About Placesmart Solutions

We are a small business, Geodavic Inc., that makes its living from working in the oil & gas and telecommunications industries providing expertise in Project Management, Business Analysis and Architecture work in GIS. In addition to this, we also do research into spatial database technology with particular focus on location based services. This website (www.placesmartsolutions.com) showcases some of that research and leverages the following open source technologies...

OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers as slippy maps. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bing Maps. This library allows developers without a GIS background to very easily display tiled web maps hosted on a public server, with optional tiled overlays. It can load feature data from GeoJSON files, style it and create interactive layers, such as markers with popups when clicked.

D3.js (or just D3 for Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of the widely implemented SVG, HTML5, and CSS standards. In contrast to many other libraries, D3.js allows great control over the final visual result. D3.js is used on hundreds of thousands of websites. Some popular uses include creating interactive graphics for online news websites, information dashboards for viewing data, and producing maps from GIS map making data. In addition, the exportable nature of SVG enables graphics created by D3 to be used in print publications.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.

Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open source enterprise search platform, written in Java, from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features[1] and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr also has geo-spatial search, including multiple points per documents and polygons. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.

PostGIS is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Sails.js (or Sails) is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application framework developed atop the Node.js environment, released as free and open-source software under the MIT License. It is designed to make it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js web applications and APIs, and enables applications to be built with 100% JavaScript. This not only includes models, views, and controllers; but also configuration files and adapters (e.g., PostgreSQL or MongoDB database connectors).

GeoServer is an open source server for sharing geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer is a OGC compliant implementation of a number of open standards such as Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Service (WMS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS). Additional formats and publication options are available including Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) and extensions for Catalogue Service (CSW) and Web Processing Service (WPS).