Organisation terrestris GmbH & Co kg

ID Number

155

Name	Mark Bishop
Organisation	Envitia Ltd
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Delivering high performance Spatial Data Infrastructures using FOSS4G components
I can give a practical demo	yes

Paper Abstract (short)

Envitia will outline the experiences gained and benefits resulting from delivering Open Spatial Data Infrastructures to Enterprise clients including the Welsh Government, UK Hydrographic Office and Royal Brunei Armed Forces for business and/or mission critical applications. These innovative projects have been proven to break down perceived barriers to open source adoption by providing highly performant, secure and future proof systems whilst ensuring the lowest possible total cost of ownership.

Paper Abstract (long)

Introduction Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and their geospatial derivatives, commonly called Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are gaining increased visibility as key technologies in a range of commercial, civil and defence environments. Organisations and individuals alike are identifying the benefits of being able to readily access geospatial information no matter where and on what infrastructure it is served. The concept of a GIS ÔsystemÕ is being broken down allowing people to concentrate on their business need and not the technology used. Programs such as INSPIRE are key catalysts in the adoption of SDIÕs. Organisations now more than ever need to publish their data holdings as open standard compliant services, and in many cases must do this free of charge. Many have found FOSS4G a convenient solution to the conundrum of providing data for free and yet paying for the infrastructure to serve it; the tough economic climate has simplified the decision making process for many. Some organisations are trying to hold on to their proprietary systems and solutions where there is a requirement for ÒHigh PerformanceÓ, ÒStabilityÓ or ÒSecurityÓ Ð Open is still seen by many as Risky... In this presentation Envitia will aim to dispel the myth! Open software is now at such a level of maturity to allow many traditional proprietary software components to be substituted to meet business requirements. We will outline the benefits and experiences of Enterprise clients including the Welsh Government, UK Hydrographic Office and Royal Brunei Armed Forces in designing, developing, integrating, testing, deploying, supporting and maintaining OpenSDIÕs. Case Studies Envitia was contracted in 2010 to deliver a Corporate GIS implementation project for Welsh Government (WG). The GIS makes geospatial information available to every department and Civil Servant in Welsh Government (approximately 5000-6000 staff). This solution provides the ability to rapidly build a number of separate spatial applications both for internal and public publication based upon the set of reusable web services. The project was awarded the Association of Geographic Information 2011 award for Government Innovation and Best Practice. The award recognised not only the success of the technology mix, implementation approach and adherence to both time and budget constraints, but also major cost savings which were achieved. Envitia are implementing the Defence Maritime Geospatial Information Services (DMarGS) capability on behalf of the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO), one of the worldÕs foremost producers and maintainers of Hydrographic Information and Charting. Envitia are providing both an infrastructure and an interface for the delivery of a broad range of on-line geospatial information to defence customers. Delivering services into the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) the DMarGS Geoportal now makes geospatial and environmental information available to defence users worldwide. Envitia are working in conjunction with Northrop Grumman UK, to supply the geographic information and spatial data management components of the Joint Operations Centre (JOC) Command and Control system for the Royal Brunei Armed Forces (RBAF). The JOC provides the RBAF with a facility that delivers command and control capability for military commands and civil organisations at both national and international level. It not only helps improve national security and the protection of its natural resources but also allows the Royal Brunei Armed Forces (RBAF) to be a lead nation in regional and coalition activities. Components of the OpenSDI Each of the solutions described in the above case studies comprise a mixture of Open Source Software combined with EnvitiaÕs Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard compliant components where these add value, performance and/or capability. All of the Open Source components used within the OpenSDI have extremely active communities with a wealth of resources and support available. FOSS4G components used include: GeoServer, the reference implementation of the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards, as well as a high performance certified compliant Web Map Service (WMS). GeoNetworks, an OGC compliant catalogue application, providing tools for the management of spatially referenced resources, and enabling rapid search of, and access to, local and distributed geospatial catalogues. It supports powerful online metadata editing and search functions and is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world. Eclipse BIRT, a reporting system for web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your app server or Java application. BIRT also offers a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application. Open Layers, a widely-used JavaScript library for the delivery of dynamic mapping and geospatial solutions into web browsers, with in-built support for WMS and WFS queries. As well as a wide range of ready-to-use components, it also provides an extensive API, allowing sophisticated geospatial applications to be delivered within a standard browser. DOJO, a JavaScript toolkit that supports dynamic capabilities within web pages using DHTML and Ajax. As with OpenLayers it includes both ready-to-use components and an extensive API. It is a general-purpose toolkit, rather than having any specific geospatial elements. It is very effective when used in conjunction with OpenLayers to provide dynamic browser-based capabilities for geospatial applications that could previously only be found in heavyweight desktop GIS. Quantum GIS (QGIS), a user friendly Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OSX and MS Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and database formats and is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Conclusions The adoption of Open Source technology is accelerating at pace. Innovative mixed economy approaches and commercially supported Open Source Software are able to break down the barriers to adoption of open source and provide highly performant, secure and future proof systems whilst ensuring the lowest possible total cost of ownership. Attend this presentation if: You want to take the ÒriskÓ out of OpenSDI implementation for mission/business critical solutions. You are looking to build your own OpenSDI and would like to understand how the Envitia solution is made up. You want an honest account of the issues we faced and how we overcame these.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Benchmarks: Comparisons between packages. Business Cases: building the economic case. Visualization: effective presentation of information. Collaboration: data collection, data sharing, open standards. New data: handling new data models, for example 3D & temporal data, or big data.		People new to open source geospatial Manager End User Technical / Developer

