Extending BIRT with geospatial data visualization capabilities by integrating the SOLAPLayers mapping component

Today, Business Intelligence (BI) is an important part for every modern company. BI
allows analyzing a large amount of data. The overview over the information simplifies to
take decisions, which influence the strategies of the company. The different parts of BI
are supported by a lot of proprietary and open source applications (OSBI).
Spatialytics from Québec, Canada is a small start‐up company, which established in
2009. The main goal of Spatialytics is to provide the use of geo‐spatial data for different
OSBI‐tools. Spatialytics has three software‐tools which covering different aspects of the
BI‐process. One of these solutions is SOLAPLayers. SOLAPLayers is a reporting tool,
which displays data from different data sources on an interactive, web based dashboard.
The main feature is the possibility to retrieve geo‐spatial data and display it on a map
component.
This bachelor thesis forced to restructure the existing SOLAPLayers 2.0 version, to
provide a more flexible, extendable and dynamical software component, which can be
integrated into other considerable reporting tools. The new version allows providing
new data‐source drivers and output formats in an easy way to the framework. In a
second step, a driver for relational databases has been added to the application. This
driver was necessary to extend the range of potential users of SOLAPLayers, since not
every company owns a data warehouse. The resulting software is not a final version.
More data sources and other features will be added to SOLAPLayers before providing
the software to the public.
The second goal of this project was to create a map component for the popular open
source reporting tool BIRT. BIRT is on of the main projects of the Eclipse foundation.
The founder and most active collaborator is the company Actuate. Based on different
facts, the decision to integrate SOLAPLayers into BIRT was done. Finally, SOLAPLayers is
used as data source and report item of the new BIRT‐plugin.
This document contains the analysis and the project documentation of both parts of this
bachelor thesis. Additional an excursion on the topic “state of the art of reporting tools”
can be found in the appendix of this document. The whole thesis was produced by
Christoph Süess at Spatialytics in Québec CA during a three month long internship and
supervised by Prof. Stefan Keller at the Hochschule für Technik at Rapperswil CH.