Open-source geospatial tools and technologies for urban and environmental studies

All over the world, organizations are increasingly considering the adoption of open source software and open data. In the geospatial domain, this is no different, and the last few decades have seen significant advances in this regard. We review the current state of open source geospatial software, focusing on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) software ecosystem and its communities, as well as three kinds of open geospatial data (collaboratively contributed, authoritative and scientific). The current state confirms that openness has changed the way in which geospatial data are collected, processed, analyzed, and visualized. A perspective on future developments, informed by responses from professionals in key organizations in the global geospatial community, suggests that open source geospatial software and open geospatial data are likely to have an even more profound impact in the future.

Abstract. Open source software could emerge thanks to the development of the Internet, development tools, and computer literacy in general. The most attractive parameter of open source GIS software is a free license. The rapid pace of development, attracting developers from all over the world and high modularity stimulate the innovative nature of open source software. Here, the introduction of new technologies does not meet with opposition, but rather welcomes. These circumstances, as well as elucidation of the functional capabilities of such GIS, become very important in the search for means of providing the educational process with modern GIS software, which is traditionally an expensive proprietary software. Goal: Analysis of up-to-date GIS software protection and visual accessibility of the QGIS system in the first place with studying geoinformation systems.Quantum GIS (QGIS) is an open source software (GIS) geographic information system (GIS). Open software is one of the most interesting technological phenomena of the present, owing to its rapid growth in the development of the Internet, development tools and computer literacy in general. The key role in the creation, development and support of open source software is played, as a rule, by the community of developers forming around individual software products: commercial companies, groups of enthusiasts or research organizations. The term open source was proposed by Bruce Perens, one of the key leaders in the Open Source and Free Software movement, cofounder with Eric Raymind in 1998 of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an open source software development organization that promotes and provides technical open source support. This open source term is used by OSI to determine whether a software license complies with open source standards. The main features of open source software as defined include free distribution, accessible source code, permission to modify this source code. At the same time, even successful open source software products require companies on the market ready to provide technical support and advice on issues related to the selected products. However, the number of companies providing support services for open source GIS software is still relatively small.

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 o 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.

A use case of integrating a variety of open-source geospatial tools is presented in this paper to process and openly redeliver open data in open standards. Through a software engineering approach, we have focused on the potential usability of OpenStreetMap in authoritative and professional contexts in Great Britain. Our system comprises open source components from OSGeo projects, the Open Street Map (OSM) community and proprietary components. We present how the open data flows among those components and is delivered to the Web with open standards. Apart from the cost issues, utilizing the opensource tools has offered some distinct advantages compared to the proprietary alternatives, if any was available. At the same time, some technical limitations of utilizing current open-source tools are described. Finally a case study is shown for the usability of the developed solution.

