Redlands, California—Esri announces that it will partner with Next Century, a decision support company based in Columbia, Maryland, to develop Esri map widgets for the Ozone Widget Framework (OWF). Next Century has been the prime developer of OWF since its beginning. OWF allows the rapid development of specialized web capabilities and was originally used in defense and intelligence systems. The U.S. government has released OWF as open-source software to foster its further use in state and local governments, healthcare, and other markets.
“This strategic relationship with Next Century provides Esri with decision support expertise of particular value to our defense/intelligence customers,” says Jeff Peters, Esri’s Director, National government. “The development and deployment of Ozone map widgets is critical to the military for command center operations.”
”Esri’s decision to develop OWF widgets is a huge win for the IC and military community who depend heavily on Esri’s products and are committed to using OWF. It is also a big win for the government, who funded the development of OWF, since Esri’s products are used worldwide. In my book, that’s the definition of WIN-WIN,” says John McBeth, Next Century’s President and CEO.
The relationship will produce widgets that will be made available to developers via open source communities. In addition to map widgets, the Esri and Next Century team will build a sample application demonstrating how to interact with them from other widgets. The focus will be on information synthesis and the support of report generation. Widgets developed will connect with the ArcGIS platform, allowing users to make use of Esri’s high-end services, tools, and workflows through the Ozone Widget Framework environment.
Ozone mapping widget features will include:
- Identification, creation and sharing of layers
- Editing and drawing features on the map
- Providing custom location markers (i.e. pins) for identified points of interest
- Geocoding
- Identification of selected features via broadcast to other listening widgets
- Drag and drop of data as rows or small sets of data items
