Story of Oskari - from a national geoportal towards an international OSGeo Project
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FOSS4G Boston 201722 / 208
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00:00
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
So my name is Timo Arno, I'm from National Land Survey Finland and I work as a product owner for the software called Oskari. I had a long title but I used only the first kind of part of it on the slides. So this is a story of Oskari kind of from the beginning to
00:21
towards the OSGO incubation where we are now. So let's get started. Down below you can see the Twitter handle and the website address or actually two website addresses GitHub and the project website. Please visit those if you want more information.
00:46
Well first of all Oskari is your geospatial friend. This spring we had a user meeting or day where all the users met and we discussed or we had a kind of event where we decided a new slogan
01:01
for our software and this is what we came up with. We voted for we had maybe 10-15 proposals and this was the one that won the contest. So your geospatial friend. And below that there is the kind of old slogan text in a nutshell. So Oskari's tool for easily building
01:23
multi-purpose web mapping applications utilizing distributed spatial data infrastructures like Inspire. So pretty long one. The key point here is distributed spatial data infrastructures. So I will talk a bit more about that in a moment. And a bit more in detail what Oskari can do.
01:47
What can you do with Oskari? You can create embedded map clients, put them on any website and that's very straightforward. You don't need any programming skills to do that
02:00
or you can set up a full-fledged geo portal or a web GIS system if you like that word more and set up also advanced web-based tools to support decision making or data analysis. That's your thing. And like I said it utilizes distributed SDIs. So the point is that we don't
02:23
store any data in the software itself but instead we fetch all the data online from web map services and web feature services etc. So that's kind of how we approach things. So we don't, like Carto, we don't or RTIS online, we don't really, we don't fetch or take your
02:45
data. We want the freshest data from the, straight from the services. That's the way we do things. And OTC interfaces, well I mentioned a few already like web map services, web tile services and web feature services. And a couple of other ones. Well Oskari is a
03:06
multilingual, it has for English and Finnish it has full coverage and some 15 other languages have a partial coverage. So quite a lot of localizations as well. And the same kind of
03:24
things that I just explained in a more animated fashion. So down below you have the data. It can be Inspire data, ELF data, well those are more European things but anyway you get the point. Raster data, metadata, GML, whatnot. And they are offered from or via
03:46
standard interfaces, web map services etc. And then statistical data. Here it says provided by proprietary interface but actually there are also standard interfaces for that as
04:01
well nowadays such as SDMX, REST, that we support. So you have all your data down below. They all connect to Oskari and you can use Oskari to make embedded maps from all those data. So you kind of pick your layers, pick your tools and you publish a map and you can put that
04:23
on any website. That's the strongest point what you can do or strongest functionality that we have. There's an example of a published map there or actually that's the tool that you use. It's just what you see is what you get. So you just click on tools and layers and you all the time you see what's happening on the map and that's the result you will
04:43
get on your web page when you finally publish it. And well software as a service obviously that's how it works. And you end up with browser-based applications that work on desktop and mobile device as well. Furthermore there is something called RPC remote procedure
05:06
calls which is kind of an API that you can use to control the map client so the map and the web page can sort of discuss. You can move the map or you can ask something from the map where is the user located now, what's the map center, what's the zoom level,
05:24
what layers does he have or can you find me a route from here to here and stuff like that and then you can show that information on the web page around the map so this makes possible to really create better services like e-government services for example or whatever for
05:44
example bike tracks or running paths or well anything with maps. Moving on to the kind of story of Oskari which is here divided in four for eras. First of all the early years
06:03
by this time I was not actually working yet at the national land survey but I was able to dig up some information and I hope it's all correct. So where it all started from is the inspired directive we wanted and needed to have a geo-portal in Finland and the commercial off-the-shelf products were not good enough or we didn't want them,
06:26
we didn't want any vendor lock-ins you all know they are not desirable and also at the national survey we wanted to try some new operating models such as agile development and open source software. We were quite new to this stuff back then and
06:47
later on we learned that other organizations, governmental organizations were also interested in getting maps on their websites like embedded maps it was not that common back then
07:02
I think google maps was the only one kind of doing that at that time and so we recognized the need for for embedded maps. We went open source in 2011 dual licensed MIT and UPL with sort of GPL but in Europe and translated into all the European Union languages so it's legally
07:28
valid in all the EU countries or that's how I've understood it at least. So these were the kind of starting early years. Next era was I call it more than a map
07:42
because we started to develop more and more useful stuff according to kind of needs from the market or user should I say and at this point we had a project developing functionalities to support e-government services and also during that project
08:01
we improved the modularity of the code so it was a bit easier to develop further software and even a bit later we added the RPC functionality I already described a bit of time ago. Then we added dynamic thematic mapping is an easy to use tool that
08:23
you can create thematic maps just by getting ready-made data from a service or just by importing your own data from Excel or CSV or whatever just one minute and you have a thematic map and you can publish that or share that with your colleagues or friends. We added some tools
08:43
for simple spatial analysis such as buffering, clipping, aggregate, counting, filtering with attribute data and also spatially and these spatial analysis were based
09:00
mostly on web processing service if you're familiar with that OGC standard and we utilized here the GeoServer offerings for web processing services. At that time we also added support for mobile devices at this point it was for the embedded maps mostly
09:27
but we are still improving on that front. Also that was an era that we went kind of international we had a couple projects that utilized oscaria as a geo portal or map viewing
09:42
