Geopublisher is a software to create and publish multimedia atlases and has been developed to overcome the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data. The targeted users are scientists and institutions that want to communicate their results to the general public. The exported atlases are user-friendly and can therefore easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Video

By watching the following video tutorial you will learn the steps you need to create and export a basic atlas using the free Geopublisher software. The video takes about 5 minutes and its purpose is to show the basic steps needed to create a first atlas with Geopublisher.

After four months of development, we today release version 1.3 of Geopublisher and AtlasStyler as the new stable release. A general overview of Geopublisher has already been given in an earlier post, so this post is just summarizing some of the new features that ship with this release.

New features in Geopublisher 1.3:

Bugfixes: Geopublisher 1.3 now comes with a 72h bugfix guarantee! If you find & report a bug, we promise to look for a solution within 72h!

What is Geopublisher?

Geopublisher is an atlas authoring system which allows easy publication of geo-data, documents, images, videos, and statistics in form of digital multimedia atlases. These atlases can be understood as minimal, pre-configured end-user GIS which offer selected functionality only where its meaningful.
Geopublisher provides tools for quality assurance and multilingual meta-data management. No in-depth knowledge of HTML, SLD or XML is required to create an atlas. Atlases can be directly published on CD, DVD, memory stick, external hard-drive or the Internet. The software is platform-independent and Open-Source.

Features as a glance:

Geopublishing.org software has some unique features which make it especially applicable in the fields of international research, participatory GIS, capacity building, and development cooperation. These features include:

In the last months Geopublishing.org focussed its development efforts on the Geopublisher application. Besides internal changes like switching the underlying Geotools library to the latest version, upcoming Geopublisher 1.3 will come with an easy-to-use statistics module which allows to publish interactive geo-statistical charts integrated in your digital atlases. Wait for a dedicated blog entry about the feature when 1.3 will be released in early October. 

 But also did some nice new features slip into the AtlasStyler SLD Editor dialog, especially into the labeling pane. The following pages provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the new labeling functions like new placement options, a beautiful halo effect, multiple attribute labeling and better generalization using a label priority attribute.

The german IT magazine iX published an article by Matthias Lendholt about the visualisation of geodata with the OGC SymbologyEncoding standard in its 3/2009 edition, 108pp. The article is called "Topografische Punkte - Geodaten visualisieren mit Symbology Encoding" and is available at the price of 0,50€ at the heise kiosk.

The article describes the basic concepts of SymbologyEncoding and gives examples on how to write SE files manually. The only application mentioned for the creation of SLD/SE files is AtlasStyler. This encourages us to follow our belief: AtlasStyler is the best SLD/SE editor available! So if you are planning any projects where you deal with SLD/SE files - avoid prorietary software; use AtlasStyler and think about investing in a sustainable FOSSGIS project. 

Geopublisher and AtlasStyler have been presented at the FOSSGIS conference 2009.

FOSSGIS is the acronym for Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformation systems and is the leading conference on this topic in German-speaking countries. The FOSSGIS 2009 was organized by FOSSGIS e.V. together with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover.

Wikisquare - the main service provider for Geopublisher in the  German-speaking countries  - presented the Geopublisher and AtlasStyler applications during the conference in Hannover. We got some interesting feedback from people using the AtlasStyler with different WMS servers.

Presentation slides and paper are available in German-only:

Krüger, Stefan A.; Judex, Michael and Thamm Hans-Peter (2009):

Erstellung von Multimedia-Atlanten mit dem Geopublisher. paper and slides of the presentation at the  FOSSGIS Conference 2009, Hannover, 17.-19. March 2009 (Link to all conference publications)

Sourcecode and bug trackers

For interested developers there is an English-speaking developers portal at wald.intevation.de. There you can access the source-code via SVN or report bugs and feature-request.

Ohloh

Ohloh is a webpage that features comprehensive metrics and analysis on thousands of open source projects. We are also listed at Ohloh:

JavaDoc

The JavaDoc HTML pages are automatically generated from annotations within the Java sourcecode. Its purpose is to provide a browsable reference that describes the API for programmers that are interested in extending or reusing the code. It's updated with every development release.

Developers-Mailinglist

For interested developers and more in-depth discussions on Geopublisher technology, you are welcome to join the developers mailinglist. Use this link to join the English speaking mailinglist for Geopublisher und AtlasStyler developers.