Tools

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HgIS applies BI tools (Pentaho platform) and GIS for the groundwater domain. Technologies and tools used in HgIS are listed here.

Since Hitachi acquired Pentaho, the development of the Pentaho platform has stagnated, and the platform's website is confusing. The original author of PDI (Matt Casters) created Apache Hop, a fork of PDI that finally has elegant architecture and is being intensively developed. PDI transformations can be imported into it.

Pentaho platform is a set of business intelligence tools.

It contains the following components (download):

• Pentaho Data Integration (PDI, also known as Kettle)¹⁾ It is an ETL tool. It can read data from diverse databases, resources (e-mail, local computer, FTP, HTTP), and files (MS Excel, MS Access, CSV, TXT, ESRI SHP, XML, JSON, YAML, RSS, XBase, or ZIP). Official resource lists all steps of transformations and jobs. Geospatial data can be handled with PDI GIS Plugins. See more info in Pentaho Data Integration Cheat Sheet.

• Pentaho Report Designer (screenshot).
  Development of Pentaho Reporting does not move forward, so it makes sense to use an alternative as Metabase – easy-to-use data analytics. FOSS alternatives in Python are Superset or even Redash.
  
  
• Pentaho Server (PBA, formerly BI Server, screenshot) is a key component of the platform. Dashboards can be executed here. Dashboards can be designed by CDE – more: Community Tools (CTools).
  
  
• Pentaho Metadata Editor – creates an abstract data layer. See a figure:
  
  
  

Machine Intelligence utilizes engines: R, Python, Weka, or Deeplearning4j (Java with GPU Nvidia).

Adaptive Execution Layer (AEL) runs transformations not only locally or on the Pentaho Server, but also on Spark. Pentaho also supports cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure (Cloud agnostic analytic pipeline). Alternative to AEL is Apache Beam.

• Java – programming language
• Apache Tomcat – web server
• JDBC – API for access to relational databases
• JNDI
• Jackrabbit: implementation of the Content repository API for Java
• Common Warehouse Metamodel – used in Pentaho Metadata – specification

• PostgreSQL is a database server we use. (PostgreSQL).
• We use DBeaver and pgAdmin for database administration. It can also display geospatial data.
• PostGIS is a spatial extension to PostgreSQL database (PostGIS).

• QGIS – desktop GIS
• QGIS Server – map server
• EnviroInsite – advanced hydrogeological visualization. The company developing EI was acquired by the corporation developing EQuIS (EarthSoft). It does not plan to develop the standalone EI.²⁾ Therefore, we plan to replace EI probably by QGIS with the Midvatten or FREEWAT³⁾ plugin.

For detailed information, go to the Czech version of this site.