OpenWIS Opensource Software
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 2013-09-26

OpenWIS OpenSource Software The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has been working for several years towards upgrading its global infrastructure to support all of its international programmes of work, both operational and research-based, to collect, share and disseminate information. The new infrastructure is called the WIS ( WMO Information System). It identifies three top level functions, namely: • GISC: Global Information System Centre; • DCPC: Data Collection and Production Centre; • NC: National Centre. Météo-France, the UK Met Office, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the Korean Meteorological Administration and Meteo France International have developed the OpenWIS software, coupled with their existing systems, to perform the three functions required by the WMO Information System; that is, GISC, DCPC and NC. Based on opensource bricks, with GeoNetwork, OpenAM, JBoss, Apache, Solr and PostGreSQL, OpenWIS is going to become opensource. Beyond the WIS requirements, the OpenWIS consortium is building new functionalities for OpenWIS that will fit the OGC (OpenGeospatial Consortium) and INSPIRE (European directive) aspects, with standards OGC interfaces, a portal providing the viewer function with the discovery, search and request possibilities, and in a short future the billing and the transformation services. The current functional components of OpenWIS are: • Data Service and its cache of essential data • Metadata Service (ISO19115 catalogue synchronised with OAI-PMH protocol) • Security Service • Monitoring and Control • Portal (Discovery, Search, Browse, Request, Subscription) Météo France operates various dissemination tools. OpenWIS provide a generic interface that Météo France has adapted, covering requests for dissemination and their monitoring. OpenWIS interacts with data sources to respond to ad hoc or periodic subscription requests either directly via harness connections or relying on SOA OGC infrastructure. The new challenge of the consortium is to share the opensource model and expand membership beyond the founding members. The reflexion within the consortium enables to give some trends: • A steering committee for the integration of new functionalities (spontaneous or not) • One or two licences (the portal and the metadata component inheriting of the GeoNetwork licence) • A strong but reduced team for the initial developpement (MetOffice and Meteo France) • Git for the management of versioning and integration • The will to put the soft on the shelves of the World Meteorological Organisation • Entrance in the opensource area by the end of 2013