Pleiades Software

The Big Picture

A main goal of the first phase of the Pleiades Project was the design and development of a working set of software, capable of supporting collaborative maintenance, update and web publication of historical geographic information derived from the [CAP Classical Atlas Project] compilation materials and other sources (see further: PleiadesBackground).

As originally proposed, this software is entirely open source. We use some components developed by other communities ("external components"), but we have also developed other components to meet the specific needs of the project ("Pleiades components"). We have sometimes found it necessary to make improvements to external components; wherever possible, we have contributed these modifications back to the originating community. Conversely, we have found -- as predicted in the proposal -- that some of our own Pleiades components are of interest to other communities of practice, and so have received contributions of code and testing from software developers supporting those communities.

The Pleiades Software stack

External components

• OpenLayers: the leading open source web map toolkit. Pleiades has modestly enhanced its features and employs it to provide contextual maps in its web application.

• Plone: a leading open source content management system. Pleiades has made modest improvements to its vocabulary manager and to its user interface framework, and contributed these code improvements back to the Plone code base.

• GEOS and SpatialIndex: low-level libraries for geometry and spatial indexing computing. Users include the PostGIS project and Autodesk. Pleiades has made modest contributions to each and helped SpatialIndex become an openly developed project.

Components developed by the Pleiades team

• PleiadesEntity: the implementation of the Pleiades data model for use in Plone.

• pleiades namespace: Plone packages specific to the Pleiades project.

• zgeo.plone namespace: a suite of general purpose (not specific to Pleiades) Plone packages supporting the PleiadesEntity component, providing georeferencing and Atom/KML views of content.

• zgeo namespace: a suite of Python software packages that provide support for the PleiadesEntity component and enjoy contributions from programmers employed by The Open Planning Project and Makina Corpus SA.

• Shapely and RTree: general-purpose Python GIS software elements that support the zgeo.* packages. Shapely enjoys contributions from programmers and researchers employed by Camptocamp SA, the University of California, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Supporting code elements and tools developed by the project

• Pleiades buildout
• Pleiades development eggs

General software development guidance and documentation (for Pleiades)

• DesignDocs
• UserStories
• PleiadesCopyright
• PleiadesBsdLicense
• PleiadesAttribution
• SettingUpPloneForTesting
• UserJournals
• ReleasingSoftware
• TicketReviews
• TestingTodos

Support

• InternetRelayChat
• PleiadesSoftwareList