Grout

Grout is an RDF aggregator for geospatial metadata, with spatial query capabilities. It is written in perl, with a mod_perl handler and plans for a simple CGI interface. It uses Class::RDF as a backend data store.

Source Code

Download an early alpha release of grout. It is intact, but doesn't support some features yet like temporal query.

A recent CVS checkout of Grout, which includes this build, is available.

Grout::GIS is the interesting part; it uses PostGIS to create a spatial index of nodes, and has some fast spatial query options. There is a sketch of spatial query in the regular Grout but it is not fully working. It should be quite possible to port this backend to MySQL.

Grout isn't intended to be a full production release. Plans include re-implementing it in python, with a cleaner API and a standalone spatial index built from libGIST.

History

I used an early version of Grout at the etcon collaborative mapping workshop in feb 2004, and this one as part of the metadata store for the TCM series of workshops in locative media.

Grout is available under the GPL.

seeAlso: the locative packet schema. Guidelines for geoannotation using RDF.

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