LocationTech Initiative Launched by the Eclipse Foundation

Fri, 2013/02/08 - 10:50 — Satri

Major news for geospatial open source, earlier this week the LocationTech Initiative was launched by the Eclipse Foundation.

From the official press release: "The Eclipse Foundation has launched a new initiative to support user driven development of location aware systems. The new LocationTech working group will allow companies to jointly develop and deploy components that bring location awareness to Enterprise IT. The Eclipse LocationTech initiative is led by Oracle, IBM, OpenGeo, and Actuate."

Its 4 initial areas of focus:

Storage and processing of massive data volume
Model driven design
Desktop, Web, and mobile mapping
Real time analysis of business critical data

I liked Direction Mag summary of how LocationTech complements the OGC and OSGeo: "In particularly, LocationTech offers a “full-service not-for-profit Foundation providing support for open source location aware technologies.” He ticked off this list of differentiators:

software licensed under commercial friendly open source licenses
intellectual property (IP) management services
a professionally-supported open source forge
full-service, not-for-profit staffed by full-time professional staff to support the ecosystem"