Solution providers

OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org

OpenGeo is the driving force behind GeoWebCache. The caching system is one level of the OpenGeo stack, which also includes OpenLayers, GeoServer, GeoTools and Postgis. The company employs many of the experts behind these products and can create customized solutions for a variety of applications.

Innovative Emergency Management - http://www.ieminc.com

IEM builds risk-based solutions for measuring and managing threats to people, infrastructure, and information. Our open source automated emergency management decision support system, called webpuff, is being developed for the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency (CMA). Webpuff is used by Army depots and civilian emergency management agencies in the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) to protect the more than three million people in eight states surrounding chemical weapons storage and disposal facilities. The system models a chemical release using the latest GIS technology, assesses its risk to surrounding communities, and delivers protective action recommendations to military and civilian responders within five to 10 minutes.

Our technical web mapping solution consists of a Mapbuilder/OpenLayers client that is served by a custom built WMS/WFS server. Our caching mechanism has been !Geowebcache. We primarily cache our basemap layer that have sizes in the order of gigabytes. The performance of our system has nearly doubled since we introduced GeoWebCache as our caching system. In addition to it's ability to cache it also follows the tiling specification that has glorified our web mapping application. We recommend GeoWebCache to anyone who is interested in providing caching for their server side WMS/WFS rendering functionality.

Our future plan is to switch to GeoServer as our WMS/WFS server and use GeoWebCache on top of that for our caching functionality.