Open Data and Collaboration

Open source based online map sharing to support real-time collaboration

Session Type: 
Academic Session
Presenter(s): 
Mr Muhammad Atif Butt, Ryerson University
Dr Songnian Li

 

Collaboration is an important part of many tasks involving people from different organizations, in which maps often play a central role in informing and improving debates and facilitating decision making.  Allowing groups to share and view maps and spatial images interactively over the Web in real-time not only provides an effective solution to decision makers, but also facilitates scientific and public debates with real-time geospatial information. A few tools have been developed using proprietary software approaches, e.g., PCI Geoconference. More recently, some efforts have been made using open map services to develop simple map sharing applications. However, little has been done on designing and developing such online tools based on open source. Further, a literature search indicates the lack of scientific publications on empirical studies of their practical applications.
 
This paper describes a study on using open source geographical information system (GIS) and mapping solutions to design and develop real-time map sharing applications, which rely on the data served through open map/data services with the option of integrating local data. The study focuses on not only real-time map (or geospatial information) sharing, but also integration of other open source based groupware solutions. Existing open source solutions are evaluated for the design and development of various prototype collaborative map sharing tools. The prototype is applied in an online virtual public meeting space for initial usability studies. The paper also discusses the issues related to the design, data required to support better map sharing, and adoption of related standards.

 

Speaker Bio: 

Muhammad Butt is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University. He has been working on the design, development and usability study of web-based PPGIS and applications, especially using open source based solutions.

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Clip and Ship: MapServer for Data Distribution

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Frank Warmerdam, Independent
Michael Smith

MapServer is primarily used for interactive web mapping. However, it can also be effectively used to provide access to underlying raster and feature data with subsetting and translation to a variety of file Formats (any OGR/GDAL writable format) - a process often referred to as "Clip and Ship".We will discuss how this can be accomplished with MapServer WCS and WFS with the existing US Army Corps of Engineer's CorpsMap system as a case study and live demo. Details of web and MapServer configuration options are provided with particular focus on the new support in MapServer 6.0 for a variety of WFS output formats.

Speaker Bio: 

Frank Warmerdam has been a contract geospatial software developer focused on
data access and interchange since 1998. He is the founder of the GDAL/OGR
project, and contributing to projects such as MapServer, PROJ.4,
OpenEV, libtiff and libgeotiff. He is a founding member and director of the
Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). He is a graduate of the
University of Waterloo, with a honours BMath majoring in Computer Science.

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The Intersection of Geospatial and Business Intelligence

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Jesse Eichar, Camptocamp SA
Emmanuel Belo, Camptocamp

Business intelligence (the techniques used in identifying, extracting, and analyzing business data) is a massive market and a vibrant area of research and development for many companies. The incorporation of true geospatial data and analysis is still a new facet in the field and one that is expected to experience significant growth and evolution in the near future.

The goal of this talk is to discuss the current state of the open-source solutions, discuss the strengths and short comings of the current solutions and look at avenues for improvement and opportunity.

A few of the technologies that will be touched upon will include:

  • Olap4j
  • Geomondrian
  • Geowebbi
  • Spatialytics
  • Pentaho
  • Mondrian

Some axes of discussion:

  • Types of Queries
  • Types of Reports
  • Supported Standards
  • Supported Data Sources
  • Role in ecosystem
  • Interoperability
  • Architectures
  • Performance
Speaker Bio: 

For the last decade Jesse Eichar has been a professional open source advocate and developer. He one of the four uDig PSC, he is the maintainer of the Mapfish print module and the SecureOWS module, he is and has been a module maintainer of several GeoTools modules including, renderer, shapefile, GML, MIF, WFS and XML. He is a committer in Geoorchestra, Scala IO and sperformance projects as well as a contributer to Geonetwork, GeoServer and Apache Pdfbox.

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The Nordic Open Source Initiative Network

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Morten Lindegaard Ph.D., National Survey and Cadastre, Denmark
Co-author- Anders Friis-Christensen Ph.D.

"The Nordic Open Source Initiative Network" (NOSIN) is a forum for general cooperation on open source software used in national spatial data infrastructures in the Nordic countries. The initiative is used for exchanging experience and reducing costs. The results are shared freely with everyone interested. Consequently, development in open source projects goes back in the main branch. Meetings in NOSIN are hosted by the participating countries, and an online forum is used for discussing and prioritizing topics of cooperation.

The creation of NOSIN was motivated by successful cooperation on GeoNetwork. This cooperation was based on a current requirement to implement national geoportals within the Nordic countries in order to support spatial data infrastructures meeting the requirements of the INSPIRE Directive. INSPIRE shall ensure compatibility of spatial data infrastructures among the member states of the European Union. It was early recognized that the national geoportals have similar architectures and common requirements. In 2009, the mapping authorities in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark agreed that development of national geoportals was a subject of cooperation. This lead to the creation of â€Å“The Nordic initiativeâ€Å“ which focus on use and further development of GeoNetwork for implementation of the national geoportals. The initiative prioritize common requests for features and share costs of development done by GeoCat. This makes it possible for different countries to fund open source development together. The cooperation on GeoNetwork is not limited to the Nordic countries. The Netherlands has shared experiences, and Scotland has also contributed.

Speaker Bio: 

Morten Lindegaard is a software engineer, Ph.D., who has been working with GIS at the National Survey and Cadastre, Denmark, since 2009.

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Mayor of Main Street – How Badges Will Make OpenStreetMap Data Better

Session Type: 
Tech Session
Presenter(s): 
Martijn van Exel

OpenStreetMap is a prime example of a collective geographic knowledge platform. Its openness is its defining feature: anyone can create, modify and destroy any feature in OSM. All contributors are created equal, and remain so into all eternity. The consequences of this – from newbies creating freeways in the ocean to entire cities being deleted by vandals, politically motivated or otherwise – are being dealt with on an ad-hoc basis. OpenStreetMap entirely relies on the attentiveness and resilience of the community to resolve undesired contribution behavior. Now that the project is gaining hundreds of new contributors each day and it has risen to a certain prominence as a geodata resource, this situation may not be tenable for much longer.

Other social knowledge platforms have successfully introduced concepts from game theory into their communities to help steer and regulate contributor behavior, as well as generate and sustain contributor motivation. A popular implementation of these concepts is a reward system, where contributors are given ‘badges’ for certain achievements that comprise desired behavior.

Badge systems are far from trivial to implement well, because they require a deep understanding of the underlying community dynamics and values. Also, a badge system system should be effective for a wide range of contributors, from newbie to very experienced. A carefully balanced mix of metrics defining the thresholds required to earn the available badges in the system is needed to achieve this. Collaborative knowledge systems such as StackOverflow have collected valuable experience in this domain.

Speaker Bio: 

Martijn van Exel is a long-standing member of the OpenStreetMap community and a geospatial professional with 15 years' experience in software development and research in GIScience. He is currently exploring trustworthiness of crowdsourced geodata, defining new metrics relying solely on contributor and community dynamics.

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