Department of Telecommunications and Information Services
Chief Consulting Officer Page 1 of 2Blair Adams Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Expanding the Role of Open Source GIS in Government
Abstract
The City and County of San Francisco has recently embarked on an adoption of Free and Open Source Software for GIS (FOSS4G) for web-based geospatialpresentation (WebGIS). There have been two primary drivers for this approach:economic pressures to innovate as well as a higher usability standard set by theGoogle Map interface.Numerous enterprise purveyors of geospatial information, particularly those inthe government sector, are at similar crossroads. End users have come toexpect web-based mapping applications that are intuitive and responsive. Thelegacy WebGIS of the City (developed in 2001) have been described by end-users as ‘slow’ and ‘complicated’. In reviewing alternatives it became clear thatFOSS4G was a viable technology refresh option. While the legacy applicationscontinue to serve maps and related data to the public, prototyping of theFOSS4G stack (PostGreSQL, PostGIS, GeoServer, TileCache and OpenLayers),began in October 2007. Within six months of work on the development of theFOSS4G stack it became clear that a FOSS4G application was eligible for pilotconsideration.The City found through its research efforts, that FOSS4G development wasexperiencing rapid and dynamic growth, with an engaged developer community.Many other municipalities were in the process or had already put in placeFOSS4G-based applications serving the public. In concert with theseapplications, municipalities were providing machine-readable formatted dataover the web (GeoRSS, KML, GML), which could be harnessed for use in othertypes of applications, including decision support systems.During the search for candidate pilot departments the potential emerged for alarger role for WebGIS within the broader decision support context. WebGIS iswell positioned to become the man-machine interface of choice for complexdecision visualization. Executive decision-makers have made clear their need toview data roll-ups not only through text reports, but also via the powerfulvisualization provided by interactive mapping. With the integration of complementary open source modules such as Customer RelationshipManagement (CRM), Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)and Business Intelligence (BI) FOSS4G is well suited to evolve civil assetmanagement from reactive to proactive.
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