Marine Scotland, a directorate of Scottish Government, comprises of policy, planning and science divisions that collectively aim to manage Scotland's seas for prosperity and sustainability. Across this wide portfolio, data underpin the decisions Marine Scotland makes and the advice it provides to Ministers and the public. A transparent and robust decision making process requires easy access to authoritative data, both for use within Marine Scotland and by external stakeholders. Marine Scotland manages three data-driven services that work in harmony to provide an Open Data Network: Marine Scotland Information, Marine Scotland Data and Marine Scotland Maps. By closely following Open Data standards and working with the INSPIRE directive and open source tools, Marine Scotland has designed a complex but highly responsive network of services to bring together data access and visualisation, GIS capabilities and an information management solution. There are an increasing number of users of the sea, and while traditional management activities such as fisheries management and environmental monitoring and assessment still feature heavily, marine spatial management, licensing of activities and protecting designated areas are becoming the integrating tools for a more holistic management of the seas. In Scotland, the Scottish Government introduced a National Marine Plan, first published in 2015, which fulfils the requirements of the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, and the Maritime Spatial Planning EU Directive (2014/89/EU). During the work to prepare an assessment on the condition of the Scottish marine area, Scotland's Marine Atlas was published in 2011. To support the Atlas, and in recognition of the need to update and manage spatial information on Scotland's seas, an interactive GIS portal was developed — National Marine Plan Interactive (NMPi), now known as Marine Scotland Maps. While the GIS portal greatly enhanced stakeholder engagement and created a tool for updating and managing spatial information to support planning of activities in Scottish seas, there was recognition that additional information was often required. Information web pages for spatial layers were created — initially a manual process- and subsequently transferred to a more dynamic database driven system to facilitate reuse of information sources and links. Within the research and monitoring function of Marine Scotland, data publication was becoming a pressing matter — not just for GIS representation, but to provide persistent identifiers to facilitate collaborative data sharing, and to be used in peer reviewed publications as well as Marine Scotland's own scientific report series. To improve access, and at the same time embrace the developing Scottish Government Open Data Strategy that was published in 2015, Marine Scotland deployed an open data portal (Marine Scotland Data) using open source software and open standards. This delivers open data at 4-star rating (www.5stardata.info) while also minting persistent identifiers on the datasets to improve citation and use in scientific literature. A number of the datasets published on Marine Scotland Data were increasingly used and referenced from pages describing the work presented on the Marine Scotland Map GIS portal, and it was decided to make the supporting information web pages more integrated to provide a more holistic description and access for stakeholders as well as enabling Marine Scotland to make better use of its own published information assets. The new information portal, Marine Scotland Information (MSI), was developed on a Drupal platform which combines service data from open standards (OGC standards and DCAT JSON feeds) with content generated by staff. Vocabularies allow the categorisation of service data and other content into searchable resources that allow stakeholders to locate and read about a broader topic, and then jump to the specific datasets and map layers as required. In this way MSI acts as a central source of information, bringing the data and GIS services together. The utilisation of information available through services enabled further keywords to be automatically generated, and additional metadata on spatial layers to be supplied through MSI. This provides context, user-friendly information and guided access to Marine Scotland data. It also facilities access to the more advanced functions offered by the data and GIS portals. The combination of contextual information with direct data access and open standards means that Marine Scotland is increasingly using its external facing tools for a substantial part of its data and information management for internal work also. This paper discusses the design and functionality of the Marine Scotland open data solution, and how the systems improve information management for both Marine Scotland and its stakeholders.

Open Content Communities

This study examined whether multimodal trip planners can be developed using open-source software and open data sources. OpenStreetMap (OSM), maintained by the non-profit OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open, freely available international repository of geographic data that individuals contribute about their communities. In the transit industry, Google's offer of a free online transit trip planner based on the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) has made GTFS a de facto standard for describing transit systems and a platform for many other Web and mobile applications. Over 125 public transportation agencies in the U.S. have put their data into GTFS format. Bus stop locations can link OSM and GTFS data. OpenTripPlanner is an open-source multimodal trip planning software system with an active developer community. The study team set up an instance of OpenTripPlanner for Tampa, Florida, using biking and walking data from OSM, and GTFS data from local transit agencies, to examine the tool's ability to route using multimodal data. The study team also recorded multimodal data for the Tampa region in OSM to examine the current OSM coding conventions and determine the coding system's ability to support functions required of a multimodal trip planner, such as providing information on access to transit, wheelchair accessibility, or conditions that could affect the safety of a trip (e.g., intersection crossings). This study also investigated the use of opensource software to quickly increase the amount of multimodal data available in OpenStreetMap. The research team created GTFS-OSM-Sync (GO_Sync), a framework and open-source software tool for synchronizing transit data between the transit agency's official GTFS dataset and OSM. GO_Sync connects the wealth of data from GTFS datasets to the ability of the OSM community to augment and improve the data. During a test deployment of GO_Sync in Tampa, OSM users corrected 173 bus stop locations. The project demonstrated that it is feasible to implement a multimodal trip planner using open-source software and open data sources. Based on existing practices regarding GTFS and OpenTripPlanner, transit schedule and route data are best obtained directly from transit agencies' GTFS files. Data on infrastructure for walking and cycling can be obtained from OSM or from other locally available public-domain data. This report suggests a few changes to the OSM coding conventions that would improve OSM's ability to meet the needs of a multimodal trip planner. The principal barrier to developing a multimodal trip planner remains the availability of data and, when using OSM as a source of data, the relatively low participation of U.S. residents in the project, compared to Europe. The OSM community recognizes this as a problem, but additional research is needed on how best to overcome it. Additional research also is needed on how best to communicate results from a trip planner to users who may have varying skill and comfort levels when it comes to bicycling and walking. 17.

