GeOxygene (http://oxygene-project.sourceforge.net) aims at providing an open
framework which implements OGC/ISO specifications for the development and deployment
of geospatial (GIS) applications. It is a open source contribution of the COGIT
laboratory at the IGN (Institut Géographique National), the French National Mapping
Agency. It is released under the terms of the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public
License) license.

GeOxygene is based on Java and open source technologies and provides users with an
extensible object data model (geographic features, geometry, topology and metadata)
which implements OGC specifications and ISO standards in the geographic information
domain. 

Data are stored in a relational DBMS (RDBMS) to ensure a rapid and reliable access to
the system but users do not have to worry about any SQL statements: they model their
applications in UML and code in Java. Mapping between object and relational
environments is performed with open source software. At present, OJB is supported and
the mapping files for the storage of geographic information in Oracle or PostGIS are
provided to users.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to familiarize themselves
with the technology and the requirements for the implementation of interoperable
geospatial applications based on the GeOxygene framework. Experiments will be
performed on the version 1.1 of GeOxygene, which has been released on June 12, 2006.