Smart Cities – MapStore as the new geOrchestra viewer for Rennes and others

In 2018 the geOrchestra community decided to look for a successor for the brave but aging geographic data viewer, Mapfishapp, developed in 2007. Five members of the community decided to get together in order to fund the needed developpements to have MapStore become the next geOrchestra SDI viewer. These organisations were Rennes Métropole, communauté d’agglomération du Puy-en-Velay, Région Hauts-de-France, Région Grand-Est and Centre Régional Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes de l’Information Géographique (CRAIG). Rennes Métropole was appointed to lead this project.

Rennes is a major city in northwest France, in the beautiful region of Bretagne. Rennes Métropole has introduced geOrchestra since 2016 as its main geographic internal portal and SDI portal.   geOrchestra is a spatial data infrastructure based on popular open source products GeoServer, GeoWebcache, GeoNetwork (and now also MapStore) plus a number additional microservices that deal with topics like security, asynchronous data extraction and more. Modules interact using OGC interfaces or REST APIs. geOrchestra is widely used and in very active development.

The work performed with Rennes Metropole was twofold, on a side we implemented a number of enhancements for MapStore itself for the integration with geOrchestra then we ported a few existing applications to work with MapStore.

A number of enhancements that have seen the light in the last 1.5 years in MapStore have been funded by this work, like the Application Context functionality which allows administrators to configure an Application Context in MapStore in order to customize the set of plugins and default map contexts available to end user (more information here) or the in map Map Catalogue which allows end users to quickly switch between different maps or the Map Templates, which are predefined maps that give users a quick and easy way to load a whole bunch of background and layers specific for a theme or scenario, like Cadastrial data, Mobility data and so on.

Application Context – Plugins configuration

Map Catalog at work

Map Templates at work

The new MapStore integration is now in use at Rennes Métropole and nearly in production in CRAIG and Puy-en-Velay. Some other organizations are in an active test phase too. Here below you can see a specific Application Context for the management of trees and gardens called geojardins.

Geojardins MapStore Context

Additional specific geOrchestra plugins have been also migrated from the old geOrchestra webgis to be available in MapStore as extensions. Here below you can see these plugins in action, the Cadastrapp tool, to consult cadastral data in the geOrchestra viewer based on MapStore,

Cadastrapp tool

The Urbanisme tool, to consult urban planning information.

Urbanisme tool

Both plugins have been realized on top of the new extensions system of MapStore, funded by the five members cited above (more information here).

We are proud to work with organizations like Rennes Metropole in such challenging projects where we actually see our work impacting important use cases and being able to make a difference.

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with open source products like GeoServer, MapStore, GeoNode and GeoNetwork through our Enterprise Support Services Subscription Services or Professional Training Services offer, feel free to contact us!

The GeoSolutions Team,