Reliability is critical to the stable operation of open source big data system software. So far, the reliability modeling and evaluation of open source big data system software is still in its early stages, and traditional software reliability models are not suitable for the development and testing environment of open source big data system software. Both closed source and open source software development and testing environments cannot be consistent with big data system software development and testing environments, and open source big data system software development and testing environments are even more complex. Such as, dynamic and heterogeneous environments, evolving architectures, and interdependencies and ecosystem complexity, etc. Therefore, traditional software reliability models fail to meet the reliability evaluation requirements for open source big data system software. In this paper, we focus on the characteristics of open source big data system software development and testing, such as the complexity of fault detection, the possibility of introducing new faults and fault removal efficiency factors during fault debugging, to establish a new software reliability model. By comparing with established software reliability models, the accuracy of the proposed model in predicting faults is verified, and the proposed model can effectively evaluate the reliability of open source big data system software. The proposed model can be used for fault prediction and reliability evaluation of open source big data system software in practical development.

This research study is an attempt to develop a MARC-formatted authority dataset for Indian geo-administrative units given the inadequate coverage of Indian place names in global authority datasets. It starts with an authenticated place names file in CSV format and applies data wrangling tools and techniques to fetch geospatial data and other related datasets from open access data sources to develop a geographic name authority file for Indian place names with geocoordinate data values. Later, this research also demonstrates how that authority dataset can be implemented in an open-source ILS and how retrieval features of a library discovery system can be enhanced through a geodetic search interface by utilizing that authority dataset. The entire methodologies are based on open data, open-source software, and open standards.

Both the free and open source software (FOSS) as well as the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) has shown particular promise among scientists for developing custom scientific tools. Early research found substantial economic savings for these technologies, but as the open source design paradigm has grown by orders of magnitude it is possible that the savings observed in the early work was isolated to special cases. Today there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines and several resources dedicated specifically to publishing them. Do the tremendous economic savings observed earlier hold today? To answer that question, this study evaluates free and open source technologies in the two repositories compared to proprietary functionally-equivalent tools as a function of their use of Arduino-based electronics, RepRap-class 3-D printing, as well as the combination of the two. The results of the review find overwhelming evidence for a wide range of scientific tools, that open source technologies provide economic savings of 87% compared to equivalent or lesser proprietary tools. These economic savings increased slightly to 89% for those that used Arduino technology and even more to 92% for those that used RepRap-class 3-D printing. Combining both Arduino and 3-D printing the savings averaged 94% for free and open source tools over commercial equivalents. The results provide strong evidence for financial support of open source hardware and software development for the sciences. Given the overwhelming economic advantages of free and open source technologies, it appears financially responsible to divert funding of proprietary scientific tools and their development in favor of FOSH. Policies were outlined that provide nations with a template for strategically harvesting the opportunities provided by the free and open source paradigm.

