27 OPEN SOURCE GIS

Dr Seema Mehra Parihar

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LEARNING OBJECTIVES

 

After studying this unit you should be able :

  1. To Visulise that open source GiS is a reality today.
  2. To understand the nuances of Open Source GIS
  3. To be able to compare Open source & proprietary Software in GIS environment
  4. To be better equipped while selecting a GIS software for your project.

    1. Introduction

 

“A paradigm shift from proprietary software to open software is quiet visual today” shared Parihar (2007) ten years back in her write up in geospatial today.

 

After ten years in 2017 , the open source GIS basket is much bigger & much versatile. The development of open source GIS software has – in terms of software history – a long tradition with the appearance of a first system in 1978. Though it started about forty years back with spatial less ideological baggage than ‘free software’, it is now appealing more to the geospatial industry, ”. About 900 open source software (OSS) can be accessed easily in geospatial arena worldwide. Thousands of software developers areexperimenting and gearing up to share their codes with geospatial community in a democratic way. “The growth of open-source software has received substantial attention in last few years. The adoption of open-source software systems in developing nations, as a means of reducing licensing costs and of promoting indigenous technological development by having access to the source code of these systems(Camara and Onsrud, 2004)”. Free and open source software for geospatial applications (FOSS4G) is the annual recurring global event hosted by OSGeo since its inception in 2006 which encourage to open source software and its development.

 

 

Moreover,OpenSourceGIS.org alone lists as many as 223 open source/free GIS related software projects (March, 2006). freeGIS.org, Meta lab linux archive, OSRS and freshmeat.net are other related storehouses. QGIS,Grass,OSSIM (Open Source Software Image Map) , uDig are few successful examples of OSS. Of course, by no means OSS is trying to undermine proprietary software or is trying to imply that in near future all desktops of GIS professional will have OSS. But certainly time has come to understand OSS as that alone has capability of expanding geospatial operability and making best use of internet browser space and server software space. Open source software (OSS) in this lecture implies principally a software in which users are given or can obtain the original source code from which software is compiled, and also where license is incorporated that permits users to modify and redistribute the code. Obviously geospatial ethics cannot be overlooked and at the same time, relevant acknowledgements need not take a back seat.

 

2. Why Open Source has become so important today?

 

Let us look at the open source available services alone which every he/he is a body – may be a geospatial technocrat or a common /civilian GIS user is using-sometimes may not be even knowing that he/she is using GIS –as for him or her location based service is important.

 

So what I am talking about in September 2017

 

A. Location-based services, what is popularly known as LBS, refer to the delivery of services to users or machines using real-time location data in conjunction with other contextually relevant information.

 

There are two major trends which is driving LBS uptake:

  1.  smartphone adoption; and
  2. quick sharing capability of hyper-localinformation.

Figure 1: Smart phone using Open Source data

 

With the global smartphone user base expected to reach the 2.5-billion mark by 2018, global enterprise LBS market will reach $19.8 billion by 2020.

 

Location-based services can be roughly segmented into four categories:

 

1. LBS search and advertising;

2. LBS tracking;

3. LBS navigation; and

4. LBS infotainment, analytics, recreation and fitness. Some of the prominent vendors for the LBS market space include Apple, HERE, Micello and Telenav.

 

B.  In terms of social applications using mobile location data to target users,

 

1. Facebook

2..Twitter,

3. Instagram,

4. WeChat and

5. Sina Weibo are among the top players.

 

These apps are transforming into platforms themselves, offering even more data for ad campaigners.

 

C. Another big thing in geospatial landscape is MR, AR & VR

    Till about a year back in 2016 , there was BIM and 3D. Now we are talking about mixed reality, augmented reality and virtual reality. Though often used together and often used interchangeably, there is fundamental difference between AR, VR and MR. Let us understand each of them:

 

i. Augmented Reality: AR supplements your world with digital objects of any sort. Augmented reality headsets overlay data, 3D objects and video into your vision in some way or another. All this while continuing to let you see the world around you. Eg: Google’s Glass was AR. A very interesting example of AR is the Oakland Medical Center Replacement Project.To help field personnel quickly access 3D BIM models and other project documents, general contractor McCarthy Building Companies placed hundreds of QR codes throughout the Oakland Medical Center Replacement Project complex. Users simply scan one of the QR codes with a smartphone or tablet computer and instantly immerse themselves in the up-to-date, as-built 3D BIM model or 3D laser scan of that space.

