LocationTech/TechnologyTLP

LocationTech Technology Project Charter

This charter was developed in accordance with the Eclipse Development Process and outlines the mission, scope, organization, and development process for the LocationTech Technology Project. This document extends the Eclipse Standard Top-Level Charter v1.1, and includes the required content and overrides which follow. It is anticipated that as the standard charter is updated, this charter will incorporate the changes and make adjustments as seen fit by the PMC, and with approval from the EMO and board of directors.

Overview

LocationTech is an industry working group governed by the Eclipse Foundation Industry Working Group Process. This document is the charter for a top level project (TLP) in accordance with the Eclipse Development Process. This charter outlines the mission, scope, organization, and development process for projects under its domain. The name for this TLP will be LocationTech Technology (LTT) project.

Location based analysis was once the exclusive domain of specialists and a peripheral activity for many organizations. As technology advanced, its use shifted by adding spatial capabilities to mainstream consumer technology and enterprise IT.

Trends such as the decreased cost and increased computing power of devices, often portable with global positioning capabilities, have significantly increased the rate of data generation including spatial data. Technology advancement has created expectations that such data be easily consumable anywhere at any time. Expectations have shifted from asynchronous processing of data to real time.

This document describes the composition and organization of the project, roles and responsibilities of the participants, and development process for the project.

Mission

LTT fosters, promotes, and houses location aware efforts in the LocationTech community. These efforts strive towards the common goal of re-usable technology components that are location aware. These components are implemented in different languages and operate across a wide variety of computing environments.

LTT projects target "clients" and "servers" across embedded devices, desktops, and enterprise systems, and provide those intermediate software services which enable applications to be more easily and concisely constructed across these environments.

LTT also hosts tools and methodology constructs that enable organizations to assess their requirements for location aware technology and plan for system deployments.

Scope

Concretely, LTT projects provide artifacts such as libraries, user interfaces, and methodology logic that enable location aware applications and services. The nature of this work is scoped as follows:

• Developing and delivering location aware services for web, mobile, and desktop based systems.
• Storage, exchange, processing, and interpretation of massive data volumes with a component of spatial information
• Bridge the gap between business application development and decades of spatial technology and terminology
• Apply Model based design in the context of geospatial information systems, building information modelling, and computer aided design
• Aggregating and relating data from diverse sources including a spatial component. e.g. Analytics, Geospatial Business Intelligence, Geocoding, Routing
• The implementation of generally applicable geospatial standards (e.g., Open Geographic Consortium, ISO TC211, etc.)

Licensing

Approved licenses for projects under LTT include EPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache. This list may be amended from time to time by the LocationTech Steering Committee and the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors. The EPL license is the recommended license for projects that fall under this top level project.