GeoDB demo 4. GeoSuite II

Hello folks!

We are very glad to announce that our Crowdcube campaign has been a huge success with 636 investors jumping onboard (www.crowdcube.com/geodb)! Immense support for our big data ecosystem powered by blockchain. Thanks everyone, we will work hard to exceed your higher expectations.

But we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to finish unveiling our demo. It has been a long journey to get here, since we’ve also been working in parallel in our testnet, news coming really soon! ;)

But let’s focus today on our demo. Previously, we’ve shown the first part of GeoSuite demo, our tool for developing our proposal and our vision for interconnection of blockchains and big data ETL. In that post, we showed its purpose and exemplified how to use it for purchasing information with the GeoMarket perspective.

In this post, we focus on the community aspect of GeoSuite through the AppStore.

GeoDB’s AppStore

With the AppStore, we aim to provide access to an ecosystem of features in which developers and data buyers collaborate:

• Developers can generate features to extend GeoSuite capabilities and receive a compensation in GEOs.
• Data buyers can purchase components to increase the utility of GeoSuite for managing and visualising data.

Modular architecture of GeoSuite provided by Eclipse RCP allows developers to easily produce plug-ins that extend the functionality of GeoSuite. We show this scheme with two simple demo components: Download as CSV and Query Map, which were developed by a developer originally named Developer.

Example 1: Download dataset as CSV

GeoSuite provides built-in functionality to download purchased datasets as JSON. In the Download as CSV component, Developer has integrated a widget to convert the purchased datasets to CSV format. With the purchase of this component for the symbolic price of 0.00001G, an additional button to download the dataset directly as CSV appears in the Dataset part.

Example 2: Query map

In GeoMarket, data buyers can define queries to specify the data they want to retreive. These queries can have a conjunction of clauses that the data points returned must satisfy. GeoSuite’s built-in functionality allows to explore these clauses separately. However, Developer noticed that data purchasers often need a general view of the query. So Developer decided to fulfil this need and shows off his developing skills while earning some GEOs for it, so Developer decides to upload a component named ‘Query map’, which extends GeoSuite to show all clauses at once in the same map. Therefore, data buyers that find this functionality interesting can acquire it and use it.

Monetize a component

The components developed by Developer are simple examples that could have been easily integrated in GeoSuite, but we provide them as example of the functionality that a developer can provide with a component. Now we move on to the developer part, in which we can upload and monetize components.

Say that you, as developer, want to upload and monetize a GeoSuite extension. The Upload component part allows you to create a new component that will appear in the AppStore browser. The upload of a component stores it and generates an associated smart contract that can later be executed by other users to acquire the component.

In order to provide a powerful way to browse the components, the AppStore provides a catalog that can be filtered regarding the terms used in the description or the tags assigned by the developer.

Disclaimer: in the video, we exemplify the upload of a component. Right now, the installation of a component that extends GeoSuite after its purchase is mocked, but once finished, the developer is expected to associate a jar file with the RCP plug-in.

Wallet management in GeoSuite

In previous stages of the development of GeoSuite demo we included some functionality for managing wallets such as adding, removing or checking the balance. In this stage we also saw interesting for developers and data buyers to have more wallet functionalities in GeoSuite such as transferring funds.

Wrap up

In this post we showed how GeoSuite’s AppStore enables collaboration between developers and data buyers. All these features are demonstrated in the following video.

In future updates, we will include infrastructure support functionality to GeoSuite. This way, GeoSuite can be used to run a node of our protocol. Developers can also provide components to run other DLTs in your machine, as hinted in the previous post, so potentially GeoSuite could be used to run any DLT that the community finds useful.

If you want to try it you can download the release candidate versions here, but we must warn you that they’ve only been tested in GNU/Linux, so if you use Windows or Mac, it may not work correctly.

If you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact Jorge Castro (jorge@geodb.com), Senior Developer at GeoDB and one of the developers in charge of GeoSuite.

Castro holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (University of Granada, 2019) and he’s knowledgeable in algorithmic, big data and has recent interest in DLT. Until he finished his Ph.D., he was dedicated to research in the machine learning applied to personalised information filtering. He balanced well a successful academic background and having hands on experience in developing complex algorithms for traditional and distributed computation.

And that’s all folks. We hope these series have helped you understand where we are heading to! Now, let’s do it.

Stay tuned!