As always GeoServer is focused on open standards and open data, making the rasters available as a Web Map Service, but also through the Web Coverage Service specification, which gives full 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, and as always a heap of bug fixes.

The Web Coverage Service implementation and WMS raster support have been the result of work carried out by GeoSolutions (http://www.geo-solutions.it), who have been a prominent member of the GeoServer community for some time. The community is glad to take this contribution and make it part of the GeoServer core and thanks GeoSolutions for their excellent work. It is amazing to see not just bug fixes and new data formats, but completely new functionality that would not be possible without the ever expanding community.

Since its inception 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 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/geoserver). To see GeoServer in action check out this demo site located at http://sigma.openplans.org. For those interested in what is going on in the GeoServer community, but not ready to jump in to the fray of mailing lists, there is a blog to follow at http://blog.geoserver.org/ .

The new raster and coverage support to GeoServer makes it a complete 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. Other community members are working on ArcSDE coverages, and MrSID and ECW are awaiting further funding. Along with direct support for these formats are some interesting plug-ins which allow users to create image pyramids and mosaics.

This is an exciting time for GeoServer. As we look to the future there are more interesting developments on the horizon. Among them include Versioning WFS, a full implementation of WFS 1.1, multi-dimensional raster data through the WCS, and support for security and authentication. Also expect to keep seeing improvements to performance and scalability, better support for KML, and a variety of other neat and interesting features.

About GeoServer

GeoServer is an Open Source server that connects your information to the geospatial web. Its focus is ease of use and support for standards, including serving as WFS 1.0 Reference Implementation (and soon to be 1.1 as well). The goal is to serve as 'glue' for the geospatial web, connecting from legacy databases and formats to many diverse clients. GeoServer includes easy to use installers, web administration tools, and demos to get you going quickly. GeoServer's homepage is http://geoserver.org. More information on features can be found on the wiki at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Features . The latest release can be found at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Latest. The GeoServer Project is completely open source, in license and development process, built by a diverse community of contributors, whom you are encouraged to join. GeoServer is built on GeoTools, an incubating project of the new Open Source GeoSpatial Foundation (http://osgeo.org)

About The Open Planning Project (http://topp.openplans.org/)

The Open Planning Project's (TOPP) mission is to build technology to enhance the role of the citizen in democratic society. We believe that a more informed and empowered populace will effect real change. TOPP draws inspiration from the ideas, processes and success of the open source software movement. To that end our tools enhance government transparency and provide opportunity for citizen participation in shaping society.

TOPP provides funding and leadership for the development of GeoServer, to help create a more open, interoperable infrastructure of geographic information. TOPP's interest in this is urban planning, so that geographic data is more available and open to enable citizen involvement through the use of simulations and modeling that can be built on top of the base data. But GeoServer is run in a true open source fashion, able to meet a variety of needs, and developed by a number of organizations. TOPP supports a diverse community of commercial providers, and does take on work related to GeoServer when related to its core mission. Any 'profit' made from providing services on GeoServer is re-invested back in to the project, building a sustainable open source project that many can use and improve for their needs.

About GeoSolutions

GeoSolutions (http://www.geo-solutions.it) is a young Italian company composed of open minded and focused IT professionals whose mission is to provide innovative geospatial solutions based on open source software and open standards. GeoSolutions believes in making location based services and information available to anyone, anywhere, regardless of the position and format of data. With a strong believe in open source software GeoSolutions has contributed to a number of open source projects including GeoServer, Geotools, and GDAL.

GeoSolutions specializes in the fields of geospatial data management and processing, geospatial data and metadata dissemination, image processing, and advanced 2D/3D image visualization. GeoSolutions associates contain expertise with a wide a variety of languages and technologies including J2SE. J2EE, JMX, Axis, Xfire,JBOSS,JAI,ImageIO,SWIG,JOGL,C/C++ and more.