HALE 2.9.0 – new look, new tools, INSPIRE codelists + Annex II/III
We have just completed testing and documentation for the new HALE 2.9.0 release. There is a lot that has changed under the hood for the 2.9 release. Apart from a lot of bug fixes and an upgrade of the underlying platform from Eclipse Indigo to Eclipse Luna, there also was a new build system introduced that allows us to again provide an installer for Windows and a version of HALE that runs on current Mac OS X operating systems.
It comes with a long list of useful new features, as you would expect after the relatively long break since the last release of HALE. Get your download here and read in detail about the new features here.
Here are the headline news:
New mapping documentation format
We added a new mapping documentation format based on HTML and SVG that is interactive and optimal for web display.
Extended command line interface
For integrating schema transformation into your infrastructure an easy way is to use the HALE command line interface. Some have already used the command line interface part of the integration with the HALE FME plug-in – but this is very limited in functionality. The new command line interface is far more flexible in its configuration and allows data export to be easily configured with support through the HALE user interface. A detailed post with an example project will be posted in the next days.
INSPIRE Code List Support
Browse and search the code lists from the INSPIRE registry provided by the JRC and directly load them in HALE.
Create ATOM feed based INSPIRE download service
HALE aids you in creating an ATOM feed based INSPIRE download service by generating a dataset feed for your transformed data automatically. Just enable the creation of the feed in the INSPIRE SpatialDataSet export and provide some basic information for the feed metadata. Information on feature types and coordinate reference systems will be included automatically.
INSPIRE Annex II and III schemas now built in
HALE supports any schema, but usage of the inbuilt schemas is super-simple, so we have extended the set of inbuilt schemas to also include the final versions of all Annex II and III schemas.
Smart Retype
Do you have source and target schema types that are very similar and differ just in a few properties or only the namespace? Now the Retype transformation function has configuration options to automatically copy properties/attributes with similar names.
Reprojection/CRS Conversion
You can now include a conversion to a given coordinate reference system (CRS) as part of writing the transformed data to GML. You can identify the CRS with an EPSG code or define a custom CRS using a WKT representation.
As usual, there has been a set of other improvements (about 15). You can go here to learn more about these. We will post separate workflow descriptions for the usage of the CLI and on the INSPRIE Code Lists in the next days. Enjoy your work with HALE 2.9.0!