Implementing an OpenLayers HTML5 Mapping Library

This project developed a set of raster utility classes and layer types for inclusion in OpenLayers to allow for statistical analysis, manipulation, and additional rendering functionality for raster data sources. The deliverables are patches for the OpenLayers development branch that include the new functionality, examples and documentation to demonstrate its use, and comprehensive unit test coverage. The intention was to get this newly developed functionality into the next stable release of OpenLayers. An additional component of an HTML5 toolkit is for the opensource JavaScript mapping framework OpenLayers. These tools are especially useful to USGS web mapping needs. This effort delivered a new set of classes within the OpenLayers library. These classes enable developers to more rapidly develop dynamic visualization because it is being done on the client with client resources (as opposed to send requests to a web service and awaiting a response as the system processes a much larger set of data).

This small investment aims to jump start the open source community in bringing dynamic raster processing to the web browser client via HTML5 and Javascript. As we are seeing now in the news, this is where technology is heading as processors get faster, storage gets larger, and the browser client becomes an application framework.



Principal Investigator : John Aguinaldo, Cassandra C Ladino



Benefits

• Provide methods to do a variety of GIS processes and analyses on raster imagery in a Web application
• Provides Web Application developers new ways to work with raster data
• Collaboration beyond USGS in exchange for better product

Deliverables

• Presentation given at CDI-hosted Webinar (September 2012)
• Tom Kunicki of the USGS Wisconsin's CIDA team jumped in with great ideas for refining and expanding the functionality that was developed under this project. Tom successfully merged improvements into the Raster development branch of the OpenLayers GitHub project.
• Tom Kunicki plans to present this work at the upcoming FOSS4G-NA conference in Minnesota. (May 2013)
• OpenLayers Raster branch on GitHub (content no longer available)
• There has not yet been a major OpenLayers 2.x release since this functionality was developed last September. Work is actively being done on two release branches 2.13 and the exciting new 3.0.
  • It's possible will forgo the 2.13 branch to ready the code for the new 3.0 branch
  • Contributions from the OpenLayers community are expected once this code hits the next major release.