GeoKettle is a spatially-enabled version of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), formerly known as Kettle. It is a powerful, metadata-driven spatial ETL tool dedicated to the integration of different spatial data sources for building and updating geospatial data warehouses. GeoKettle enables the transparent handling of the geometry data type as any other classical data type to all transformations available in Kettle. It is possible to access geometry objects in JavaScript and to define custom transformation steps. Topological predicates have all been implemented.

GeoKettle has been released under the LGPL.

At present, Oracle spatial, PostGIS, and MySQL with ESRI shapefiles are natively supported in read and write modes. At present, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Ingres, and IBM DB2 can be used with some modification. It is possible to build and feed complex and very large geospatial data warehouses with GeoKettle. Spatial reference systems management and coordinate transformations have been fully implemented. Native support for unsupported geospatial databases and raster and vector based data formats will be implemented in the near future as an active and growing community has federated around the project.

GeoKettle releases are aligned with PDI, allowing GeoKettle to benefit from all the new features provided by PDI. For instance, Kettle is natively designed to be deployed in cluster and web service environments. This makes GeoKettle suitable for deployment as a service in cloud computing environments. It enables the scalable, distributed and on demand processing of large and complex volumes of geospatial data in minutes for critical applications, without requiring a company to invest in an expensive infrastructure of servers, networks and software.

Upcoming features to be implemented in GeoKettle include:

• cartographic preview

• implementation of data matching steps to allow geometric data cleansing and comparison of geospatial datasets

• read/write support for other database, GIS file formats and geospatial web services

• native support for MS SQL Server 2008 and Ingres

• implementation of a spatial analysis step through a graphical interface

GeoKettle user interface showing a basic geospatial data transformation.