page on MarkMail where you can sign in to submit a topic is available at http://markmail.org/message/2gypkad7f5xcjzyy


Martin Desruisseaux, Manager of R&D at Geomatys, was one of the initiators of the OGC GeoAPI project. Sergio Fernández is a software engineer at Redlink GmbH and a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences of Salzburg. Both are committers and members of the Apache Software Foundation.