 

ii.  Virtual Reality: Virtual reality (VR) replaces your world with a virtual one. They each involve looking into a headset with lenses that look at a virtual screen. VR makes you completely immersed in another world and blocks everything else. Eg: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation, Gear VR.

     The latest version of CityEngine, just released last year allows urban planners, architects, and GIS professionals to quickly create VR experiences on mobile devices. These experiences can be viewed in a free ArcGIS 360 VR app that is available from Esri Labs.

 

iii. Mixed Reality: Mixed reality integrates digital objects into your world making it look as if they are really there. Mixed reality is a mix of real word and virtual world. It is somewhere between AR and VR. Eg:

 

Microsoft Hololens.Trimble’s DAQRI Smart Helmet integrates mixed reality applications to enable companies from architecture, engineering, construction, and operations industries see first-hand how the applications can improve team communication, data interpretation, and collaboration in their work. Together they are being hailed as the next big thing in the geospatial industry. So how can they help? In addition to city planning and engineering —these technologies could have big appeal in disaster management areas to keep personnel safe and secure while performing rescue ops.the list is endless

   So what I have been trying to impress upon all of you is that reality today is forcing all of us to move towards open source GIS. You cannot ignore it any longer!.

   Understanding basics of OPEN SOURCE

 

For understanding the nuances of open source software, it is relevant to understand related terms – free software, freeware and proprietary software.

 

“It is general perception that the only distinction between open source and proprietary software is that one is free and the other is not which is not true at all. They each are based on differing philosophies, methodologies and business models. Open source software is, almost by definition, more flexible but requires more effort to use, whereas the opposite is true for proprietary software in general. All open source software is required to be licensed, (Maurya,2015)” It is important for us to understand that Open source software are unique with open source codes. They by no means imply free software and freeware.

 

Nor free software and freeware are synonyms. Free software is opposite to proprietary software where, “proprietary indicates that a party exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property, usually to the exclusion of other parties.” (www.en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Proprietry) as ESRI’s ArcView,  ArcGIS etc or Geo Media of Intergraph. Proprietry software cannot be open source OS). Proprietary software restricts users’ rights and protects  ownership rights. When software vendors make their software available to the users free of charge, they are referred as freeware. While free software means freedom in users’ favour,  of whether software is free or not. Free software can be used commercially. They are also licensed software. GNU project (www.gnu.org./) establishes four freedoms, albeit qualifying them as free software as promulgated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by Richard Stallman:

 

•  Freedom 0 : The freedom to run the programme for any purpose

 

•  Freedom 1: The freedom to access the source code to understand how the programme works and make needful adaptations

 

•  Freedom 2 : The freedom of redistribution and

 

•  Freedom 3 : the freedom to improve the programme and redistribute the improvements.

 

In February 1998,” the Open Source Group adopted Open Source Label to free software, arguing that `open source’ carried less ideological baggage than `free software’ and would have greater appeal to businesses, even though the software and the open approach were the same (Jack Schofield, 2003)”. This supposition has generally proved correct.

 

The open source definition

 

Open source implies access to the source code. Software developers are creators of human-readable programme statements referred as source code. These are written in a high-level or assembly language (C++, JAVA, PHP etc.) and are opposed to object code, which though derived from the source code are designed to be machine-readable. “This literal meaningof `open source’ is necessary, but not sufficient, for a full definition. The mere fact of making source code available does not make a programme `open source’, parihar,(2007)”

 

According to the definition given by the Open Source Organisation. The organisation laid criteria clarifying distribution terms of OSS (www.OpenSourceGIS.org) on dual aspects: source code and its license. As for source code, the criteria prepares the source code to be readily available in a legible format wherever some sections are amiss, its source code be made available via internet without charge the derived works be distributed on original terms of the OSS.integrity of the author’s source code be retained with derived works to carry different name or version number from the original OSS.

 

A next criterion of licenses of OSS further simplifies the redistribution and makes this software really open, where license will be free, whereby requiring no royalty or fee for selling or giving away the software; a single license extending to all those whom the programme is redistributed; license must not be specific to product or restrict other software and be technology neutral. Moreover, there will be no discrimination against persons or groups or any fields of endeavour.

 

Some examples of free licenses are BSD style, GNU General Public License (GPL), GradsLicense and ApacheSoftware License. The procedure of implementing “free software licenses” is necessary to protect their users’ legal rights and to ensure the freedoms of the software. With open source software the user can access the source code and redistribute it.

