Open-Source Geospatial Tools and Technologies for Urban and Environmental Studies

TARGET GROUP: URBAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

OBJECTIVES

·        To create an enterprise in the form of a sustainable ecosystem accelerating new discoveries help solve global cross-disciplinary societal challenges, from climate change mitigation to sustainable cities.

SUMMARY

Open-source GIS has consistently and effectively improved during the past decade. Governments and stakeholders from academia and industry actively participate in open geospatial data, software and standards initiatives and support related organizations such as the Open Source Geospatial foundation (OSGeo). Furthermore, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) consistently design and test open standards which are at the core of major infrastructures such as the European Union’s INSPIRE Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The amount of national and international projects that employ open geospatial data and develop open-source GIS software by implementing open-source GIS standards is extensive and it is expected to grow even further in the near future. As a result, research and practices in the open-source GIS domain with its broad range of applications has become a timely topic of interest to the geospatial community.

Concrete projects based on open geospatial data and software now have significant and measurable impact on communities, including their economy, political life, environment, health, transportation, and many other areas. While such projects provide their own benefits, the data and software developed by these projects are often reused beyond the original plans, reflecting the real potential of Open Source GIS and its value.

The contributions of this collection are divided into two main categories. In the first, seven concrete studies on open-source tools and technologies for urban and environmental studies are briefly presented, each of which has been implemented for and applied to a certain use case, and at the same time may be applied to other use cases due to the reproducibility nature of open source software. The second category presents and discusses the usability of open-source geospatial solutions for Earth Remote Sensing applications.

REFERENCE: https://opengeospatialdata.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40965-020-00078-2