Analysis of the development of open GIS software and QGIS system

Open Content Communities

Water is a scarce natural resource that necessitates sustainable planning and management. Geospatial technology is capable of generating and analyzing geospatial data to produce water resource development (WRD) plans at watershed level. The generation of a WRD plan is a complex process involving the aggregation of multiple thematic layers based on some criteria. Hence, to accomplish the task easily, the complex logics are to be combined in a geospatial tool. In the recent past, much free and open source software for geographic information system (GIS) has been developed that facilitates the storage, analysis, and visualization of geographic data. The significance of the present chapter is that it discusses two case studies for the development of a customized WRD plan generation tool using free and open source GIS software. The first demonstrates the usage of the open source MapWindowGIS component for developing a desktop-based customized GIS tool in stand-alone mode. The second discusses how open source Web GIS technologies can be used to develop a customized web application for generating a WRD plan of an area. The importance of MapWindowGIS is that it allows users to develop customized GIS tools in addition to its existing toolsets. This feature is very useful for desktop-based spatial data analysis. However, the development of a web-based tool requires a different set of open source software: Postgres/PostGIS for spatial data management, Apache web server for hosting the application, GeoServer for sharing of spatial layers, and OpenLayers library for query and analysis of spatial data. The present study was carried out using the geospatial data of three districts of Jharkhand state, India. The potential of free and open source geospatial software for the generation of WRD plans in both stand-alone and web-enabled mode is successfully demonstrated in this chapter.

Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse

Education, together with science and technology, is the main driver of the progress and transformations of a country. The use of new technologies of learning can be applied to the classroom. Computer learning supports meaningful and long-term learning. Therefore, in the era of digital society and environmental issues, a relevant role is provided by open source software and free data that promote universality of knowledge. Earth observation (EO) data and remote sensing technologies are increasingly used to address the sustainable development goals. An important step for a full exploitation of this technology is to guarantee open software supporting a more universal use. The development of image processing plugins, which are able to be incorporated in Geographical Information System (GIS) software, is one of the strategies used on that front. The necessity of an intuitive and simple application, which allows the students to learn remote sensing, leads us to develop a GIS open source tool, which is integrated in an open source GIS software (QGIS), in order to automatically process and classify remote sensing images from a set of satellite input data. The application was tested in Vila Nova de Gaia municipality (Porto, Portugal) and Aveiro district (Portugal) considering Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) data.

Fertilization is one of the most important components of precision agriculture, ensuring high and stable crop yields. The process of spatial interpolation of soil sample data is recognized as a reliable method of determining the prescription rates for precise fertilization. However, the application of a free open-source geographic information system (GIS) software was often overlooked in the process. In this study, a method of precise fertilization prescription map creation was developed using an open-source GIS software to enable a wider and cheaper availability of its application. The study area covered three independent locations in Osijek-Baranja County. A method was developed for the fertilization of sugar beet with phosphorous pentoxide, but its application is universal with regard to the crop type. An ordinary kriging was determined as an optimal interpolation method for spatial interpolation, with the mean RMSE of 1.8754 and R2of 0.6955. By comparing the precision fertilization prescription rates to a conventional approach, the differences of 4.1 kg ha-1 for Location 1, 15.8 kg ha-1 for Location 2, and 11.2 kg ha-1 for Location 3 were observed. These values indicate a general deficit in soil phosphorous pentoxide, and precise fertilization could ensure its optimal content in the future sowing seasons.

The article describes the capabilities of the open source GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and other Free and Open Source Softwares (FOSS) for building desktop application that can support firefighting and volunteer groups in cases of wildland fires or flood events reactions. The desktop application have two main modules as design. The first module is based on open source GIS software. The second is the server software, database and visualization environment for the application. The main goal of the tool is to visualize administrative and vulnerable objects and POI’s (Points of Interests) like logistic centres for water supplies, tools and supplies from where the firefighting and volunteer groups can take what they need on the field work. The idea is to be visualized detailed information about logistic centres and what kind of equipment is stored inside. This is needed, because there aren’t implemented modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools in the field work. The current situation is such that the groups are using instructions written on paper in most of the cases. Our article presents a desktop application that can be used on the field and in an operational rooms by firefighting and volunteer groups acting in cases of wildland fires or flood events. In our application different open source software solutions as Geoserver, Qgis, Web App Builder, Boundless WEBSDK, PostgreSQL and OpenLayers are used:

Technical Institutes management programs include development of community in which each and every aspect of information of Indian Technical Institutes is conserved and managed properly, to serve a public without affecting the geological location of institutes and for refining the admission process in institutes. Modern technologies like Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote Sensing and Global Positioning System (GPS) can be integrated to develop a well organized planning procedure for Indian Technical Institutes management. The Web GIS provides a fast way to represent information about the Indian Technical Institutes Management via maps, statistics and existing records. Open Source GIS tools or software's has the tremendous capacity to deal with large amount of raster as well as vector database. The present study uses the Quantum GIS, an Open Source GIS tool's capability for Web GIS based applications in particular to Indian Technical Institutes management. The present study also deals with creation of geodatabase of the top Indian technical colleges like Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Information Technology, other reputed engineering colleges and implements ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) technology using open source software Quantum GIS, Geo Server and Apache Tomcat server. This will help in extending the benefit of GIS and Web technology, for Indian Technical Institute Management, available in the particular area for preparation of the master plan and other development plans.

