Free Software, Free Knowledge, Free Humanity: National Conference on Free Software15 – 16 Nov 2008, CUSAT, Cochin, India

FOSS GIS: the future of GIS

A.P.Pradeepkumar

1,2

and Radhakrishnan.T

Department of Geology, Government College, Kottayam, India.geo.pradeep@gmail.com

Stuttgart Active Alumni Group (SAAG), ND-9, Jawahar Nagar, Trivandrum, India

Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala, Technopark, Trivandrum,rkrishna@iiitmk.ac.in

A. The beginnings

The development of GRASS paved the way to open source GIS way back in the 1980s, ata time when there was no concept of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In a way itwas ahead of the times, and that very fact has now turned it into a somewhatanachronistic system. But GRASS, developed by the US Army showed that spatialanalysis is first and foremost a free enterprise. It was the advent of ESRI's Arc series thatlead to the sidelining of GRASS, and its subsequent confinement to the research labs ofacademicians.But the growth and spread of Linux in its various flavours has, in the last few years,created an almost cult-like following for the philosophy of FOSS. This has permeated allareas of computing and GIS has not been an exception. GISs like Manifold were the firstto offer their proprietary software free for use, with some limitations, which prevented theiruse in a production environment. But even this situation has now changed. FreeGIS.orglists over 300 GIS projects based on FOSS technologies (Steiniger and Bocher 2008). Aswith the rallying cry of the messiah of the FOSS movement Richard Stallman (Stallman2007), FOSS GIS too has its messiahs like the OSGeo Foundation. As with any softwaresystem, FOSS GIS too has its advantages and disadvantages that we list at the end ofthe paper.

B. FOSS everyday!

The best everyday FOSS example is Firefox with millions of ardent users, who haven'tbeen swayed by Google's Chrome browser. The OpenOffice suite to has quite a largefollowing, and the whole STM publishing industry from Netherlands to India depends onthat versatile free software LATEX (www.tug.in), which continues to be tweaked into doingthings its founder Donald Knuth didn't ever imagine possible, to get those journals intoprint as well as on to the web. GIMP, Inkscape are popular image and drawing packages.The R Project is the latest buzz in the GIS statistical analyses arena.Governments still are dependent upon ESRI suite of GIS, and even in Kerala most ofthe government (e.g. Mining and Geology Dept, KSLUB, State Remote Sensing Centre etc.)and university labs (CGIST, University of Kerala) run ESRI's GIS packages. But with the newfound enthusiasm and support groups in FOSS this situation is changing in Kerala too, intune with the changes the world over. There have been instances of GIS-like packagesbeing developed for in house use e.g. the MARS package by KELTRON, Trivandrum. TheIndian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala (IIITMK), Trivandrum ispioneering in FOSS GIS developments that include both Desktop and Web GISapplications. IIITMK has also started using the tools in implementing projects as well as intraining students. Its GIS lab could very well become the locus for FOSS GIS in Kerala, orfor that matter even in India. It has already hosted FOSS GIS events like theOpenStreetMap (OSM) Workshop in 2007, and it was selected as the venue for a WebGISworkshop (Oct 28—30, 2008) completely based on FOSS GIS like gvSIG, R, XAMPP etc, bythe Stuttgart Active Alumni Group and the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences,Germany, in association with its academic partner the Geology department, Govt College,Kottayam. It uses FOSS GISs like Quantum GIS, GRASS, gvSIG etc. These and othersoftwares have in recent times seen extraordinarily high download rates, attesting to theirincreased popularity. FreeGIS.org's OSM Project is a pioneering venture in datadevelopment and in some areas it betters Google map. The release of the book on

Free Software, Free Knowledge, Free Humanity: National Conference on Free Software15 – 16 Nov 2008, CUSAT, Cochin, India

GRASS by Mitasova and Neteler in 2002, at the Trento GRASS user’s conference was animportant milestone for the movement. The book has gone into its third edition despite itsstiff price of 75 euros, an index of the popularity of FOSS GIS. A number of FOSS GISbooks have come out in this year, and 2008 seems to be a landmark year for FOSS GIS.Books like

(1)

Hall GB

Open Source Approaches in Spatial Data Handling

Springer Verlag

(2)

Mitchell T, Emde A and Christl

Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits

O’Reilly

(3)

Neteler M and Mitasova H

Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach

3rd ed.,Springer Verlag

(4)

Ramm F and Topf J

OpenStreetMap: Die freie Weltkarte nutzen und mitgestalten

,Lehmanns Media

(5)

Sherman GE

Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source

The PragmaticProgrammersseem to have caught the imagination of the new generation of GIS users who cannot becowed down by proprietary stuff.Software, routines, algorithms as well as data are coming out under GPL licenses(http://grass.itc.it/). Data is the most critical component of any GIS and its availability freeof cost over the net is revolutionary to say the least. USGS had pioneered such moves, inthe past, but now we have individuals doing their mite in sharing data. This augurs well forthe knowledge society we aim to become, unfettered by the shackles that limitintellectual discourse and which goes against the grain of the motto of the FOSSmovement which is that every software is the foundation of a learning society where weshare our knowledge in a way that others can build upon (FSF 2008). The best knownlicensing of FOSS are the General Public License (GPL), the GNU Lesser General PublicLicense (LGPL), NetBSD, FreeBSD (Berkley Software Distribution), the MIT license(www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html), sourceforge.org, okfn.org, sciencecommons.org arepopular FOSS endeavours.Reviews of FOSS GIS can be found in Reid and Martin (2001), Ramsey (2007),Jolma et al. (2006). The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (www.osgeo.org) founded in2006 in Chicago is the defacto representative of the FOSS GIS community today. TheOSGeo journal is its mouth piece. FOSS GIS thrives through small conferences andworkshops, but some of its events have over 1000 participants. Websites dedicated toFOSS GIS alsoo carry the message forward. The Open Geospatial Consortium is not tobe equated with the aims of the FOSS GIS actors, since the former is simply a name for astandard for GIS data exchange.Thuban, mezoGIS, MapBender and MapBuilder are examples of two free GISviewers. Some FOSS GIS projects use C and C++, some JAVA, others Python and someMicrosoft .NET. GISs founded for commercial uses by companies include uDig andKOSMO. Others GISs found by geospatial teams working in a collaborative mode includeQuantum GIS. Research projects at universities/government departments have lead toGISs like GRASS and SAGA. The new gvSIG is an example of a GIS developed bygovernmental agencies for assisting local administration (Schroeder 2008).

