IGN Report 2008

French Geoportal

Contact name: Didier Richard

First draft for the Annual Report - Still needs to be re-read by IGNF people.

Key Accomplishments

IGN France is the Mapping Agency of France, in charge of acquiring, maintening and delivering reference datasets for France mainland and overseas territories.

Launched in november 2006, the French Geoportal project (See [1]) aimed at :

providing a 2D/3D integrated viewer of French datasets ;

enabling access to these datasets through an API ;

downloading of datasets ;

many more objectives ...

Project news can be found over there : [2]

Most, but not all, of the software components for the Geoportal project comes from the Open Source Community :

Vector datasets (more than 10 millions of objects) are stored in postgreSQL/postGIS databases;

Image datasets (more than 10 tera-bytes of data) are tiled to be served by a TMS like service.

The API is based on OpenLayers and has been released in April, the 25th 2008. The chosen licence is BSD. It uses a key for giving access to datasets. See the API web site for more information : [3].

In July 2008, IGN France became of sponsor of OSGeo. In September 2008, we have been participating to FOSS4G in Cap Town. In the end of 2008, IGNF and the OSGeo french-spoken local chapter met in order to ease collaboration between the two organisations. As a matter of fact, using Open Source components has drove IGN France to enhance and participate in debugging those components more actively than before :

PROJ4 : addition of IGNF catalogue of CRS, generalization of plate-carre projection and addition of Gauss-Schreiber projection (all inputs have also been pushed to PROJ4JS);

GDAL/OGR : mainly addition of a new vector driver (Geoconcept Export) and amendments to support changes made to PROJ4;

Geotools : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch sent to Geotools's referencing developer;

GeoServer : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch not yet sent, on-going french translation contribution;

MapServer : addition of support for IGNF authority - patch sent to MapServer trac [4];

OpenLayers : the API is built on top of OpenLayers. We have made a lot of developments, but we cannot contribute to the project because of the CLA and legal international outcomes.

Areas for Improvement

The overall Geoportal process is quite cumbersome and a lot of improvements are in our 2009 TODO list :

improve speed when computing the tiles cache : we have started rewritting the warping engine of GDAL. As soon as it is stable enough, it will be handed over to the GDAL/OGR project for assessment;

improve WMS speed for vector datasets : we have made benchmarks for serving vector datasets through Geoserver. We have to find out ways of tuning it correctly in order to conform with INSPIRE (European legal framework - See [5]);

find a way for serving raster datasets with WMS/WCS : still the key issue is performance !

try to have one CLA (CCLA and ICLA) for all OSGeo projects to facilitate contributions of organisations like IGNF (Governmental Agency).

Opportunities to Help

Mainly, we will need help for having a common CLA for OSGeo projects.

Besides this main area, technical issues will be solve by direclty talking to OSGeo projects teams.

Outlook for 2009

This project is a 5 year project. 2009 will be the year for consolidating the infrastructure and collecting requirements for the next 5 year project ...