GeoCat Bridge now available in the OpenGeo Suite, allowing ArcGIS users to publish robust web maps in a single click.

New York, New York, March 31, 2011 — GeoCat, a geospatial software company specializing in Spatial Data Infrastructure development, and OpenGeo, the world leader in supported open source geospatial solutions, announced that the GeoCat Bridge software will now be available as an integrated component of the OpenGeo Suite.

GeoCat Bridge allows users of Esri's ArcGIS™ Desktop to instantly publish data online. Now that Bridge is included in the OpenGeo Suite, existing ArcGIS users do not need to adopt a new cartographic toolset to create robust web maps. Instead, they can continue to use Esri software to style and edit maps on their desktop and then use GeoCat Bridge to push their geospatial content online through the OpenGeo Suite. This allows them to leverage the capabilities of the OpenGeo Suite's open source geospatial stack, which was built from the ground up to support standards-compliant, high-performance web maps.

The day of Christmas Eve seems to be a good day to look back on an in many respects enervating year.

With GeoCat we've been working on some great projects that have helped to advance our dreams and have given a lot of satisfaction. I will mention a few here. What is great about these projects is that they have helped us advance the GeoNetwork opensource project significantly. Considering that one of my main reasons to leave the security of a United Nations job for a less secure private company adventure was that it would help GeoNetwork opensource to develop faster, I feel really proud about my team and about the GeoNetwork core developers!

Interesting GeoCat projects

The Dutch National Georegistry (NGR) has been a project we've worked on since GeoCat started back in2007. The official launch happened during the GSDI conference in Rotterdam in 2009.

This video shows the install process, the configuration and use of the GeoCat Bridge extension and the resulting metadata and map services configured on GeoServer through the GeoNetwork opensource user interface. (It can also be viewed in HD quality). Purpose:

• Publish shapefiles, ArcSDE data and gridded data on GeoServer while maintaining the complex symbology created in ESRI® ArcMap (ArcView, ArcEditor or ArcInfo).
• Publish metadata for each data layer in ISO format (a.o. for INSPIRE) on the GeoNetwork opensource catalog to publish as OGC CSW et cetera.