GeoServer
= an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data.
URL = http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Welcome
Description
"The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.
While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.
"It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are." (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/mark-gorton-ceo.html)
Example
"Portland, Oregon's TriMet bus system is building a multi-modal trip planner using OpenLayers [updated], an open-source visualization tool for GeoServer data, that will let people plan trips involving multiple forms of transportation.
"If you say, 'I want to bike to the bus and then walk from there,' Google and MapQuest have no idea what you're talking about," Gorton explained. "But it's actually really useful information if you're talking about a world where you're trying to get people out of their cars." (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/mark-gorton-ceo.html)