The OpenSextant Project

History

• 2013 ~ OpenSextant 1.0 released here on GitHub, courtesy of US Govt agencies sponsoring R&D and prototyping in this field of geospatial awareness tools. The primary project was a GATE pipeline in Java and other languages.
• 2014 - Xponents collection of libraries partitioned off as lower-level functional libraries
• 2026 - Dave Lutz published HOWLER, an app to work on ontology translation ideas
• 2017 - Consumer projects like Diffeo and VoyagerGIS were spotted citing use of this work
• 2017 - Dave Smiley migrates the SolrTextTagger module formally as the Apache 7.x Solr TextTagger module that lives on
• 2018 - As Pentaho/Kettle pipeline for Gazetteer curation aged, Xponents ported all Gazetteer curation to pure Python, and added additional gazetteer sources
• 2019 - An initial Xponents Docker REST server is built out; Python client illustrates how that works
• 2020 - First cut of Xponents postal/address geotagger and gazetteer released.
• 2023-present - Xponents 3.x series refines support for European, Asian and Middle Eastern languages and scripts

Inactive Modules

This list of projects and experiments is no longer active, but worth listing here as part of the OpenSextant family. Last update is noted in each heading.

• HOWLER: Ontology translation work. Last update 2016.
  • HOWLER - Translate between simple English text and OWL ontologies
  • HOWLER Kanban - HOWLER combined with Kanban (based on Wekan )
• GISCore: GIS support. Last update 2019.
  • giscore - GIS file data format streaming input and output library
  • geodesy - Geodetic primitive library
  • The critical elements of GISCore/geodesy have been rolled into Xponents directly.

• SolrTextTagger - (Retired) A text tagger based on Lucene/Solr. Lat updated 2023. NOTE: As of Solr 7.4 this tagger plugin was migrated to Apache Solr as a formal request handler. Xponents SDK uses the Solr TextTagger still.

• OpenSextant v1: Original Gangstah. Last updated 2017.
  • OpenSextantToolbox - (Retired) A geotagger and entity extractor employing GATE.
  • opensextant - (Retired) The original OpenSextant project.
    NOTE: Xponents is the currently maintained geotagger solution that took over the main functionality.
  • Gazetteer - (Retired) Pipeline project to render world-wide “geo names” data into gazetteers used by these projects. NOTE: This Gazetteer required Pentaho 6 or earlier and was stuck to Oracle JDK 8.
    Xponents internal gazetteer is current and yields a flexible SQLite intermediate and complete worldwide gazetteer