To get the most out of geographical data, people are being encouraged to use open-source data and software. Freely available Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software is making rapid progress. These software’s can be used to look at various properties that a satellite-based data, and other geographic data from different sources provides. Overall, satellite based remote sensing applications for soil resource mapping and modelling has gained a huge success all over the world. Conventional soil analysis is time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in high costs. Interpolation and its derivatives have gained widespread acceptance as an important spatial analysis technique. In this context, prognostic soil mapping approaches have been created as a result of advances in RS and GIS technology. With thorough satellite-derived soil quality indices, in-situ soil quality measurements may be transformed, which can then be scaled up to cover wider geographical areas. The spatial maps can also be used as an ideal input for models that are spatially distributed. It was possible to distinguish four major land degradation categories based on data derived from remote sensing-based satellite data, namely undegraded, moderately degraded, degraded and severely degraded based on the amount of vegetation cover, slope and erosion. Likewise, different researchers have used application of RS & GIS in mapping natural resources, studying soil taxonomy, soil resource assessment and mapping and crop growth indicator integrated with crop models. In addition, RS & GIS application can also be used to track change in forest cover density, Land use land cover, coastal morphology, status of reef and biodiversity of islands. Realizing this, the chapter highlights the utilization of free open satellite dataset and GIS software’s as well as the presentation of open-source soil information and use of the application of RS & GIS in soil resource mapping and monitoring in India.KeywordsOpen-sourceRS & GISSoilSoftwareSatellite

Today, Information and Communication Technology has provided us with an ability of flexibility and access to information and resources (Agarwal, Manjari, 2014). It has empowered the Library and Information Science community to adapt to the new open source software (OSS) tools and technologies in their day-to-day activities in their libraries. Development of OSS based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history that is essentially as long as software development itself. Open source initiative was formed in 1998 as an educational, advocacy and stewardship organisation at an important moment in the history of OSS and collaborative development. This study is aimed to study the different OSS of library digitisation in engineering college libraries of Karnataka, to Study the nature and type of open source digital library software used in engineering college libraries of Karnataka and to Study the areas of application of OSS in engineering college libraries of Karnataka. The investigation has conducted a survey among 147 engineering college librarians in the state of Karnataka on the above matters. The results are discussed under the categories such as status of library automation and digitisation, use of automation and digital library software, management of IT and network requirement of library, own digital library/institutional repository software, involvement in installation of OSS, involvement in installation of OSS, potential areas of adopting OSS in library and duration of OSS implementation in library.

Geographic information system (GIS) is platform for massive geographic information management and processing. Remote Sensing data is processed and analyzed as a key application in geographic information system platform. A large number of proprietary and open source applications exist to process remote sensing data. According to an NOAA Sponsored Research by Global Marketing Insights, Inc. the most used applications among Asian academic groups involved in remote sensing are as follows: ERDAS, ESRI, ITT Visual Information Solutions ENVI, and MapInfo. On the other side, open source developments or their applications in the geo-spatial community have somewhat long history, and nowadays they are regarded on the maturing stage in both the academics and industries. The most notably open source systems are well known, such as, GRASS, OSSIM and ILWIS. Standards are a fundamental enabling technology of the Internet and allow thousands for applications, vendor solutions, and technologies to be interoperable. The OGC web services are standards which have resulted in the interoperability between different applications, such as commercial system and data from open source system. In Oracle 11g, they have implemented following OGC Web Service Interface Standards. This paper mainly studies interoperation of multi-source enviroment in the OGC Web Service Framework. The author shows how the OGC standards work and how the system present the data. As a sample of commercial remote sensing software, ERDAS APOLLO supports the standards specifications developed by OGC (WMS, WFS, WCS). And this paper shows the impelementation of publishing data to web-based client application in ERDAS APOLLO Essentials. As one of typical open source software's characteristic, open source software framework provides the ability to implement thematic information systems that collect, reference, visualize, exchange and disseminate statistical, survey and indicator data. Finally, open source platform based architecture and system design with several sturdy open source software is shown in order to remote sensing applications to construct remote sensing contents and to provide specific target applications services in integrated platform. It is thought that the application and implementation of in open source geographic information system software can widen uses-scope of remote sensing applications as international information trade main trend.

