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XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia
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Figure 6. Google Map Maker
Very similar to OpenStreetMap is Google Map Maker, an
initiative that provides a user friendly platform to create a
community in order to improve maps where data (e.g. roads,
railways and rivers) is unavailable in Google Maps
(http://www.google.com/mapmaker).
Both approaches use trusted users as moderators or reviewers in
order to prevent vandalism and inaccuracies. The differences
lay basically in the license offered (commercial use of data is
forbidden in Google Map Maker) and access to data: Map
Maker provides no programmatic access to data.
Another example is the Eye on Earth network
(http://network.eyeonearth.org/), a joint collaboration of
Microsoft, ESRI and the European Environment Agency (EEA).
The platform is based on ESRI's ArcGIS Online cloud services.
The aim of the initiative is to provide a collaborative online
service for hosting, sharing and discovering data on the
environment and promoting the principles of public data access
and citizen science.
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This architectural approach based on a hub platform because of
its nature might typically be developed and hosted by a private
corporation or non-profit organization. Having all users that
interact with the same platform, interoperability between
different systems is not an issue. Terms of use and data
ownership are defined by the hosting platform itself.
A different approach to enable more efficient crowd sourcing of
spatial data is based on a web application as a node of a
network. In this case the data owners will continue to host their
own repositories sharing it by each using the same or similar
software. In this case, the core software supporting the node
approach is likely to be open source to be widely accepted by
different kind of users from smallest to largest organizations.
An example of the node approach is GeoNetwork Opensource
(http://geonetwork-opensource.org/). ^ GeoNetwork is a
decentralized metadata catalogue able to search geospatial data
across multiple catalogues and combine distributed map
services in the embedded map viewer. GeoNetwork is free and
open source and supports different OGC standards such as CSW
(Catalogue Service for the Web), WMS, WFS and WPS (Web
Processing Service) and others.
In principles the same application could be used as a hub
platform and as a node of a network. Some organizations can
have a platform where they share their large amount of data but
at the same time be able to interact with smaller nodes. On the
other hand, some users could prefer to download the platform
software and then set up the application having a complete
control over it.
3. THE GEONODE APPLICATION
3.1 Introducing GeoNode
Both decision makers and staff in the field traditionally use hard
copy maps as an important source of information. Maps are
often distributed in digital format (such as PDF or JPEG) and
then printed, posted on walls and annotated by hand. While
paper is an excellent material because it is portable, durable,
cheap and requires no power supply, it has also some
drawbacks. Paper maps are static. Some data are extremely
volatile, the situation represented on the map can become out of
date very quickly. For instance, in Haiti the OSM map of Port-
of-Prince grew up of information with a fast pace. IDP camps
are a dynamic feature because a lot of people often changed
place: new camps arose weeks after the quake while other
changed of population reducing or increasing in an
unpredictable manner.
In very recent years, humanitarian agencies, civil protection
departments and other aid structures started expressing the need
of having data beyond the maps, in order for them to be possible
to reuse the data themselves to create new products, produce
new analysis, changing the map layout, data styling, scale factor
and bounding box.
At the same time initiatives for promoting the importance of
geospatial data sharing in order to better face natural disasters
were born. At that time most of these activities were felt as
direct answers to needs input and happened mosily without a
complete consciousness of the whole process. Only afterwards
they were conceived, promoted and financed as proper
development projects; one of them is the GFDRR Open Data
for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI). Furthermore such an
initiative was accompanied by the development of an
operational tool that allows data sharing over the internet, the
GeoNode (Balbo, 2012).
3.2 GeoNode main functionalities
GeoNode is a project initialized by the World Bank with the
aim to break barriers hindering the effective deployment of
volunteer based communities in support of the humanitarian
sector. GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the
creation, sharing and collaborative use of geospatial data.
The central core of the architecture is constituted by GeoServer
and GeoNetwork that interact with each other through the
Django Python Web. GeoServer is a Java based geospatial data
manager for sharing, editing and viewing geospatial data.
Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major
spatial data source using OGC standards. It can be connected to
different spatial DBMS including PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Oracle
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