Azavea has announced the release of its GeoTrellis geographic data processing engine under a GPLv3 licence. GeoTrellis is designed to quickly perform common geographic operations on large datasets, by allowing the tasks to be distributed over a number of systems.

Written in Scala, and using the Akka framework, which enables the easier creation of concurrent and distributed applications for the JVM, GeoTrellis should help developers create scalable and distributed geo-processing web services and take full advantage of systems with multi-core processors. The software can be deployed as a package, to physical hardware or to virtual systems in the cloud, or integrated into other software applications.

Azavea says that GeoTrellis has been been employed in projects such as CommonSpace, a sustainable transit planning web application, the City of Ashville's Priority Places application and Visualizing Emancipation, a Digital Scholarship Lab project at the University of Richmond. A commercial licence is available for companies who do not wish to use the GPLv3 licensing model. The source code for Azavea is available from the project's GitHub repository.

(djwm)