Osiris

A new release package is available to download from Github. The binaries include all the new features belonging to Osiris 1.2 such as the authentication method. The objective of this package is to reduce the complexity of the installation process as it it not necessary to build the source code.

Osiris 1.2 has been released bringing security to the whole set of web services. In previous versions, anyone could access to any map uploaded to the server as the services didn’t check grants. Even more, the concept of user didn’t exist. The new feature requires a new collection to be created for each map in the database. This collection stores users’ credentials making possible to add so many users as you want.

This article explains our experience in the AIDE project and how the use of new technologies could enhance a robotic system designed to assist people with disabilities. Our research group is contributing with Indoor Mapping, Indoor Positioning and Natural Language Processing. Osiris is the component which gives the Indoor Mapping capabilities. Its data is used as contextual information offering the exact location of a person in a house.

In a previous previous post we wrote about Leaflet and how to show our maps in it. Now, we will see another interesting feature of Osiris that is the use of Points of Interest. Before that, we should explain what is a POI for us. In Osiris, POIs are called Features and are used to report about interesting services or places, being usually (but not necessary) outdoors. For instance, metro stations, bus stops, restaurants, etc. can be included as a POIs in our application.

We are used to hear about Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and those of us interested in indoor applications already know the efforts of the GIS community for extending his knowledge to this new field of interest. In addition to this, architects are changing his way of work in the last years, due to the existence of new methodologies, tools and data models under the scope of the Building Information Modeling (BIM).

In this article we will learn how to use Leaflet to show the indoor maps of our smart building. We will take a common basemap and then we will overlay our indoor spaces getting the data stored previously in Osiris. We assume a basic knowledge of Leaflet however, the contents of this blog post are easy to understand. Another component we will need is JQuery, which will be used for makng AJAX requests to our Osiris server.

This post intends to be an introduction to the use of web services provided by Osiris. These services, are available through REST protocol and provide response data in JSON format. For further details see the API reference section of this site.

As you can see, we are starting a new blog to support this project. We will try to write some use cases and examples to clarify how we use and how anyone can use Osiris.