Minghini et al. Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards (2020) 5:1 Open Geospatial Data, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40965-020-0074-y Software and Standards EDITORIAL Open Access Geospatial openness: from software to standards & data Marco Minghini1*, Amin Mobasheri2, Victoria Rautenbach3 and Maria Antonia Brovelli4 Abstract This paper is the editorial of the Special Issue “Open Source Geospatial Software”, which features 10 published papers. The editorial introduces the concept of openness and, within the geospatial context, declines it into the three main components of software, data and standards. According to this classification, the papers published in the Special Issue are briefly summarized and a future research agenda in the open geospatial domain is finally outlined. Introduction Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, The Open Definition qualifies knowledge as open “if while in the 1990s the history of Web Mapping began anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — sub- with MapServer (https://mapserver.org), originally devel- ject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and oped by the University of Minnesota. The success of openness” [1]. This definition, derived from the Open both projects as well as the communities they were able Source Definition [2] which is specific to software, puts to attract explain the important role they still play today forward the idea of a common good based on access to in the open source geospatial arena. The establishment information that everyone can benefit from. This vision in 2006 of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation of a so-called ‘Open world’ is brilliantly invoked by Pol- (OSGeo, https://www.osgeo.org), dedicated to the devel- lock, who calls for an open revolution – where everyone opment and support of open source geospatial technolo- would have the freedom to use, enjoy and build on gies, was the key milestone to certify the maturity of everything – in a digital age where most information is open geospatial software and the related community. ‘closed’ and controlled [3]. There is no doubt that the Today, open source geospatial technology is regularly geospatial domain holds the potential to play an import- used by governments, businesses, professionals and aca- ant role in achieving this open digital revolution, given demics in a broad range of high-level applications [6– that an increasing number of georeferenced data is pro- 13]. However, open source software alone would have duced everyday – e.g. from sensors, including citizen never succeeded without other parallel movements in sensors [4] – and geospatial technology has become the same direction of geospatial openness. Open geospa- mainstream in a plethora of domains. This Special Issue tial standards are intrinsically linked to the activities of is exactly dedicated to geospatial openness declined in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC, https://www. all its components, especially software, data and opengeospatial.org), started at the end of last century to standards. ensure geospatial interoperability and still leading Open source software in the geospatial domain has a standardization activities with more than 500 member long and successful tradition. In the 1980s (almost the organizations and tens of new standards released or up- prehistory of GIS) the first versions of GRASS GIS dated every year. Similarly, open geospatial data repre- (https://grass.osgeo.org,[5]) were released by the US sents the counterpart of open source geospatial software when moving from the domain of technology to the do- main of data. Over the last few decades there has been * Correspondence: [email protected] The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not in any an increasing awareness of the value of data and actions circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European to ‘open the data’ (especially publicly funded data) have Commission. multiplied, resulting into open data policies included in 1European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), 21027 Ispra, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article political agendas at different levels, see e.g. [14–16]. In © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Minghini et al. Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards (2020) 5:1 Page 2 of 5 addition, the amount of (geospatial) data produced by it has also become an official OSGeo project after com- citizen-driven initiatives is usually distributed under pleting the incubation process. The paper describes the open licenses and represent valuable input for several latest PyWPS version (4.0), implementing WPS 1.0.0 and applications. The most popular of such initiatives in the developed by over a dozen individual contributors geospatial domain, OpenStreetMap, is discussed in during a period of almost 3 years. In addition to the new Section 4. advanced features of PyWPS 4 (logging using Object- The Special Issue features 10 papers (all accessible at Relational Mapping, scalability using WSGI, container- https://www.springeropen.com/collections/osgs), which isation), authors provide a comparison against other are grouped in the following three sections according to WPS server-side implementations and a set of real- the category they primarily belong to: open geospatial world use cases where PyWPS is used. Finally, the paper software, standards and data. offers a glimpse of the OSGeo way to ensure sustainabil- ity of its projects. This is achieved through the collabor- Open source geospatial software ation of different people and organizations with a Several papers published in this Special Issue describe common interest in the success of the incubation of the specific open source technology in the geospatial do- proposed product, being the positive incubation a proof main. This section presents three of these papers. The of its reliability and maturity. software tools described in the first and second papers The improvements in sensor and satellite technology are general-purpose products, targeting users from (po- currently make it possible to collect high-resolution tentially) different domains and specifically developed to datasets in real-time. Along with the increased size and implement or make use of one or more OGC standards; amount of data, the need for real-time processing has in contrast, the third paper describes applications of a become crucial. One example in the hydrological field is geospatial algorithm specific to the hydrology domain. the delineation of watersheds. Currently, many desktop Geospatial datasets are typically made available to end GIS applications allow users to perform watershed ana- users through standard web services, which are usually lysis but there is a lack of libraries optimized for client- not easy to discover using traditional search engines. To side and server-side web applications. Sit et al. [19] address this issue, the Hypermap Registry developed by developed an optimized watershed delineation algorithm Corti et al. [17] and released under the MIT open source for web applications that was tested and benchmarked license, is a standards-based geospatial registry and using various languages on both the server-side (Python, search platform that harvests and manages a catalogue Go, C, Node.js) and the client-side (JavaScript, WebGL, of OGC Web Map Services (WMS). The platform con- WebAssembly). The software package is open source sists of various components, such as an OGC Catalogue under the GPL. To optimize the delineation algorithm, Service for the Web (CSW), a database, a search engine WebGL was incorporated to allow using the Graphics (queryable through a REST API) and a map caching en- Processing Unit (GPU). The benchmarking results show gine. An instance of the Hypermap Registry, known as that the server-side implementation in C performs best, HHypermap, is maintained by the Centre for Geographic but on the client-side JavaScript becomes significantly Analysis of Harvard University and is used in conjunc- more effective when WebAssembly is employed. In tion with their WorldMap application. HHypermap has addition to independence from third-party software, the harvested about 120,000 layers from 15,000 services and tool allows decision makers and stakeholders to make regularly checks whether these services and layers are informed decisions through web-based analyses that available. Hypermap Registry holds the potential to be- exploit real-time information. come an addition to a geoportal to accomplish the needs of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Additional devel- Open geospatial standards opment is planned to extend its functionality to include, Section 2 above has already demonstrated the strong for example, support for OGC Web Feature Service link between open source geospatial software and open (WFS) and to be included as a native application in the standards for interoperability of geospatial data and open source GeoNode platform. services, particularly those from the OGC. This Special The paper by Moreira de Sousa et al. [18] presents the Issue also includes two papers specifically describing latest developments