 

Criteria for Open Source Software

 

There is misconception among users and developers about the actual meaning of Open source software. An open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. Moreno (2015)deliberate the criteria for open-source software to be related with Free Redistribution, with No restriction on selling; No royalty and No profit from any sale. The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed. The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

 

     Integrity of the Author’s Source Code

  1. The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.
  2. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.
  3. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

 

In addition there will be no discrimination against persons or groups. Neither, the license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. At the same time, the rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. What is important to remember is that, the license must not be specific to a product , and license must not restrict other software. also, . license must be technology-neutral . No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

 

The procedure of implementing “free software licenses” is necessary to protect their users’ legal rights and to ensure the freedoms of the software. There are several organizations that can provide free software license templates, such as General Public License (GPL), Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) (Tsou and Smith, 2011).STEFAN STEINIGER and ERWAN BOCHER (2009)listed several open source GIS software which is presented here in the extended form in Table 1 with details.

 

The following open source desktop GIS projects are reviewed in Steiniger and Bocher (2008/9)

  • GRASS GIS – Originally developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, open source: a complete GIS SAGA GIS – System for Automated Geoscientific Analysis- hybrid GIS software. SAGA has a unique Application Programming Interface (API) and a fast growing set of geoscientific methods, bundled in exchangeable Module Libraries.
  • Quantum GIS – QGIS is an Open Source GIS that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows.
  • MapWindow GIS – Free, open source GIS desktop application and programming component.
  • ILWIS – ILWIS (Integrated Land and Water Information System) integrates image, vector and thematic data.
  • JUMP GIS / OpenJUMP – (Open) Java Unified Mapping Platform (the desktop GIS OpenJUMP, SkyJUMP, deeJUMP and Kosmo emerged from JUMP; see)

    Today we are talking about Big data and data Analytics The 10 Open Source ETL Tools Posted by Techroba on December 9, 2015 at 4:00am are as follows( TechRoba,2015):

 

 

1. Talend Open Source Data Integrator: With multiple solutions for data integration, both open source and commercial editions.

 

2. Scriptella: Scriptella with focus in simplicity is an open source ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and script execution tool written in Java. SQL is one example

 

3.KETL: KETL is a premier, open source ETL tool. The data integration platform is built with portable, javabasedarchitecture and open, XMLbased configuration and job language.

 

4. Jaspersoft ETL: Jasper ETL is easy to deploy and outperforms many proprietary ETL software systems.

 

5. GeoKettle: GeoKettle is a powerful, metadatadriven

 

6. Spatial ETL tool dedicated to the integration of different spatial data sources for building and updating geospatial data warehouses.

 

  7. CloverETL: The CloverETL Open Source Engine can be embedded in any application, commercial ones as well.

 

8. HPCC Systems: HPCC Systems is an Opensource platform for Big Data analysis with a Data Refinery engine called Thor. Thor clean, link, transform and analyze Big Data using engine Roxie.

 

9.Jedox: Jedox is an OpenSource BI solution for Performance Management including Planning, Analysis, Reporting and ETL

 

10.  Apatar: Apatar is an open source Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) project.

 

 

4. Strengths and Weaknesses of Open Source GIS Software .

 

Open source have several facilities for their users and the developers:

 

1. Accessibility

 

Easy to start with: If you’re starting a small company, a private venture, or even a project within a large company, you’ll appreciate the ability to be able to freely experiment with technologies without paying any royalties.

 

2. Acceptability

 

Community support: Perhaps the greatest FOSS advantage. There’s virtually no question regarding a popular open source project that hasn’t got a profound answer in the web. For the undocumented questions, you’ll probably get an answer within 24 hours in a professional forum.

 

3. Scalability:If you are using OpenSource software, you can switch over to a more powerful server or add a second server behind a load balancer.

 

4. Easy to port: When your data is kept in open formats, translating from one data type to another is straight forward, and there is probably a piece of software that does exactly that. Figuring out closed format is a truly embarrassing experience.

 

     a. Enhances Control: Open source software allows extensive configurability, which means that you can fine-tune the product to your exact needs.

 

For niche demands, hiring a software developer to change the product will be considerably cheaper than paying a software company for changing the product (and they probably Just Don’t Do this kind of things).

 

5.Attracts better developers. Open Source software developers seem to better perform, be more independent, productive and curious than developers under proprietary software

 

6. Great web tools: There’s a plethora of web-oriented open source tools: mapping, tiles, databases, webservers, web framework and web authoring tools. Building your first GIS website will be very easy

 

5. Comparison of Open Source Software with proprietary software.

 

There are many open source GIS software are available but QGIS is most popular among them. ArcGIS is most popular proprietary software in the field of GIS so at few places we try to compare it with QGIS.

