Olivier Ertz

The open source dynamics in geospatial research and education

Peer reviewing is one of the core processes of science. While the typical blind system helps to improve original submissions, there are opportunities for academic publishing to learn from open source practices (commits, bug reports, feature requests, documentation, etc.), which are entirely open and done in public view. But beyond, with greater significance, peer reviewing offers a good opportunity to illustrate how the characteristics of the open source model can favor simultaneously the acknowledgment of programming efforts, a high quality evaluation standard, but also reproducibility and transparency. Code has to be considered as a full research object in geospatial development. It should be made available in full and examined as part of any contribution, like the article going with it. A good example is the Journal of Statistical Software. Created in 1996, it publishes articles and code on statistics and algorithms. The contents are freely available on-line, code snippets and source code being published along with the paper. An advantage of this approach is to prevent the propagation of “black boxes”. The approach clearly also adds value to code by acknowledging programming efforts as scientific contributions. But publishing code along with a paper also results in the ability of subsequent research projects to build on this basis. This ability is even becoming a requirement for publicly funded research projects. In addition, we may notice that code malleability provides the researcher with the opportunity to adapt the software to the scientific questions, instead of being constrained by the limiting functionalities of the software. As regards education, there are two key freedoms inherent to open source software and practices that offer potential pedagogical wins for geospatial education. First, “free as in beer” allows students to indefinitely install software on computers without license limitations. A consequence of this unconstrained context is a greater degree of exploration and discovery by the students working by themselves and at their own pace. But there is still a long way to go before all the benefits are fully realized. Indeed, current demands and offerings are focusing on “buttonology”, which consists of learning how to use tools constrained by software licenses carefully negotiated over the years by universities. It raises then some important questions regarding the role of geospatial education. Is it not to train students to equip them with the skill sets and knowledge so that they are ready for, and can create, the future geospatial labor market? Therein, we can consider the second freedom, “free as in speech,” as able to empower the students by revealing the logic of particular algorithms and computational concepts. Open source code—as text—is available for reading, manipulating, and understanding. The expected advantage is that students’ engagement with fundamental concepts is deepened in a way that is per se not possible with closed source software. In other words, students come to see geospatial methods not only as tools they can use in their own research, but as possible subjects for research.

Towards an Automated Label Placement Service

The main focus of this chapter is to introduce a new way to ease the integration of labelling placement functionalities from a given library: a programming-language independent solution based on a web service wrapper. Considering the GeoWeb allowing to combine geodata, mapping, and geoprocessing services to fulfil various needs, it is to give an answer to a current lack: there is no such an approach for delivering advanced labelling functionalities through a standardized web service. The chapter describes a solution to wrap PAL library using standards from Open Geospatial Consortium like Web Processing Service and Symbology Encoding.

A redesign of OGC Symbology Encoding standard for sharing cartography

Despite most Spatial Data Infrastructures are offering service-based visualization of geospatial data, requirements are often at a very basic level leading to poor quality of maps. This is a general observation for any geospatial architecture as soon as open standards as those of the Open Geospatial Consortium have to be applied. To improve this situation, this paper does focus on improvements at the (inter)operability side by considering standardization aspects. We propose two major redesign recommendations. First to consolidate the cartographic design knowledge at the core of the OGC Symbology Encoding standard. Secondly to build the standard in a modular way so as to be ready to host upcoming cartographic requirements. Thus, we start by defining the main portrayal interoperability use cases that frame the concept of sharing cartography. Then we bring to light the strengths and limits of the relevant open standards to consider in this context. Finally we paint a set of recommendations to overcome the limits so as to make these use cases a reality. Even if the definition of a cartographic-oriented standard is not able to act as a complete cartographic design framework by itself, we argue that pushing forward the standardization work dedicated to cartography is a way to share and disseminate good practices and finally to improve the quality of the visualizations.

GEOPOLL - Integrate Cartographic Questions in Web Forms, Polls or Surveys

Most of the web forms, polls or surveys are composed with classical input fields (check boxes, radio buttons, select lists, etc.) and a lot of standards web forms builders or services (e.g. Typeform, WuFoo, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc.) help to build and deploy them. Nowadays, offering a text area to catch a ZIP code or a select list to point out a country remains the best way to explicitly collect geospatial data. But what about mapping interfaces to integrate cartographic questions and/or cartographic answers as a more suitable solution? How to let form’s respondents indicate in which area(s) they engage in certain activities? The only way to solve these issues is by coding it yourself. This paper shows the design and technical problematic and try to give some solutions to build an efficient UX for the respondents and a standard answers treatment for the data analysts. This paper will also highlight the capacities of open source JavaScript library like OpenLayers to build the solution. Our interface was tested by the cities of Lausanne and Pully (Switzerland) and thousands of people answered to these cartographic forms on mobile and desktop. We would like to share some good practice and lessons learned. ∗Corresponding author Email address: adrien.bigler@heig-vd.ch (Adrien Bigler) Submitted to FOSS4G 2017 Conference Proceedings, Boston, USA. September 20, 2017 FOSS4G 2017 Academic Program GEOPOLL

Relationship between land cover type and Body Mass Index in Geneva

Past studies conducted in urban areas analyzed the impact of the presence of green spaces on public health, and highlighted in particular the psychological benefits of interacting with nature. To investigate a supposed relationship between overweight and dense built environment, we focused on the State of Geneva, Switzerland, and calculated the correlation between Body Mass Index (BMI) in a representative sample of 6663 adults and the percentage of natural areas at the locations where these individuals were living. To this end, we used population-based health data from the “Bus Santé” study (Geneva University Hospitals) and multi-scale land cover maps obtained by means of satellite images and LiDAR data classification. We found little correlation between BMI (as a proxy for health) and land cover data and were not able to verify the working hypothesis at local and regional scales. However, an important phenomenon highlighted here is the difference in the results obtained between the city center and the whole State.

Towards geoservices portals MEDIAMAPS: WGIS trends for business applications

The developments within the MEDIAMAPS project were motivated by the idea to provide small and medium companies with a solution to benefit from Web Business Geographic Applications (WBGA) advantages at an affordable price: a Webmapping application service with which the user only pays for used data and analysis processes. As one of the goals of this research was to give users the possibility to produce printed documents with spatial analysis results (maps), the main preoccupation was to find a technology allowing high-quality cartographic representation. Our interest led us towards SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an open standard technology, official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for delivering vector graphics on the Web. From the development of this tool several recurring thematic mapping and publishing aspects have come out: statistical ranges determination and related colour problems, data types and choropleth mapping, cartographic publishing rules. The MEDIAMAPS prototype shows how this kind of specific constraints can be implemented in a WGIS application.