C. Open Source Desktop GISs: the top guns

GRASS - Geographic Resources Analysis Support System

GRASS was an alternativeto ESRI’s ARCINFO. It was the US Army’s Construction Engineering Research Lab (CERL),which initiated GRASS in 1985. GRASS was a raster analysis software, programmed in Cand Tcl/Tk. GRASS had an initial period of success, and an enthusiastic user group, butits decline began under the onslaught of ESRI. The US Army soon found out that eventhough it had its dedicated, high quality GRASS development team, the Army's numeroussuppliers had no such capability and were unwilling to spend time and effort in usingGRASS, when they could get easy support for ESRI GIS at some extra cost. This sounded

Free Software, Free Knowledge, Free Humanity: National Conference on Free Software15 – 16 Nov 2008, CUSAT, Cochin, India

the end of the Army's support for GRASS, its team was disbanded, never to work togetheragain on GRASS. Thus commercial interests of the suppliers drove the demise of GRASS.But 1999 GRASS had a sort of revival with the intervention of Mitasova (USA) and Neteler(Germany). GRASS now again has a large user and developer group. It supports 2Draster/voxel display and analysis, 2D/3D vector editing, vector network analysis andimage processing. The capabilities are comparable to that of ArcInfo. GRASS finds usemostly in research and academia in environmental analysis, fire management,hydrological analysis and geological mapping. Still, many people unaccustomed toUNIX/LINUX find its UNIX heritage discomfiting. Also there was no Windows version ofGRASS, requiring Cygwin to emulate Windows under UNIX (with v6.3.0 a native Windowsversion has been released) (Mitasova and Neteler 2004). But tutorials on GRASSinstallation have always existed on the net (Pradeepkumar 2003).GRASS had quite a few mirror sites from which it could be downloaded and theBaylor University was a defacto location. Indian involvement cam elate, with a mirror sitehosted by the Center for Ecological Sciences, at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalorein 2003. GIS analysis on GRASS currently is done in few places in India like IISc, NIC,IIITMK-Trivandrum, IRTC-Mundur-Kerala etc.

QGIS – Quantum GIS

QGIS development started in 2002 with the aim of giving Linuxsystems an efficient GIS data viewer. But QGIS turned out as a GUI for GRASS. QGISworks on Windows, MacOS, Linux and can handle raster and vector data, web serversderived data. It is programmed in C++, with GUI on the Qt4 library. QGIS extensions are inC++ and Python.

uDig – user-friendly Desktop GIS

uDig (Refractions Research Inc. Canada, 2004) aims atcapability for viewing and editing directly in databases and over the web. PostGIS forPostgreSQL database is also by the same company. uDig is under JAVA-Eclipse platformand has both vector and raster capabilities. uDig's jGRASS team aims at bringing GRASSfunctionality JAVA based programs and upgrade GRASS to production environment, thusmaking it competitive with ArcGIS. The user and developer documentation of uDig, QGISand GRASS are very good.

gvSIG - Generalitat Valenciana, Sistema d'Informaci Geogràfica

This Spanish project(2003) with European Union funding and active collaboration of researchers from allEuropean nations, including Germany and the company IVER S.A. of Spain is the largestproject in GIS these days. gvSIG was initiated by Regional Council for Infrastructure andTransportation of Valencia province of Spain in response to the municipality’s decision tobecome completely FOSS-based. It thus needs to have all the functionality of ArcView. Ithas a simple GUI and very good user documentation. Raster, vector analysis is possibleand database connectors are available. gvSIG is JAVA-based. ArcView's capabilities aresometimes overtaken by gvSIG. C++ and JAVA libraries like GDAL-OGR and GeoTools areused, but such library dependencies are difficult to assess and to do customisedprogramming (Alfaro and Rico 2003; gvSIG, 2006).In India one of the first introductions to gvSIG took place in the WebGIS workshopat IIITMK-Trivandrum (Oct 28—30, 2008), where Prof Dietrich Schroeder of the StutthartUniversity of Applied Sciences, Germany used it to demonstrate it spatial analysiscapabilities. The audience found its capabilities inspiring and comparable to or evenbettering those of ArcGIS.

SAGA – System for Automated Geo-Scientific Analysis

Developed in 2001 at theDepartment of Geography, University of Gttingen, Germany for raster analysis. Used for

morphometric analysis and visualisation, and soil mapping. It is based on C++ with an APIfor customised developments.

ILWIS - Integrated Land and Water Information System

ILWIS and GRASS had similarhistories and are quite robust FOSS GIS. ITC, The Netherlands developed it in the 1980s. Ithas GIS and image processing functionality. Documentation is very good, and is apedagogic tool in many GIS courses. Visual C is the language used, and now ILWIS is