This paper presents a tool to automatically generate distribution network models for the power engineering software OpenDSS. The tool was developed in a free and open source Geographical Information System (GIS) software that allows a direct translation of GIS to OpenDSS files. The paper shows the potential of the developed piece of software and how it can help power engineers to carry out detailed studies of medium and low voltage networks. It also explains data requirements in the GIS database and all the steps followed to create the OpenDSS files. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the model builder, the paper presents the translation of a real distribution circuit GIS model to OpenDSS.

Sensible Open Source Licenses For Standards Development Organizations

ABSTRACTRemote-sensing applications using the remotely piloted aerial system (RPAS) are becoming more frequent. RPAS is used in different contexts and in several areas, such as environmental studies, cultural heritage, civil engineering, forestry, and cartography. To process the images resulting from the RPAS, different types of image-based 3D modelling software (proprietary or open source) are used. MicMac is an open-source software which allows generating georeferenced information which can be manipulated or visualized under a geographical information system (GIS) environment. So, the integration between the MicMac procedures within a GIS software could be very useful. The main objective of this work was to create an open-source GIS application based on MicMac photogrammetric tools to obtain the orthophotographs, point clouds, and digital surface models. To test the application developed, two distinct areas were considered: one in a more natural environment (Aguda beach near Porto city, Portugal) and another in an urban environment in the city of Coimbra, Portugal. High-resolution data sets were obtained with a ground sampling distance (GSD) of approximately 4.5 cm. Shaded relief image and dense point cloud were generated. This open-source application can be automated and can create all the files required to run the functionalities from MicMac to obtain the georeferenced information, within a GIS software, bringing photogrammetric data generation to a wider user community. Moreover, integrating this application with the GIS software has several advantages like generating more georeferenced information, such as vegetation indices, or even creating the land use land cover map. Creation of shapefiles with the projection centre of the camera, the area covered by each photograph, and taking account of the number of images that appear in each location are also useful in performing certain tasks.

The study of terrain and all its related elements and facets are of crucial importance to the military. Lodi, Smit, and Ayirebi agreed with this statement and added that the importance of terrain was recognised by military leaders more than two thousand years ago.[i] Military operations can occur at any of the three levels of war: tactical, operational and strategic and can be a combat operation or a military operation other than war (MOOTW). Information about the geography empowers a military commander to plan and execute a mission successfully. As technology developed and evolved, geographic information systems (GIS) have come to play a major role in this. Today, a military operation without the use of GIS is unthinkable. In a developing country like the South Africa, however, licenses for proprietary GIS software, vendor-exclusive training and the bureaucracy of the procurement cycle add to the time and costs of a mission. The question arises whether open source software is a feasible alternative. Since the South African National Defence Force was initially trained in the use of proprietary software and it therefore became a strong habit, the perception now exits that FOSSGIS products are neither mature enough nor user-friendly enough to be used in military operations. This study evaluates the use of an open source desktop GIS product, QGIS, in a use case for a military operation “other than war” (MOOTW). QGIS outputs were compared to those produced in ArcGIS, a proprietary desktop GIS product widely used in military operations. The user-friendliness of the two products as well as pricing was also compared. Results show that the QGIS outputs provide the operational commander with equivalent information to successfully plan and execute a mission. This implies that open source GIS is suitable for military operations, especially those with limited budgets and at short notice, such as in the case of disaster relief. [i]    Lodi, K., Smit, H. & Ayirebi, G. (2014). Terrain analysis in the course curricula of the South African Army Engineer Corps. Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies, 42, 102-121.

As lots of GIS (Geographic Information systems) applications for statistical purposes are available in the market but still there is lots of demand of integration of GRASS-GIS i.e., Geographic Resources Analysis support GIS with the R statistical package. Many researchers always want to explore, analyse, complex analysis of spatial data with statistical problems and dealing with large areas in less amount of time and memory within individual software but this is not possible without integration. However, the integration of GRASS-GIS and R statistical package play a very important role to fulfil all needs related to computation, analyse, retrieve, image processing, graphics production and query spatial data. GRASS is open source software freely available, used for data management, analysis of geospatial data, spatial modelling with visualization whereas R (Open Source Package) enables all statistical environments with better quality plots providing linear or non-linear modelling, time series analysis with classification and clustering. In this paper, GRASS-GIS i.e., GIS subsystem act as a simple interface for R i.e., statistical computing subsystem for both raster and vector spatial data which provides commands to GRASS program via R system () function. Integration also enables all R plotting and analytical functions i.e., kriging prediction; kernel density pattern estimation etc. and proves very beneficial with the perception of research and educational purposes. It is also capable to provide introductory knowledge of both open software’s packages with their flexibility, robustness capability. This paper also introduces an example of classification of roads on the basis of slope via box plot representation by interfacing R in GRASS Environment.