Open Source for Geospatial Software Resources Platform for Geospatial Data Exploitation - OSS4gEO: community led Open Innovation at ESA and beyond
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FOSS4G Prizren Kosovo 2023101 / 266
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00:00
Internet forumOpen innovationSoftwareOpen sourceComputing platformMusical ensembleComputer animation
00:40
Open sourceLocal GroupDigital rights managementRaster graphicsOpen setRepository (publishing)FeedbackMach's principleEuclidean vectorEvent horizonUser profileCategory of beingState of matterJava appletSuite (music)RefractionCore dumpAbelian categoryInternational Date LineScripting languageMobile WebFormal languageComputerIntegrated development environmentProcess (computing)Visualization (computer graphics)Data modelDrum memoryMechatronicsProjective planePoint (geometry)MereologyMusical ensembleMultiplication signData storage deviceChainOpen sourceComputer programmingWebsiteLibrary (computing)Flow separationCartesian coordinate systemVideo gameProcess (computing)SpreadsheetWhiteboardInformationFlagResultantFormal languageVisualization (computer graphics)Group actionWeb 2.0Programming languageCore dumpState of matterType theoryOpen setTraffic reportingAssociative propertyTheory of relativitySelf-organizationComputer animation
06:49
SpreadsheetGoogolOpen sourceSoftwareComputing platformCore dumpServer (computing)Mobile WebDependent and independent variablesSoftware maintenanceData modelInformationStandard deviationInheritance (object-oriented programming)Self-organizationDistribution (mathematics)Ramsey theoryModul <Datentyp>StatisticsFormal languageDigital filterQuery languageService (economics)TelecommunicationOrder (biology)Extension (kinesiology)InformationService (economics)Open sourceStandard deviationProduct (business)SoftwareLatent heatComputer programmingProjective planeSystem callBitMultiplication signDecision theoryCategory of beingDigitizingMereologyUniverse (mathematics)Uniqueness quantificationMoment (mathematics)Software developerDependent and independent variablesDemo (music)NumberFunctional (mathematics)Bus (computing)Point (geometry)Physical systemOpen setFrequencyMedical imagingDifferent (Kate Ryan album)TelecommunicationEndliche ModelltheorieMusical ensembleTheory of relativityImage resolutionWorkstation <Musikinstrument>1 (number)Real numberPattern languageComputer animation
15:03
MassAlgorithmStudent's t-testMusical ensembleProjective planeCodeLevel (video gaming)Functional (mathematics)HypothesisOpen sourceLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
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Core dumpOpen sourceLocal ringGroup actionWhiteboardProjective planeGreatest elementMusical ensembleOrder (biology)Interactive televisionLatent heatOpen sourcePoint (geometry)Different (Kate Ryan album)Context awarenessFile formatNumberMultiplication signComputer animation
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Open setSinguläres IntegralMultiplication signMusical ensembleOpen sourceOpen setProjective planeVideo gameTransformation (genetics)Computer animation
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Computer animationLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:08
So I'll put my hand up. That's great to hear. Yeah, indeed, it's a long talk. It's a long title, sorry. And I hope this will be interesting enough, given
00:21
that you just had lunch and now your body is kind of relaxing. So I hope I'll bring you very nicely into this new session of talks. The title is long, but I hope you will remain with one thing, which is Osprey Chair.
00:40
So I'm going to talk a bit. I'm going to talk about the history of this initiative, because given that the project has only six months, then the project initiative is much longer. Why do we bother to do it for food? We want to accomplish it, and it exactly means to us that we are doing it.
01:02
So as I mentioned, this initiative is a bit longer. It started in 2016, when the company that I work for in Bucharest, which is Casima and S&E, is part of the European Association of Earth Observation Companies.
