OpenSextant

The Open Spatial Extraction and Tagging (OpenSextant) software provides an unstructured textual data geotagging and geocoding capability. The U.S. Government Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) developed this capability in coordination with other U.S. government agencies and is pleased to provide this as open source software using an Apache 2.0 license. The software relies upon the open source General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) natural language processing software and the Apache Solr search software. Please see below for instructions on how to access the source code and binaries.

OpenSextant Suite

This suite is various projects for geospatial and temporal extraction. The core module is OpenSextantToolbox which produces a GATE plugin and a toolkit for controlling the overall extraction and geocoding pipeline using that plugin.

Modules

Commons -- Common parent classes, data model and core utilities. TBD

Xponents -- Extractors

• XText document conversion (to plain text)
• XCoord coordinate extraction
• XTemporal date/time extraction
• FlexPat

OpenSextantToolbox -- A GATE-based plugin and various main programs for geotagging/geocoding Gazetteer -- A Solr-based gazetteer supporting mainly NGA Geonames, USGS place data, and adhoc catalogs. LanguageResources -- Linguistic tuning data doc -- Documentation, user manuals, developer guides

Peer Projects

SolrTextTagger -- A text tagging solution for high-volume word lists or data sets

GISCore -- An API manages GIS data formats.

• geodesy geodetic primitives and routines used by OpenSextant and GISCore
• giscore the main GISCore API which supports IO and data manipulation on GIS data

additional content: Testing -- (RELEASE TBD) test data and programs to give you ideas of the possible. GeocoderEval -- (RELEASE TBD) we've developed a framework and ground truth for evaluating OpenSextant and other geotaggers

Getting Started Using OpenSextant

In the OpenSextant binary distribution you will find ./script/default.env It contains OPENSEXTANT_HOME and other useful shell settings. WinOS version is TBD.

To Geocode files and folders please use the reference script:

  $OPENSEXTANT_HOME/script/geocode.sh   <input> <output> <format>

where input is an input file or folder output is an output file or folder; depends on format format is the format of your output: one of GDB, CSV, Shapefile, WKT, KML

Getting Started Integrating OpenSextant

Javadoc is located at OPENSEXTANT_HOME/doc/javadoc ; Typical adhoc integration will be through the o.m.o.apps.SimpleGeocoder class, which leverages o.m.o.processing.TextInput on input and GeocodingResult/Geocoding as output classes.

Integration documentation is in progress, as of April 2013.

The main library JARs of interest are:

OpenSextantToolbox.jar opensextant-apps.jar opensextant-commons.jar

And the various Xponents: xtextjar xcoordjar xtemporaljar flexpatjar

As of release time 2013-Q1, we are working on documenting and honing dependencies with other libraries, as well as our internal dependencies.

Getting Started Developing OpenSextant

For more information see ./doc/OpenSextantToolbox/doc/OpenSextant Developers Guide.docx

Set your maven proxy settings; see ./doc/developer/ for hints.

Ensure that JAVA_HOME environment variable is pointed at a Java 7 JDK.

Otherwise you may encounter Javadoc and/or compilation errors.

In the source tree, run "ant". This will build the various required components and build a release

cd ./opensextant

see that things compile

ant compile

the release step compiles all modules and prepares a release.

ant release

Alternatively, Maven can be used to build Commons, Xponents, and SolrTextTagger. For example:

 cd Xponents
 mvn install 

But complete Maven build support is not planned at this time.