Open Source, Anarchy, and the Utopian Impulse

IntroductionThis paper introduces OS-WALK-EU, a new open-source walkability assessment tool developed specifically for urban neighbourhoods and using open-source spatial data. A free and open-source tool, OS-WALK-EU is accessible to the general public. It uses open data available worldwide and free online services to compute accessibility, while at the same time allowing users to integrate local datasets if available. Based on a review of existing measurement concepts, the paper adopts dimensions of walkability that were tested in European city environments and explains their conceptualization for software development. We invite the research community to collaboratively test, adopt and use the tool as part of the increasing need to monitor walkability as part of health-promoting urban development. MethodsTool development is based on spatial analysis methods to compute indicators for five dimensions of walkability: residential density, weighted proximities to amenities, pedestrian radius of activity, share of green and blue infrastructure, and slope. Sample uses in the cities of Dublin, Düsseldorf and Lisbon test the validity of input data and results, including scenarios for target groups like older people. ResultsOverall, application of the tool in Dublin, Düsseldorf and Lisbon shows conclusive results that conform to local knowledge. Shortcomings can be attributed to deficiencies in open source input data. Local administrative data, if available, is suitable to improve results. ConclusionsOS-WALK-EU is the first software tool that allows free and open walkability assessments with pedestrian routing capacities for ‘proximity to facilities’ calculations. Large scale implementation for 33 German city regions in an online application shows the value of comparative assessments of walkable neighbourhoods between urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Such assessments are important to monitor progress in a mobility transition towards improved walkability and public health.

Critically studying openness: A way forward

India Takes an Open Source Approach to Drug Discovery

In recent years, “Data Fabric” has become new analytic buzzword in Data Management agility where it has become a high priority in booming industries where they have an environment that is more complicated, scattered, and diversified. Data analytics experts began exploring beyond conventional data management techniques and shifted toward contemporary solutions like AI-enabled data integration in order to decrease human errors and total costs. Data fabric is a weave where it stretches spanning a wide area that connects numerous sites, various data source kinds, and accessing techniques. As it progresses through the various stages of the data fabric, the data collected from the source can be handled, processed, and stored. For a wide range of applications, the data can also be accessible by or shared with both internal and external apps. Data fabric applications’ main objectives are to optimize supply chains for end-to-end products, complywith data rules, and enhance consumer engagement through more sophisticated mobile apps and interactions. Always Companies can gain a competitive edge with data, but to meet customer demands, they must supply data rapidly. Most of the enterprises implemented cloud migration and IoT, with increased cost-effective data storage and processing. Because of this data is no longer tied to local centers, and most of the data are located in different places and it is very difficult to manage [1]. A Data Fabric is a strategic solution to the enterprise to incur storage operations and leverages the best version of cloud migration. This architecture can support centrally managed, public and private clouds, IoT and other devices. This reduces management tasks through automation, accelerates the development and deployment process, and protects assets without interruption. It enables changes to be made quickly, resolving problems, managing risk, reducing IT operations and complying with regulations. In this chapter, the best open source data fabric tools that meet the enterprise requirements are listed and highlighted with its benefits and challenges. The greatest data fabric tools are profiled in one location, which makes it easy for researchers to choose the tool throughout their search. Data categorization and discovery, data quality and profiling, data lineage and governance, and data exploration and integration are the four main functions offered by the data fabric technologies. These data collaboration platforms combine data integration with business applications. Atlan, Cinchy, Data.world, Denodo, IBM, K2 View are few open source tools that are used by enterprise to manage their data and its integration. There are wide ranges of Open Source Data fabric tools that are quick to list its benefits. Instead of using proprietary systems, the majority of firms are interested in open source solutions due to lower costs. The capacity to modify and offer creative solutions on the code to satisfy business objectives is another crucial advantage of working with open source proponents. However, in this chapter we discuss about the Key features, benefits and technical challenges of different open source data integration tools in detail. The primary challenges in the utilizing open source data tool in enterprise is they lack in community support. In general The IT departments of many businesses rely on vendor support to enhance their internal capabilities [2]. Having open source tools, make the enterprise to face and resolve the issues by their own, which is very hard. When developing a data management environment, technology teams frequently underestimate the amount of time and expertise required to properly employ open source software. Most of the organizations they frequently underestimate the amount of work necessary to integrate open source with other subsystems and, as a result, incorrectly evaluate the total cost of ownership of employing open source systems. Most businesses meet few significant obstacles when working on open source pilot projects, but they may run into problems when attempting to manage and maintain those deployments on a wide scale.