01:22
And they had this concept paper published in 2016 saying that, OK, open source seems to be some kind of an interesting resource. And the paper would be published towards their members, towards the members of their community, saying that,
01:42
do you consider open source to be important? Should we, as a European Association, do something about it? And at that time, my boss, who knew that I am really involved in the open source community, and that I volunteer about my time, and it's a huge resource, and so on,
02:03
and so on, and so on. So Othman, do you think we should do something about it? And I say, of course. And fast forward, Casima led the Open Source Initiative Working Group. It was formed by the companies, people from the companies from that, you can see their logos there,
02:22
trying to shape this open source idea to the board of the association. So moving fast forward, the idea is that, at that point, I was naive enough to imagine that if I
02:42
were a open source, and I'm part of this community, then it would not be that difficult for me to explain to people in schools and European and American companies what it is. But as I mentioned, I was really naive because it turned out to be much more complicated than I
03:02
thought. And the only thing that it was helpful for me at that point was that it was not the first attempt. The first attempt was done by one of the important people in our community, by Orenzi, who, in 2005 and 2006,
03:23
had this state open source GIS report. And this was the initial separation, let's say, between the Cheers racial open source project. So we tried somehow to document how
03:41
this entire ecosystem looks like. And Orenz had to present it to people that are completely outside of the school, not even the program, but the people that take decisions. This is the people, let's say. So at that point, we decided on a few important information that we considered at that point to present.
04:02
One was related to what is the type of solution that we are documenting. And we decided, in the end, on the five categories, web tools, server side, core library, so on, desktop, the main programming language, let's say, three programming languages.
04:23
What is the type of organization that is actually needing the approach of the open source? Is it an individual? Is it a university? A company? How is it governed? And, of course, the license. At that time, we did quite traditional events,
04:45
and we just started this Google sheet and the idea that we wanted to make it collaborative and we wanted to make it easy for people to document this information. We had this Google spreadsheet, and then we just started to fill in this information. And it was quite an interesting experience
05:02
because, as I mentioned, working with open source, I had the impression that I claimed it for a little bit, but the experience was unbelievable because, in that time, in 2016, I think we ended up documenting in about, I don't know,
05:21
a year and a half, something like that, about 200 or more applications in one. And we also tried, another important thing for us, what we tried to show was that it's actually a consistent, and they're not different, sparse things. They're related. Core libraries are used by many other applications.
05:41
And, of course, we didn't need that. We went in front of the Earth's board to present our conclusions to present this graph, and I've given the conclusions. There, of course, the open source ecosystem for geospatial is a mature ecosystem. We have operational solutions for each step
06:02
of a processing chain, from storage to processing to visualization and so on and so forth. We mentioned, of course, the importance of licensing, the work of community and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, at that time, due to various reasons, I'd say it was not really, we did not manage
06:23
to convince them of the importance of supporting this kind of work. But we came on the side, it was way too good, and we understood the importance of having an overview of what this ecosystem is. So what we did was continue to document this
06:40
in a voluntary way and try to speak as much about it as I could, every benefit of it except our talk. So except for that, we also tried to get some funding in order to develop even further this initiative
07:00
because it's not only important that the licenses are compatible. We're interested in standards and compliance. We're interested in so much more information related to the health of the open source project. And in order to do that in a sustainable way and a well-fought way from the beginning
07:21
and not with a Google spreadsheet, you would need a bit more support. So for example, in 2018, there was a call for proposals that came from Ford Foundation. It was for digital infrastructure resources, and we said, OK, open source projects
07:42
should have very important digital infrastructure. It's critical for the world in which we live in. Unfortunately, we didn't win the project. But happily, some years forward, we have managed to get funding from ISA in this last period
08:04
for a more structured, open source, open science initiative, let's say. So this is how we came about the project. It'll be a long time. It'll be a transpiration with racial softwares.
08:20
This is from Virginia's National Data. It's a project that started six months ago, and it will end in January 2018 for the world. OK, this is by the way set, going for initiative. What we're going to do, and what we've started to do, is actually in two sides.
08:42
Firstly, I want to mention that the development side of this project is not the essential part. The essential part is actually building a community that will hopefully become part and will document their own software.
09:03
So this is, as you are trying to explain, as we look at that point, what exactly we are considering to do in this project. And the idea is that we go keep the same five categories. We have defined what kind of information
09:23
we want to document for each of these projects. And the idea is that the actual value, the added value, is the data itself, the documentation itself, because we want to make, of course, a puzzle for users
09:41
to be able to query this information and to get a response based on what is inside this ecosystem. So what we need at this point is part of the community that is involved with maintaining different projects, different open source
10:05
projects, to actually make effort at some point to document it. It will be a one-time effort where you have to integrate information to the governance model, the software license. Very, very important for us to cross project dependencies.