Additional Presenters
Name	Matthew Wood
Organisation	Envitia Ltd
Email	[e-mail]
Name	Alan Crisp
Organisation	Envitia Ltd
Email	[e-mail]

ID Number

123

Name	Jonathan Moules
Organisation	Warwickshire County Council
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Deploying a Open Source Web-GIS within Warwickshire County Council
I can give a practical demo	no

Paper Abstract (short)

This presentation seeks to present a case study for how Warwickshire County Council replaced their proprietary web-GIS with a in-house developed deployment of Heron Mapping Client, with GeoServer for the backend. It will cover the entire process, from business case, through specification, extending Heron, technical "gotcha's", community participation, user feedback, evaluation of the project, and future plans.

Paper Abstract (long)

Warwickshire County Council wanted a new intranet web-GIS to replace its existing proprietary solution which was failing to meet either the expectations or needs of the users. Unfortunately, because of the current political climate, the council lacked the funds to go out to tender for a new commercial solution - the last one cost in vendor fees alone in excess of £100,000 over three years. The Corporate GIS team had touched on with Open Source GIS before, using GeoNetwork for their metadata needs, but now gave it serious consideration for replacing the web-GIS. Time was set-aside for the project with the GIS Developer set to investigate open source options. A comparison of just some of the almost daunting selection of web-mapping libraries, frameworks, and clients was made and eventually the Heron Mapping Client was chosen for the web-front-end. For the back end, GeoServer was chosen and would work in conjunction with the existing Oracle database. Heron was chosen because it's a client designed for ease-of-deployment, and had no need for anyone to learn a full, complicated, framework. This, combined with its readily customisable user-interface would allow it to be used easily for this project and potentially other web-map projects the council had plans for in the future. As Heron lacked some of the more advanced "GIS-like" features Warwickshire desired ("redlining", select by location, etc), work was commissioned to extend the software, with the aim of this work being contributed back to the community, something Warwickshire feel is part of their social role as a publicly funded body. Some commits also went upstream to other projects such as OLEditor. This marked a notable change from the norm of giving funds to a proprietary vendor only to receive bespoke work that wouldn't benefit anyone else. GeoServer was chosen because of familiarity from a previous project and its user-friendly GUI for most admin things would allow easier training of administrators. The active and helpful community further solidified this decision. Its support for a myriad of OGC standards would also allow Warwickshire to expand its use, including to provide mapping for the desktop GIS's that are used across the Authority (MapInfo, ArcGIS, and potentially QGIS in the future). Warwickshire were pleased to note that participation in the communities was a two-way process: as well as using the software, they identified and reported a considerable number of bugs, some user-experience improvement suggestions, and endeavoured to participate in the mailing list communities to help others. Conversely, experience with the proprietary realm shows that bugs are often swept under the carpet ("That's a feature", "We can't replicate it") and very few commercial offerings come with a active online user community. Because the products are Open Source, Warwickshire also found there were a considerable number of potential vendors for both the Heron development work and the GeoServer support. This was in contrast to the current (and typical) vendor lock-in where once a system has been deployed, there is only one place to get support/development; something that also proves a particular problem if that support isn't up to par. As a result of this work, Warwickshire aims to have a state-of-the-art web-GIS client that can be used by users of all abilities within the authority, ideally with a smaller staff maintenance overhead. Development time from start to finish for the first version will be less than 5 months, with an anticipated cost over the next three years of about £20-£25,000 - a very significant saving to the taxpayer. Future web-GIS and web-map solutions should be created quickly and easily (weeks at most), with Warwickshire aiming to provide several external versions, some for the public, and some for partner organisations later. (Note: This project goes live internally in May 2013; we'll report at FOSS4G whether it lived up to its promise or not.)

