GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data. The project aims to surpass existing spatial data infrastructure solutions by integrating robust social and cartographic tools.
The World Bank and OpenGeo are leading a growing community of partners in defining and developing GeoNode. Initially, the GeoNode efforts have focused on serving and visualizing the data created by the Central America Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) initiative to assess and mitigate natural disaster risk.
At its core, the GeoNode is based on open source components GeoServer, GeoNetwork, Django, and GeoExt that provide a platform for sophisticated web browser spatial visualization and analysis. Atop this stack, the project has built a map composer and viewer, tools for analysis, and reporting tools. The GeoNode also supports facilities for styling data as well as collaborative features like ratings, comments, and tagging for data, maps, and styles. The GeoNode is built on four key tenets: Collaboration, Distribution, Cartography and Data collection.
To promote collaboration, the GeoNode is designed on Web 2.0 principles to:
- Make it extremely simple to share data
- Provide user statistics
- Easily add comments, ratings, tags
- Allow collaborative filtering
- Provide rankings of best ‘views’ and data sets contributed
- Highest rated, most viewed, most shared
- Allow connectivity between several GeoNode instances to augment the collaborative potential of government GIS programs
To secure distribution, the GeoNode enables:
- Simple installation and distribution
- Automatic metadata creation
- Versioned metadata
- Search via catalogues and search engines (Google)
To allow for flexible and cost-effective cartography, GeoNode incorporates open source software components:
- GeoExt – The JavaScript toolkit for rich web mapping applications
- OpenLayers – Pure JavaScript library powering the maps of GeoExt
- GeoNetwork – provides Web catalogue service
- GeoWebCache – Cache engine for WMS Tiles
- GeoServer – Standards based server for geospatial information
And, to promote data collection, the GeoNode is aimed to align incentives to create a sustainable Spatial Data Infrastructure to:
- Align efforts so that amateur, commercial, NGO and governmental creators all naturally collaborate
- Figure out workflows, tools and licenses that work to assure data quality
- To promote ‘living’ data, constantly evolving – authoritative and always up to date
The idea is to create a full featured platform for helping decision makers easily compose and share stories told with spatial data.