Spatial OLAP using GeoMondrian

I received an email from Thierry Badard of Laval University, Québec:

After the release of a new version of its open source spatial ETL tool, GeoKettle yesterday (please see the announcement for more details), the GeoSOA research group at Laval University, Quebec, Canada is proud to announce the availibility as new open source projects of GeoMondrian, the first implementation of a Spatial OLAP (SOLAP) server and Spatialytics, a lightweight cartographic component which enables navigation in SOLAP data cubes.

GeoKettle, GeoMondrian and Spatialytics are components of the complete geospatial BI (Business Intelligence) software stack developed by the GeoSOA research group.

For some screenshots of the project, see Fabio D'Ovidio's blog.

This is the kind of news that makes me proud to have gotten involved in open source. I'm not an expert on spatial software, so I could never have written a spatial OLAP engine; I didn't even realize the need existed. I'm delighted that people who are experts in the field could build upon my efforts and all of the other people who have contributed to Mondrian and JPivot over the years.

I hear that they are also involved in a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project to integrate with Pentaho Community Dashboard Framework (CDF). That makes a lot of sense.

And of course I would be happy to receive contributions back to Mondrian if it makes it easier for them to maintain the code base.

I wish the GeoMondrian, GeoKettle and Spatialytics projects every success, and look forward to them bringing BI to a new audience.