Journal Issue: Nottingham, UK
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FOSS4G 2013 Full Conference Proceedings (papers)
Köbben, Barend
This Conference Proceedings is a collection of outstanding papers submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), 17th to 21st September 2013 in Nottingham, U.K.
A New Zealand case study - Open Source, Open Standards, Open Data
Wood, Brent Alexander
The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is New Zealand’s leading agency providing freshwater, ocean, climate, atmosphere and fisheries related research. Open Source software is widely used internally, both infrastructurally and in desktop systems. In 2011, the New Zealand Government passed “The Declaration on Open and Transparent Government”. This requires central government agencies to make taxpayer funded information freely available to the public, and encourages regional and local government, as well as agencies such as NIWA to comply. NIWA works closely with central and regional government, utilities, NGO’s and primary industry, making information discovery and delivery using common and open standards critical. NIWA is using Open Source applications to meet these open data discovery and delivery requirements. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards compliance ensures interoperability. Standards adopted to date include SFS (Postgis), CSW (Geonetwork), WMS/WFS (Mapserver, Geoserver, Openlayers, Quantum GIS, Quantum Map) and SOS (52 degree N, Quantum Map). Some proprietary applications are also used. These are also OGC compliant and fit within NIWA’s OGC based architecture. This paper describes the role that open source software and open standards play in NIWA’s strategies and architecture for environmental information management, discovery and delivery and gives implementation examples.
Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Plurinational State of Bolivia - A free and democratic SDI
Molina Rodriguez, Raul Fernando; Lesage, Sylvain
The Vice Presidency of the State, with the help of the GeoBolivia project, is building the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (IDEEPB by its Spanish initials). The first phase of the project has already been completed. It consisted in implementing an infrastructure and a geoportal that nowadays gives access to the reference geographic information of Bolivia, through WMS, WFS, WCS and CSW services. The project is currently in its second phase dedicated to decentralizing the structure of IDE-EPB and promoting its use throughout the Bolivian State. The whole platform uses free software and open standards. As a complement, an on-line training module was developed to undertake the transfer of the knowledge the project generated. The main software components used in the SDI are: gvSIG, QGis, uDig as GIS desktop clients; Post-GreSQL and PostGIS as geographic database management system; geOrchestra as a framework containing the GeoServer map server, the GeoNetwork catalog server and the OpenLayers and Mapfish GIS webclient; MapServer as a map server for generating OpenStreetMap tiles; Debian as operating system; Apache and Tomcat as web servers.
GIS for All: Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Underexploited GIS Applications
Ye, Hao; Brown, Michael; Harding, Jenny
Geographical Information Systems have been existed since the early 1960s, but evidence suggests that adoption of GIS technologies still remains relatively low in many sectors. We will explore both the barriers that affect the utilisation of GIS and opportunities to overcome these barriers. As part of this exploration we performed a literature review, collected responses from quantitative questionnaire survey and interviewed a range of technical and domain experts. Having analysed and collated the results of these studies we have identified ways forward for future research and development to facilitate wider spread adoption and exploitation of GIS applications. Our discussion focuses on the importance of open-source GIS software, open data and cloud computing as key mediators for breaking the barriers and promoting the wider appropriation of GIS based solutions.
Web–based Participatory GIS with data collection on the field – A prototype architecture
Brovelli, Maria; Minghini, Marco; Zamboni, Giorgio
The rise of Web 2.0 and the current, unprecedented diffusion of mobile devices have laid new foundations for the development of PGIS (Participatory GIS). This study evaluates the possibility of exploiting FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools to build up a PGIS prototype providing Web publication of user field-collected data. Besides increasing public awareness and collaboration, user-generated content should also enlarge the knowledge of specific phenomena up to the local level. A prototype architecture was designed and tested in relation to a simple, planning-related case study, i.e., the report of road pavement damages. Open Data Kit suite was used to gather georeferenced multimedia data using mobile device sensors (e.g., the GPS) and to store them into a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS spatial extension. Data was then Web-published using GeoServer. Web access was finally enabled from both traditional desktop-computers and mobile platforms through ad hoc OpenLayers and Leaflet clientside solutions. The architecture provided support for FOSS applicability within the typical PGIS-related tasks, from field survey to data storage, management and dissemination on the Internet. This bottom-up communication paradigm, which exploits real-time, freely available user contributions, can become a potentially precious tool for making decision-processes more democratic, faster and ultimately better.