18 April 2007: The GeoServer announced the release of version 1.5.0 on April 18th . The officials said GeoServer will provide a complete solution for serving spatial data, as the primary focus has been support for raster formats, starting with GeoTiff, ArcGrid, World Images, GTOPO30, and image mosiacs and pyramids.
Being an open source tool GeoServer is focused on open standards making the rasters available as a Web Map Service, but also through the Web Coverage Service specification, which gives access to the raw data, not just the final image. The WCS passes all OGC Compliance tests, and will be fully certified very soon. Other notable improvements for this release include easier adding of data through the web admin tools, better support for Google Earth KML, performance and scalability improvements.
GeoServer has been an open source, standards based implementation of web services for publishing geospatial data. It is an integral part of the ‘geospatial web’ connecting a wide variety of spatial data sources to a wide variety of clients. GeoServer can be downloaded from SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver).
The new raster and coverage support to GeoServer makes it a solution for serving geospatial data. Adding to the the variety of vector formats already supported such as Shapefile, PostGIS, Oracle, DB2, ArcSDE and more, are now a variety of raster formats such as GeoTiff, World tiff/png/jpeg, ArcGrid, GTOPO30, and more. Along with direct support for these formats are some interesting plug-ins which allow users to create image pyramids and mosaics.
GeoServer is an Open Source server that connects your information to the geospatial web. Its focus is easy of use and support for standards, including serving as WFS 1.0 Reference Implementation (and soon to be 1.1 as well). For more information about GeoServer visit www.geoserver.org