 

1. Too Many Projects:There are many open source projects for every niche, and you’ll have to spend some time picking the best one, because other will be abandoned.

 

2. Graphical User Interface:This is probably because software developers are familiar with command-line tools, and there are not enough open source GUI designers. The resulting GUI (e.g., GRASS GIS) is often slow, ugly, and have counterintuitive interface. ArcGIS have excellent GUI in compare to any open source software.

 

3. User platform:Most of the users, and many developers, will consider this as an advantage.Windows Open Source software tools have gone a long way in the past years, but the best-of-breed software is almost always in the Linux world. Whereas ArcGIS is MS-Windows based software.

 

4. Documentation:Documentation is superb in ArcGIS. QGIS has lots of documentation; well written. There are numerous tutorials you can download and try for yourself. There are excellent introduction videos. QGIS does not lack documentation at all.

 

5.Support: If you’re going to pay for it, you’ll probably get good telephone support from the vendor. Whereas in open source probably no tech support or SLA, unless you pay a consultant.

 

6.Cost:With proprietary software, when you need an extra software component that would fit to your existing infrastructure, it’s probably going to cost you a lot more.

 

7. Effort:Open source software is, almost by definition, more flexible but requires more effort to use, whereas the opposite is true for proprietary software in general.

 

8.Performance:QGIS is somehow faster than ArcGIS for most operations considering QGIS’ newer architecture and code base it’s not difficult to understand why it is faster.(it’s often difficult to improve performance of a large codebase application without using new technologies). QGIS is much faster working with PostGIS than ArcGIS, unless you opt-out and store your data in PostgreSQL using ESRI’s own spatial format.

 

9Availability of tools: QGIS does have less available operations and algorithms than ArcGIS, mainly if you consider advanced ArcGIS Extensions like 3D Analyst, Geostatistical and Network i.e. QGIS just support Dijkstra’s algorithm for solving network problems while ArcGIS extends it and solve more network problems.

 

10License: This is a huge advantage that open source software can be licensed and can be distributed whereas proprietary software can’t be distributed.

 

11Completeness: ArcGIS is a set of products that obviously work very well together. QGIS was born to work with PostGIS. There is also a set of products similar to ESRI ‘s that pack QGIS as the desktop component.

 

12Operating system dependency: Although Open Source software tools have gone a long way with Windows in the past years, but the best-of-breed software is almost always in the Linux world. Migliaccio et al. (2007) experimentally prove it for the case study of CO emission under INTERMEDE BBSO project, it is observed that results generated with GRASS under Linux environment were better. Thus, there is reinforcement of the belief that free/open source GIS Maurya et al., OSGIS-2015, 150-155)

 

6.SUMMARY

 

Open source is here to stay & is very useful.The idea that proprietary and open source solutions are polar opposites is certainly not true. We have understood the positive and negative of both. Also we have learned the active existence of software vendors. Many software vendors have built proprietary solutions that they have later released as open source. Similarly, there are distributors of license-free, open source packages who also offer a for-profit, licensed and proprietary version built upon the original open source platform. It is really difficult to decide without qualifications which model is the best software development model for your organization to adopt: open source or proprietary. BUT open source is here to stay and we all have to get use to it!

 

you can view video on OPEN SOURCE GIS

 

References

  • Moreno, R. (2015), NCAR Geospatial Talks Series,Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications (FOSS4G).
  • Ming, H.T. and Smith, J.(2011),Free and Open Source Software for GIS education, White paper, National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence.
  • Stefan, S. and Erwan, B. (2008), An Overview on Current Free and Open Sourcedesktop GIS developments,International Journal of Geographical Information Science,Vol. 23, pp. 1345–1370.
  • Parihar, S.M., (2007)Freedom to Open, Vol.4, Issue7, pp.44-46. April,2006, Article (2006) Geospatial Today, pp 44-46
  • Gilberto, C. and Harlan, O. (2004), Open-Source Geographic Information Systems Software: Myths and Realities, Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science, pp 127-133.
  • https://www.quora.com/How-does-ESRI-ArcGIS-proprietary-compare-with-Quantum- GIS-QGIS-open-source.
  • Migliaccio, F., Carrion, D. and Zambrano, C. (2010), A comparison between free/open-source and proprietary geospatial software tools, based on a case study, FOSS4G.