Announcing OpenGeo

We recently unveiled OpenGeo.org, the online home for the OpenGeo team.

Back in 2001, OpenGeo was just a twinkle in our eye. When they started GeoServer, Mark Gorton, Chris Holmes, and their collaborators saw the huge potential for open source, collaborative technologies to help transportation-planning bodies make better decisions.

We realized early on that in order to do complicated transportation modeling right, first you need to know ‘where the roads are.’ This discrete technical problem shed light on a huge opportunity: every municipality in the world needs to manage and share location-based information, whether it’s with colleagues, parallel agencies, or private citizens. But the technology tools to meet this basic need were inadequate.

Sharing location-based information – whether road data, crime statistics, or water quality readings – was expensive and cumbersome, partly due to proprietary tools that relied on closed formats.

GeoServer is a simple concept: share maps and their underlying information. Make it easy to share location-based data via maps on the web, and more groups will share more data. How? Follow open standards, support a huge variety of formats, play well with other technologies, and you lower the barriers to sharing and using data.

GeoServer has really taken off, and along the way, bolstering a larger community of production for open geo-based technologies. TOPP has become a leader in the field, ontributing to related open source tools (including OpenLayers and GeoWebCache) and doing consulting work for clients like Google, Landgate, and Portland TriMet.

And now the team that builds GeoServer and related products has a new home. Take a look!