Highlighting recent trends in open source geospatial science and software

Abstract

Over the past decade, open source software has become widely accepted across governments, industries and academia. The geospatial domain is no exception and this trend is also reflected in geospatial research and practice. Nowadays, governments and stakeholders from the business sector both participate and promote open geospatial science including open geospatial data and open source geospatial software. As a result, open source geospatial science and software (i.e., open source GIS) is a growing area of research with numerous applications and great potential. The consistent prevalence of open source GIS studies motivated this thematic collection. The contributions are divided into two main categories. In the first, novel open source geospatial software and standards are 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 of open source software. The second category presents and discusses the applicability and usability of open source GIS solutions for various interdisciplinary domains, mostly related to urban studies.

Free and open GIS source software for spatial epidemiology and geospatial health in Malaysia: a comparative analysis of the software usability

“…The benefit of using open-source GIS is it has no licensing fees with a provided highly customized applications and tools based on client's needs. This an open-source application can freely access and modifies the source code for, such as system for automated geoscientific analyses (SAGA) GIS, geographic resources, analysis support system (GRASS) GIS and Quantum GIS (QGIS) [11] [18]. In terms of potential innovations, the global geospatial community predicts that open-source geospatial applications will continue to rise in popularity [19,20].…”

The openEO API–Harmonising the Use of Earth Observation Cloud Services Using Virtual Data Cube Functionalities

“…Over the last years, acceptance of and demand for EO-related open source software and data have increased among users from the industrial, academic, and governmental sectors (see, e.g. [17]). Answering this demand, the open source openEO API [18] was developed.…”

From consistency to flexibility: A simplified database schema for the management of CityJSON 3D city models

“…The conceptual similarities between CityJSON and document-oriented management, which stores information as document in BSON-encoding, could provide an answer to the lack of flexibility. This paper is divided as follows: the section 2 contextualizes this research in related works on Web Geographic Information Systems architecture (Web GIS) and the trend towards an increasing use of the web (Mobasheri et al 2020). It highlights the major drawbacks of the current relational management and put it in parallel with the current state of alternate developments.…”