Spatialytics is an open source lightweight cartographic component which enables navigation in Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) data cubes. It aims to be integrated into existing dashboard frameworks in order to produce interactive geo-analytical dashboards. Such dashboards support the decision making process by including the geospatial dimension in the analysis of enterprise data.

Spatialytics is based on the OpenLayers web mapping client, and uses olap4j for connection to OLAP data sources. For now, it requires GeoMondrian, the first implementation of a Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) server, to be able to display members of a geospatial dimension on a map.

Spatialytics allows then:

• the connection with a Spatial OLAP server such as GeoMondrian
• the navigation in the geospatial data cubes
• and the cartographic representation of some measures and members of a geospatial dimension as static or dynamic choropleth maps (for now)

Spatialytics is a realization of the GeoSOA research group (headed by Prof. Thierry Badard, http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca) of the Department of geomatics sciences at Laval University, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. Spatialytics is released under the terms of the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and of the BSD license. Please see the "License and copyright" section for more details about the licensing terms.

The Spatialytics development team is composed of:

• Project coordinator: Thierry Badard
• Lead developer: Etienne Dubé

Spatialytics is distributed under the following licenses:

• Server component (Java servlet, under directory src/): Eclipse Public License version 1.0
  See src/LICENSE.html for detailed license information
  
• Web Client component (JavaScript code, HTML pages and other resources): The Clear BSD license
  See webapp_html/LICENSE.txt for detailed license information
  

External components and libraries included in this distribution are available under their respective licenses; please refer to the different projects' web sites for more information.

You must accept the terms of the license agreements to use and distribute this software.

Spatialytics is Copyright (c) 2007-2009, GeoSOA research group, Departement of geomatics sciences, Laval University, Quebec, Canada.

For future releases and more information, visit us at http://www.spatialytics.org.

All comments or questions about Spatialytics are welcome! Two mailing lists are available:

• spatialytics-users, for problems, questions and comments about the usage of Spatialytics.
• spatialytics-devel, for problems, questions and comments relative to development tasks with Spatialytics and for feature request.

To subscribe or to sign off the lists, please visit:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spatialytics-users
or
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spatialytics-devel

There is a lot of work to do on a project like Spatialytics and your help will be greatly appreciated. So we gladly welcome any contribution to further development, implementation and feedback on usage of Spatialytics.

Nevertheless, it is often hard for new developers or users to work out where they can help. To begin with, we suggest you to subscribe to the mailing lists. Listen in for a while, to learn how others make contributions.

You can get your local working copy of the latest code. Review the todo list, choose a task or perhaps you have noticed something that needs to be corrected. Make the changes, do the testing, generate a patch, and post to the devel mailing list.

Document writers and translators are usually the most wanted people so if you like to help but you're not familiar with the innermost technical details, don't worry: we have work for you! ;-)

At present, no release of Spatialytics is available. It is still an experimental, in development project.

Source code of Spatialytics is currently only available on the Subversion repository of the project. Please consult section entitled "SVN repository and issue tracking system" for more details about how to get the source code.

The source code available on the SVN repository is not a release version. The API is expected to change during the development process. THIS EXPERIMENTAL VERSION SHOULD NOT BE USED IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. IT IS PROVIDED AS IS, COMES WITH NO GUARANTEES AND WITHOUT TECHNICAL SUPPORT.

The Spatialytics project is also available on Sourceforge at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/spatialytics

A subversion repository for direct access to the last version of the Spatialytics sources has been set up. The project subversion repository can be checked out through SVN with the following instruction set:


This is a generic Subversion checkout command which will pull all modules, tags and/or branches of the project. You will want to add '/trunk' to the HTTPS URL above to check out only trunk (main development line).

You can also directly browse the SVN at:

http://spatialytics.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/spatialytics

An issue tracking system is also available online at:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=262206&atid=1131656

Instructions for building and installing Spatialytics are provided in the README.txt file included in the root directory of the source code.

You can also access the slides and a video (part 1 | part 2) of a presentation (in English) given by Dr. Thierry Badard during the SummerCamp/GeoCamp 2009 event which was held in Ottawa at the Algonquin College on May 13-15, 2009. It was an opportunity for the GeoSOA research group to present the last developments performed on the free and open source geospatial Business Intelligence software stack designed by the research group. GeoMondrian, the first open source implementation of a Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) server and Spatialytics, a cartographic component which enables the navigation in the geo-analytical data cubes and aims at being integrated in various dashboard frameworks, have been presented and demoed.

An online demo of Spatialytics is also available online. It demonstrates how Spatialytics coupled with GeoMondrian works! Please, visit the following URL to access the demo:

http://geosoa.scg.ulaval.ca/Spatialytics/

Notes about the demo:

3 measures are available and can be accessed through the modification of the MDX query:

• Population (by default when the page loads)
• Naissances (# of birth)
• Décès (# of death)

Data from 2001 to 2003 are available.

Values of these different measures are in no way related to any reality (or maybe the population of black flies in some regions of Canada ;-)). Boundaries of provinces, economical regions and local administrative divisions are also false.

At present, only 2 thematics can be selected (see Thematic drop-down list) and be changed live:

• choropleth maps based on dynamic equal intervals
• choropleth maps based on fixed intervals

More thematics should be available soon. A student funded by the Google Summer of Code 2009 program, under the umbrella of OSGeo, is currently working on the extension to thematic mapping capabilities of Spatialytics.

Moving the mouse cursor on a province, an economical regions, etc. highlights the polygon of the geospatial feature. The value of the measure is then displayed in the Information box.

To drill down the map, just select the first icon at the left top corner of the map and click a province, an economical region, etc. The drill operation implemented in this demo is a drill by occurence.

If you want to roll-up, just select the second icon at the left top corner of the map and click an economical region, a local administrative division with the left mouse button. The roll-up operation implemented in this demo will retrieve all parent members in the hierarchy of the geospatial dimension. It is a roll-up by level operation.

The following features are not yet supported in Spatialytics, but are planned for future releases:

• More map-driven OLAP navigation operators (drill by position, by member, roll-up to parent, etc.)
• Dimension member selection / navigation controls
• Legend display
• New thematic mapping styles:
  
  • Choropleth: quantiles, other statistical distributions
  • Graphics: histograms, pie charts, ...
  • Styles for other geometry types (lines and points)
  • Some styles or combination of styles allowing representation of multiple members/measures on a single map feature
  • Multi maps: Maps for different periods of time
  • ...

If you use Spatialytics and like it, please let us know. We will try to maintain in this section a list of companies, governmental bodies, not-for-profit organisations, labs or universities that use Spatialytics, develop or plan to develop packaged solutions based on it.

Thanks!