application the arctic sdi some of you might know and the elf which is a european location framework they both started up sometime in that era. The third phase or third era
10:00
which we are kind of now is a community-owned project from 2015 onwards we founded a oscar network kind of network of organizations utilizing oscar or developing oscar or interested in oscar and currently we have more than 30 members in that network from both the public and
10:24
private sector also third sector i should probably mention that and we also developed an operating model for the network obviously we needed to define kind of roles within the network
10:40
and responsibilities for those roles so we had an integrator and coordinator and member and things like that and shortly after we formed a project steering committee it was late 2016 and this was already towards the os geo membership or the incubation
11:03
process kind of thing so that was formed in 2016 and then we applied for the membership or the incubation process it's a known application for that and that was a success it was i think may 2017 when we got into the process or entered the incubation process
11:26
and we were appointed a mentor who is art of crystal i'm not sure he's not here today but i guess he's he's in town anyway last but not least what we did this year we
11:41
acquired a so-called community manager so a person who would help the community to grow and and help with communication and and take part in part in different events and stuff like that so we got got a person like that so that the whole network is paying for the community manager
12:03
to do certain things for the for the community so those are the three eras and as in my abstract i promised to say also something about the future so here's one slide about about the future of oscar what are we going to do we have to adjust the model that we have developed
12:24
within the network it was it's a national network so it's in operating in finland now as we're going more and more international and and towards osgo membership we have to adhere to the model that osgo is using we are i would say we're pretty close to that already so only minor adjustments
12:43
need to be done i think and obviously we want to graduate from the incubation process to become a full member of osgo that should happen i hope hope soon maybe even even during this year already and function wise we have what we are doing now and and next year as well we have
13:06
added or kind of refactored the thematic maps functionality the point was that the old functionality only supported one service or one type of service to bring in the statistical data
13:20
for thematic maps now now you can add your own kind of adapters and and bring any any statistical service provided data into oscar and make thematic maps from that also more visualization methods or types of thematic maps used to have only correlates maps now you can
13:41
do also gradual dot symbol maps and and soon you can also do animations or time series from from tentacle data or maps what we're going to do this fall is improved support for changing projections so we already have some a bit of support for that but but we will kind of
14:05
change that work during this this fall part of the arctic sdi project and one more thing i should mention is is the developer experience which is kind of how fun it is to contribute and code to oscar so simplify the api a bit and streamline the architecture those are the kind
14:27
kind of things that we want to focus on on this this fall and one more slide about do's and don'ts that i also promised in my abstract so things we have kind
14:43
of learned along the way coming here i'm sure i could have listed more of these but these are maybe the the ones that came to my mind first so gain your management support this is something i learned from my dear colleague yani who is sitting sitting right there in the third row
15:01
and give lots of support to early adopters so we had a lot of interest for this software but it was as the documentation was maybe not so good in the early years so they needed a bit of support so that's just what we did we gave them support and now now we have we are good friends and they're still using oscar so that was a good kind of investment of of our time
15:25
keep your documentation up to date because documentation does not age well it's not like wine and find different types of developers that's what i'm very happy about that we have
15:40
different kinds of guys and girls or women and men in our team some are happy with the back end doing java someone to do only front end javascript and html css etc and well different people make up a perfect team i would say uh keep an eye on the architecture of your software
16:04
this is of course crucial when you're expanding and and more and more years behind your project so if your architecture is not good it's it's not gonna work in in five years anyway so don't let it rot and last but definitely not least encourage merging back to the project
16:26
this is something we maybe didn't do so well like two years ago while many people or many organizations were using oscar you are doing services with oscar they did not do pull requests so they did not merge back so they have their their fork but we kind of lost them
16:44
along the way since we are already many versions after that and it's not so easy to merge anymore and that's something we have to think about in the agreements that we do when when we develop like a like a big community and collaboratively collaborate with a lot of
17:05
organizations those are the those are the do's and don'ts i i came up with um that's about it thanks a lot and uh again the twitter handle website addresses please do visit them and follow
17:23
us on on twitter and in case you have any questions i'll be happy to happy to answer those right now right here thanks a lot everybody wants coffee please sorry how i what was
18:17
yeah well i know geonoid i think i even took a work some some years ago i think so um
18:25
when we started the network how many members did we have yani might remember seven so seven organizations it was the finnish transport agency finnish environmental agency maybe see city of tom but some of small organizations big
18:44
organizations than us and now we're at more than 30 so so the network is or communities is getting bigger and growing i would say steadily and well where i would like to see us i would like to see a company also kind of taking the risk of of um offering oscar as a
19:06
and trying to make a business model out of that because that that's what many other open source software projects are doing like geonode i think and the gis cloud i was seeing a presentation today and that we don't have yet but but soon we will or we should have the
19:26
osgo support so i'm looking a lot forward to that and of course more developers and full requests but that's what everyone wants i guess sure man i'm not the developer myself
19:54
but we don't use react what was the first one you mentioned no no we used to have jcuri
20:01
but i think we're we kind of want to get rid of that the um architecture of our project sunny mackin is also in town but he had something very interesting he wanted to attend at this time so i can i'll hook you up with him if you want but yeah we're using take area i know
20:20
but i think some people don't like it i've heard so it might be that we want to get rid of it any more questions coffee time all right thanks