Case Studies

In the past standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium in web information systems were commonly integrated for visualizing vector and raster. With the implementation specification of the Web Processing Service (WPS), a standard to process geodata in the web is available. The new possibilities in web-based geographic information systems allow an interoperable processing of different data based on service-orientated architectures.

This presentation describes the implementation of a Web Processing Service to derivate products from satellite data. Software including a WPS was evaluated with focus of handling large data files. Several processes were developed to create products for MODIS satellite data, available on the web. On top of these processes, software for implementing and executing processing chains as a web processing service was evaluated and several chains were implemented.

An automatically running service is processing near-real time data downloaded direct after acquisition. An interface to get and process archived data was integrated in the developed web information system. The user of this system can search interactively for archived MODIS data and process it with the developed web processing services and processing chains.

The software evaluation showed that there is additional work to do to improve the WPS standard. Specific profiles for working with large raster data are needed to define standardised rules. For processing chains no standardised data format describing these chains exist, but it is also possible to create processing chains with several software solutions.

The Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA) (a tool developed by the University of New Hampshire and NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration) is used by the US government to provide a comprehensive decision support system for responding to disasters. ERMA is built primarily using an Open Source Stack, that includes OpenLayers, MapServer, PostGIS, Linux, Apache, Python, GeoDjango, and GDAL/OGR - just to name a few.

In this session members of the ERMA development team will give you an overview of the tool and how its OSS components work together to provide a powerful framework for aggregating and presenting data from multiple sources in a unified web-based tool. In particular, we'll discuss:

• User-facing tools to dynamically create MapServer configurations and add layers to dynamic maps.
• Techniques used to provide for display of real-time tracking information including ship, aircraft, and ground team position information.
• Leveraging GeoDjango to provide in-browser data analysis and query capabilities.
• A framework to allow the web-based tool to operate effectively in an Internet-less environment.

We will also highlight an actual use-case focused on the deployment of ERMA as the Common Operational Picture (COP) for the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster of 2010 (GOMEX). With over 16,000 layers currently residing in the GOMEX deployment of ERMA, the system has shown to be flexible and scalable in real world situations.

Finally, we will also describe a public facing version of ERMA deployed during the Gulf Oil Spill that successfully sustained 20+ million hits during the first 48 hours of deployment and was used extensively to convey the real time situation to the public on a daily basis.

FalconView is a Windows based Mapping/GIS application.  It has been widely used throughout the US Department of Defense and allied countries for over 16 years and has over 55,00 users in over 15 countries.  In 2009, We were asked by the US government if we would consider releasing the software as Free and Open Source Software.  We were intrigued by the idea but were unsure of the obstacles which we would need to overcome in order to move away from our closed source development model.   The problems would be compounded because the software contained components which were controlled by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) as well as DoD owned components.

With the help of the Government we were able to receive export approval to release almost all of FalconView as Open Source. Along the way we discovered many benefits and  "discovered" the thriving community of FOSS4G.  We have incorporated several open source libraries including GDAL/OGR, LibKML and PostGIS and have begun re-architecting much of our Data Architecture to embrace OGC standards.

This paper will outline the process we went through to convince our sponsors that an Open Source Model could fit within the DoD's requirements for development and release of software, as well as the steps we took to receiving a Commodity Jurisdiction approval for release of the software.  We will also describe the architectural changes we made to align ourselves with OGC standards and the Open Source libraries which helped us implement the changes.