Eclipse launches geolocation initiative LocationTech

The Eclipse Foundation has announced a new initiative, LocationTech, designed to support development of location-aware systems. Starting as a working group with companies, and with founding members Oracle, IBM, Actuate and OpenGeo, the LocationTech initiative hopes to develop a range of location-aware software components under the "business-friendly" Eclipse Foundation open source model. Also participating are the Carleton Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

"By creating a multi-vendor, open platform for location technologies we intend to spur even broader adoption of location aware products, devices and services" said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. The group is open to "any organisation with an interest in adding location awareness to their business". Milinkovich points to the Eclipse Foundation's IP management services, professionally-supported open source forge, and full-service, not-for profit status as reasons why existing geolocation groups may wish to participate and why the Foundation should be attractive to companies that are new to open source collaboration.

The first project listed for LocationTech is LTT, LocationTech Technology, with a wide scope of creating location-aware services across platforms and addressing the storage, exchange, processing and interpretation of the huge amounts of data that location-aware components can generate. The group has already had a number of tech talks and early events, the most recent of which was a Introduction to OpenStreetMap tech talk. Further details are available on the group's Events page.

(djwm)