Our official final project review took place in Luxemburg on 3^rd December 2015, where we presented our software, innovation output, and achievements to our Reviewers and Project Officer. Once again, it was a pleasure to present our work, receive positive feedback, and discuss the PublicaMundi vision. We would like to express our gratitude to our Reviewers for their feedback and directions, to our Project Officer for an amazing collaboration, and of course to the European Union.

This work would not have been possible without the leadership and financial support of the European Union and the FP7 Work Programme. We are grateful for being given the opportunity to contribute, along with several other projects, in materializing our shared vision for an EU Data Economy.

We started with a simple idea: “Make open geospatial data easier to publish, use, and reuse” based on our own experiences and challenges in open data publishing. We intentionally and exclusively built upon, extended, and developed open source software. This allowed our work to benefit user communities and developers well beyond our reach. We exclusively focused and extended open standards for geospatial data, assisting in standardization and even delivering reference implementations. We worked side-by-side with data publishers and developers, with a single goal: to make their work easier, faster, and more creative.

After two years, we can be proud for our work and contributions. What we consider however as our single greatest achievement is that PublicaMundi has outgrown its original vision. The PublicaMundi software is not just a great open geospatial data catalogue, but something bigger than the sum of its parts.

PublicaMundi is a feature-complete Geospatial Data Infrastructure, handling the entire life-cycle of data sharing, discovery, and reuse. PublicaMundi is simple to use for data producers and developers, automates data handling and service provision, is compatible with the latest OGC and INSPIRE standards, extremely versatile and future-proof. Being cloud-based and inherently scalable, it is a cost-effective solution for the public and private sector across multiple domains that focus on geospatial information.

For more features you check this page, the first production deployment of PublicaMundi as a national data catalogue, and of course our source code repository.

With the project officially complete, our work continuous towards further improving PublicaMundi, extending it with even more services, and pursuing its deployment world-wide.

Feel free to contact us if you intend to use or extend PublicaMundi, contribute in its development, or have an interesting idea!

It brings us great pleasure to share this news since pycsw is an integral part of PublicaMundi, being extended and adapted to support scalable geospatial data publishing and discovery. Also, our own Scientific Coordinator, Angelos Tzotsos, a long time member of the pycsw Project Steering Committee (PSC), has been appointed as the pycsw project officer.

pycsw is an OGC CSW server implementation written in Python. pycsw implements clause 10 (HTTP protocol binding – Catalogue Services for the Web, CSW) of the OpenGIS Catalogue Service Implementation Specification, version 2.0.2. Started in 2010 (more formally announced in 2011), pycsw allows for the publishing and discovery of geospatial metadata, providing a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. The project is certified OGC Compliant, and is an OGC Reference Implementation. pycsw is Open Source, released under an MIT license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

pycsw powers numerous high profile activities such as US data.gov/geoplatform.gov, Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), US National Geothermal Data System (NGDS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the WMO World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre (WOUDC).

Graduating OSGeo incubation includes fulfilling requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance, and general good project operation. Graduation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users and the community at large an added confidence in the viability and safety of the project.

The project steering committee says, “The pycsw team is thrilled to be recognized as a full OSGeo project. Being part of OSGeo is important for us since OSGeo supports the collaborative development of open source geospatial software.  There have been strong ties between the two communities with pycsw developers being involved as charter members, represented in local OSGeo chapters and helping with various FOSS4G activities. We are very happy to be included as part of OSGeo and a member of such an esteemed group of projects.”

Jeff McKenna, mentor of the incubation process says: “It has been a pleasure to work with the pycsw team throughout this process.  pycsw complements the OSGeo stack with a lightweight method to share and discover geospatial data.  I want to thank the pycsw team for their continued passion for FOSS4G.“