The Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) had been using GeoServer for some time. MTRI builds prototypes of analysis and data management systems for remote sensing data and derived products. And with clients like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Land Management, MTRI works with a lot of data.
Over the past few years, MTRI has moved toward open source technologies. MTRI uses GeoServer in many projects because of its flexibility and reliability.
“With proprietary products, if you wanted to do something non-standard, you would often run into bugs that you couldn’t resolve,” explains Tyler Erickson, a researcher at MTRI. In a robust open source project like GeoServer, the wider community is always available to answer questions and squash bugs.
In early 2008, MTRI hired OpenGeo to implement per-layer security in GeoServer.
“For a lot of our clients, we need good control of each data set,” explains Tyler. “We wanted to be able to run a single instance of GeoServer and give a different set of users control over specific layers of data.”
Transparency
OpenGeo began by setting up a project tracker, to give MTRI a real window into the work.
Tyler appreciated, “the refreshing transparency. I could actually log on and see what had been done. I could get updates on how things were going whenever I wanted to.”
Expertise
“I was eager to implement per layer security,” says Andrea Aime, who worked on the project. “This feature matters to a number of organizations, so we were glad to develop it for MTRI.”
Andrea is a leader in open source projects like GeoServer and GeoTools. In a former life, he developed research prototypes for the European Union and the Italian state administration.
With a range of projects with large, diverse data sets, MTRI needed access control at the layer and feature type level, in addition to the service level. Andrea’s solution introduced a ‘security wrapper’ into GeoServer, an elegant solution that allows the rest of GeoServer’s code to remain unaware of granular security settings.
Results
“It was quite a pleasant experience,” reports Tyler. “Once Andrea started working on it, the first prototype appeared within about a week.”
Today, MTRI is using per-layer security in projects for the Department of Transportation and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Once OpenGeo delivered the enhancement to MTRI, we rolled the new functionality into GeoServer version 1.7.0. Since the code is open source, other GeoServer users can take advantage of per-layer security it in their projects.
And Tyler is involved with the GeoServer community. His contributions include a tutorial on how to use GeoServer and PostGIS to track tropical storms in GoogleEarth.