10:23
Another important thing is to integrate it to the standards that the software is compliant to. Another thing that is important are the functionalities. What can that specific project do? And starting in 2016, and even now for the, let's say,
10:40
demo part, we've been trying to document this information. But it's not that easy from the outside, especially if you're not familiar with the project itself. And all of these things that you see on the left are actually answering the 2005 questions that Paul Renzi had in his stay at open source
11:02
related to the viability of a cross-project. So as I mentioned, the first part is trying to very well document what we want to know related to a project that can answer to those six categories related
11:23
to organization, licensing, interdependence, and standard compliance. What we use, as I mentioned, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. What we use is open source. Everything that we've developed for this project is, of course, going to be open source. We want to make, and we will make
11:40
the data available to you for, say, online related data. But in the end, why do we do that gets into the question, well, who are we doing it? Well, we are doing it for ourselves. We are doing it for the community because it's important to be able to identify in this amazing open source paper system
12:03
a solution that can answer to your question. And it doesn't have to be off the shelf. It can be something that you can further on continue developing. Another important aspect, at least from our point of view, is that if all the documents of the deliverables,
12:22
the visa, the moment remains publicly available, this information, that document, can be seen as a unique career for someone that wants to start and then starts at a university open source project because it makes the person think about
12:41
what is important if you want to build a community around that project. You need to have some kind of governance model because people are not going to offer their time without knowing whether they're contributing to it, whether their contribution is going to the main open source, and so on and so forth. So we need to how this would be useful
13:03
for the community. Just imagine some kind of question that's not necessarily a program or a program can have a small company that wants to develop a specific product or data service and they are in search
13:22
for some solution that can specifically answer some issue that they have. It can be related to the license that they need to use, if they can reuse it, if they need to develop something on top of the impact of the open source or not and so on.
13:43
Related to the standards that it's confined, how is the solution provided, is it native, is it by extension and so on. How is the government who takes decisions towards where that project is going to go. If I have a small company and I invest my time
14:02
and resources in using a specific solution, then I want to know that in five years is that going to change, is that going to disappear, is that going to change forces, let's say. What kind of communication channels and what we would like to do or what we very understand that is not at all easy
14:21
is to somehow try to have an image on how healthy that project is. I'm sure that most of you know what a bus number in open source is, but I'm just going to mention the bus number is related to how
14:41
many people that are poor people in a specific project need to disappear or leave the project and to terminate what has been done. So the most important people. Obviously, if that bus number is longer, then you are in a bit of danger.
15:03
This is one of our hopes to be able through the documentation of these projects to also have a greater understanding of the biodiversity of that. So here I'm basically saying everything
15:21
that I've mentioned until now. I don't know anything else to say. Oh, and another thing that this could be very useful. Imagine that, and I'm also going to show it, that it gives you the possibility if you are a student or if you are developing a project for your
15:42
master thesis or your PhD thesis that you can document what you've done, you can include it in the technical system, and yet it's much more easier for someone that is looking for what you have and for the functionality that you did to find it. And it also helps
16:01
smaller projects that are beginning to be put on this map of open source solutions. So that I think it is also a very good thing. Why did we imagine that we can do this? Well, as I mentioned, the biggest
16:20
added value that we see from this project is not the infrastructure or the coding behind what is really important is the documentation and the data that is collected. And it was absolutely clear for us that this cannot be done by a small number of people because not necessarily
16:40
resources rise, but also because the person or the people that know exactly what's in the project, for dependency, to standard, for privacy, so on, only the formatting has been maintained in the project actually. So that is the important part, and we believe that given our involvement in the
17:03
international open source community, we can somehow convince people to want to document their projects. That's on one side. On the other side, in the beginning of the project, with the significant support from
17:20
Lisa, we have been constantly trying to raise awareness about this. Also, for example, for the documentation part, what we want to collect about these solutions. For that specific document, we have interacted with OGC, with the European
17:42
Commission, with Lisa and with NASA as well, through different work communities in order to get the best possible document at this point related to what we want to achieve. So we are trying to take both the document from top to bottom
18:01
as well, and it's a good time to do that. It's a very good time to do that because both Lisa and NASA and not only are in the European Commission, are more related to the idea of open science.
18:21
Open source is a very important body of life for open science. So you probably are aware of the initiative that comes from NASA, which is called Transform to Open Science. It also talks about the initiatives that come from Lisa. This is also why we receive funding for our projects.
18:41
So we consider that as a very good time for this very smooth initiative that we had in 2016. So, thank you.