LOUIS@ City Lab
Local On-line Urban Information System
City Lab is
developing a web-based information system called LOUIS (Local On-line Urban
Information System), which is based on OLIVER
(On-Line ViewER), an open-source viewer supported by MassGIS.
Currently, we are working primarily on LOUIS V (pr. Louis the 5th), which is the LOUIS Viewer. In the meantime, the inner workings of the
full-fledged LOUIS system are being re-written (mostly in Java and C++)
according to OpenGIS standards. The final system will be a fully operational
web-based, open-source urban information system targeted primarily to
municipalities and other local authorities.
The development of LOUIS has been supported by small grants from towns
participating in City Lab’s Hometown
Initiative as well as by other support from global project sponsors at our international project
centers. Once the LOUIS platform has
been fully developed, we plan to develop specific higher-level applications
targeted to individual municipal departments, such as the Roadway Information
System shown below. The LOUIS
development schedule will depend on the generosity of our City Lab supporters,
but we hope to release the basic viewer (LOUIS V) by the spring of 2008 and a
more advanced interactive version, including editing and thematic mapping (LOUIS
IV, Louis the 4th) by the
end of 2008, to coincide with the 20th Anniversary of the Venice
Project Center.
LOUIS is being
designed to be fully OGC-compliant
and it is meant to provide the core functionality to be embedded in municipal
information systems that adopt the City Knowledge
approach to urban
data farming. For more information,
you can download a powerpoint presentation containing
additional examples of upcoming LOUIS implementations as well as some diagrams
outlining the 
inner workings of LOUIS.
Current
Status
LOUIS is based
on Geoserver and it is planned to be based
on AJAX technology (similar to GoogleMaps) or on a very light client. Current
development is being carried out on a LINUX server at the Venice Project
Center in Venice. Currently you can already
open maps served out from the Venice server, by using a free viewer such as
uDIG or
the Geoserver’s simple viewer.
The current
effort is to provide an “easy” upload feature called PlopMAP for GIS layers and
a similar one for datasets (PlopDATA).
An early
release is planned for April 2008.
For more
questions you can contact Prof. Fabio Carrera,
director of City Lab.
City Lab [Homepage,
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