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Business Cases: building the economic case.		People new to open source geospatial Manager Technical / Developer

ID Number

224

Name	Paul van Genuchten
Organisation	Geocat bv
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Developing an accessible Geonetwork for Environment Canada
I can give a practical demo	yes

Paper Abstract (short)

Accessibility guidelines and geo never were close friends. However governments require accessibility to the full website. For Environment Canada we are redesigning the classic UI in GeoNetwork to better comply with accessibility regulations. I'll present you the challenges we meet in doing so.

Paper Abstract (long)

At many governmental agencies there is a tendency to require websites to be fully accessible for a wide public. In the geo world there is quite some attention on fancy map navigation, accessibility didnÕt always get enough attention. Within the geonetwork project the interface has become more and more slick over the years, but it also ended up getting less and less accessible for impaired users (no scripting, IE6/7, (colour)blind, keyboard only). The group has recently increased dramatically with the recent explosion of mobile use of the web (small screen size, processing limitations). Environment Canada, one of the aware agencies, asked Geocat to create a UI that complies with accessibility Guidelines. In this presentation IÕll guide you through the changes we did to the classic GeoNetwork UI. The changes were considerable: Page-endpoints for home, search, detail, editÉ Javascript and ajax are optional, core functions can operate without scripting. All html elements have useful titles. UrlÕs are spider friendly. The changes will be proposed to the community soon, and probably integrated in the 2.12 release of Geonetwork.

Topic type		Target Type
Case Studies: Relate your experiences. Development: new developments in products. Collaboration: data collection, data sharing, open standards.		Manager End User Technical / Developer

Additional Presenters
Name	Jose Garcia
Organisation	Geocat bv
Email	[e-mail]

ID Number

219

Name	Pascal Coulon
Organisation	SCISYS
Email	[e-mail]

Paper Title	Disconnected Geospatial Mobile & ÒOpen SourceÓ 5 rule to success?
I can give a practical demo	yes

Paper Abstract (short)

Building a disconnected geospatial mobile solution in 5 key steppes

Paper Abstract (long)

Will 2013 be the year we all embrace GI mobile technology? Maybe but... there are a number of obstacle still ahead! Geospatial solutions are very data centric and whether you are in the office or in a remote location they need to consume large amounts of data. This is not always easily achieved in remote locations with poor connectivity. At the same time Open Source is increasingly being considered as a credible technology choice for desktop, web and mobile platforms. There is undoubtedly a growing community and standardization of the Open Source stack. This paper looks at the challenges and opportunities that are brought about by these two issues and addresses the key rules to consider for enabling geospatial technologies on mobile platform. This paper will look at the following key issues: Rule 1 Ð Data Storage. Streaming GI data requires good bandwidth, by implementing a caching mechanism the end-user will always have access to the data for a given area. Rule 2 - Use Open Source. Free and Open Source software for GIS has evolved significantly in recent years and in some cases faster than commercial alternatives. The mobile field is a bit different and few experts are using free and open source mobile GIS, despite the good tools that exist. Rule 3 - Use Open Standards. In combination with the use of Open Source products, Open Standards can help future proof the solution. Rule 4 - Simplify User Interfaces. The time of the stylus is gone and users now expect to use their finger for driving the application. Specific attention must be paid to designing simple and clear user interfaces. Rule 5 - Implement Non native Solutions. Should separate solutions be developed for IPhone and Android? Could the answer be instead to actually develop non native solutions reducing development and maintenance costs. Armed with these rules we will look at the challenges on the road ahead to implementing your GI Mobile solution.