2015-05-29

Cartaro is a new web mapping platform that makes the power of some of the best open source geospatial components available in a content management system (CMS). Cartaro allows to set-up and run small websites or complex web applications with maps and geodata.

It is also suitable for geoportals and spatial data infrastructures whenever there is the need to get everything up and running without much individual programming. The geospatial software stack used in Cartaro consists of PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache and OpenLayers. The whole stack is managed from within the CMS Drupal.

The geospatial components bring professional aspects of geodata management into the CMS. This is namely the ability to persist data as true geometries, thus allowing for complex and fast queries and analyses. It does also mean supporting a whole range of data formats and the most relevant OGC standards. For the latter Cartaro can extend the handling of user roles and permissions, which already exists in Drupal, to define fully granular read and write permissions for the web services, too. In the presentation we will first explain our basic motivation behind Cartaro: that is bringing geospatial functionality to the huge community of CMS developers and users.

This community, which is of course much larger than the classical FOSS4G community, has a great potential to make more and better use of geodata than it was possible with most existing tools. We will then demonstrate how far the integration with the CMS reaches and present the Drupal user interface that allows to configure most features of Cartaro.

We will show how to create, edit and map geospatial content with Cartaro and we will demonstrate the publication of this content as an OGC web service. We will also go into some details concerning the architecture of Cartaro and explain how we tackled specific problems. A glimpse of the some use cases will demonstrate the real potential of Cartaro. It will also show how the focus and functionality of a Cartaro based application can be extended with the installation of any of the Drupal modules that exist for almost every task one could imagine.

The presentation will close with the future perspectives for Cartaro. From a technical point of view this includes the roadmap for the next months. But it also includes a discussion of our ideas about Cartaro’s role as self-supporting bridge between the geo and not-so-geo world of open source software.

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