The University Of South Brittanny Portable Compilation of open-source GIS & BI tools for windows workstations
GIS-BI open-source softwares on a USB stick derived from the work of Joanne Cook on Portable GIS version 2. In the title Portable UBSOSGISBI UBS means University of South Brittany, OS stands for Open-Source, GIS for Geographic Information System, BI for Business Intelligence i.e. the decision field. This is the open-source part of the "platforme géodécisionnelle de l'Université de Bretagne-Sud", which includes all softwares and data allowing to make a decision in the middle and long terms resulting from statistical processing or a management reasoning by taking into account in particular the time and location dimensions. It is reasonable to exclude software packages commonly (and mainly) present in the transactional information system (On Line Transactional Processing).
The philosophy behind this idea was to provide beginners with a readily-installed and configured stack of open source GIS-BI tools that would run under the Windows environment without needing emulation or a live CD. Considering that the often difficult installation and configuration of open source GIS-BI of often difficult, I hope to make it easier for beginners, so that they won't be put off before it gets interesting and funny. Moreover, having a fully self-contained GIS system may prove useful in a number of real-life situations.
The current set of software includes, as in Portable GIS:
- Desktop GIS packages QGIS 1.02 (with GRASS plugin), OpenEV 1.8, uDig 1.1.1 and GvSIG 1.1.2,
- FWTools 2.4.2 (GDAL and OGR toolkit with PROJ and GEOS)
- Xampplite 1.6.2 (Apache2/MySQL5/PHP5),
- the MySQL 5.0.45 RDBMS with the admin PHP web admin application phpMyAdmin,
- PostgreSQL (version 8.4)/PostGIS (version 1.4 et 1.5),
- MapServer 4.9, OpenLayers 2.8, TileCache 2.10, FeatureServer 1.12 and GeoServer 1.7.6 web applications.
The package and menu system are all open source, but each component has a separate license. Some of the components have been altered in order to make them drive-letter independent.
Provisoes:
There are the same proviso's as for Portable GIS:
- This is not for production use. In order for the end user to keep a minimum configuration there are a number of security issues and as such its use should be limited to demonstration and home use only.
- It is also not “stealth GIS”- no attempt has been made to leave no trace on the host system.
Differences from Portable GIS version 2:
- BI softwares built on Pentaho Community Edition 3.6 platform (Mondrian/JPivot, Pentaho Analysis Tool 0.7, Pentaho BI Server 3.6, Pentaho Administration Console 3.6, Pentaho Web Ad hoc Query Reporter 3.6, Pentaho Report Designer 3.6, Pentaho Schema Workbench 3.2, Pentaho Aggregation Designer 1.2, Pentaho Design Studio 3.6, Pentaho Metadata Editor 3.6, Weka (Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) 3.7.1) or compatible (xmla4js r73, BIRT rcp report designer 2.5.2, iReport 3.7.3, jRubik 0.9.7, OpenOffice.org 3.2 Base with Oracle Report and MySQL connector for OpenOffice extensions), ETL software (Talend Open Studio 4.1, Pentaho Data Integrator 4.0.1), GeoETL (Spatial Data Integrator 3.2, GeoKettle) and Spatial OLAP (GeoMondrian/Spatialytics) applications. GRASS 6.3 software added because of QGIS GRASS plugin problems. Other GIS softwares added are: Pgrouting 1.03 / PostGIS Raster 0.1.6d (formerly WKT Raster) extensions, Python 2.6.1 and R 2.11.0 geocapables and ORDBMS connectable languages, OpenJump 1.3.1 & jGrass 1.1 & BeeGIS (a uDig 1.2 plugin) java RCP Eclipse software. Open source generic RDBMS clients (Eclipse SQL Explorer 3.5.1, SQL Workbench/J build 109) or specific administration tools (MySQL Workbench Community Edition, SQLyog Community Edition - MySQL GUI).
- French/English versions for menu system
- Specific configuration scenarios (for Windows Vista/Seven systems, multi-users, with some unwritable directories)
- drivers for commercial softwares that provide free user edition Oracle (Oracle 10g Express Edition), Microsoft (Microsoft SQL Server 2008 r2 Express Edition with Advanced Services) that are functional in BI or GIS field.
- The InnoDB engine is enabled to make MySQL behave as a true relational DBMS.
- PostgreSQL Databases are not by default spatial ones for two reasons : in BI domain, a database may only be relational and we want to provide the choice between (no PostGIS / PostGIS 1.4 / PostGIS 1.5). PgRooting and WKT Raster, PL/pgSQL TIGER Geocoder can be added in a PostGIS database. PL/R, PL/python and PL/Java procedural languages can be enabled in a database.
- SQLite 3, SpatiaLite/RasterLite self-contained, no server, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engines.
- Apache Derby 10.6, an open source relational database implemented entirely in Java and now included in Java SDK.
- Apache jUDDI 3 server and Apache pluto 1.1 portal added on geoserver software stack as java web application for interoperability and web services use.
- PHP MapScript module, OGR/PHP Extension and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) SDK for PHP are also added on XampLite server stack.