ISC Intros Open Intel Project

The MapDotNet Team at ISC, an information technology company that specializes in developing vertical geospatial applications on both MapDotNet and Microsoft's .NET (News - Alert) platform, has revealed a new, open source project called Open Intel.

Open Intel (News - Alert) (OI) is said to be a feature-rich codebase built with ISC's MapDotNet UX and is heavily focused on spatial data visualization and cartographic analysis.

Designed for use with Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Azure and SQL Azure, OI can benefit both government and the private sector enterprise, said the company in a press release.

 “We wanted to make building a mashup with spatial data as easy as creating a music playlist,” said Brian Hearn, the MapDotNet lead architect and a coordinator on the Open Intel project said in a statement.

“With inspiration from Microsoft's Zune user interface and following Microsoft's Metro styling guidelines, we designed the OI application for today's consumer who expects an app to be responsive and easy to use,” added Hearn.

Company statement revealed that OI can fulfill data transparency requirements as an open government data portal for publishing data for internal or external consumption. Additionally, OI is noted as the foundation for building advanced business intelligence applications for analyzing large amounts of spatial and non-spatial data. It also allows users to preview datasets in a data catalog, download data in portable formats such as shapefiles or comma separated values, connect to data feeds for building apps or widgets, or produce a mashup for advanced data analysis.

Moreover, the codebase, which has been in development for the past three months, is being released on Microsoft's CodePlex Open Source Community.

ISC also said that it is hosting a live demo of the OI application loaded with a large number of datasets from the City and County of San Francisco.

The application, as stated, is written in C# .NET and leverages Microsoft's Silverlight technology for the frontend user interface. OI can be easily deployed into Windows Azure and leverages SQL Azure for data storage.

“Since Open Intel is designed for deployment Microsoft's cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, it makes setting up and getting started with the application very easy,” added Hearn.

Hearn also clarified that for all those customers that don't have .NET developers on staff, ISC can provide support and software-as-a-service options for deploying and hosting the application for customers.