GeoNode Motivations, Design, and Challenges

Sebastian BenthallUC Berkeley School of Information

ICTD Seminar

(Based on a presentation written with

Rolando PeñateOpenGeo)

What is...

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)

“[Spatial Data Infrastructure] provides a basis for spatial data discovery, evaluation, and application for users and providers within all levels of government, the commercial sector, the non-profit sector, academia and by citizens in

general.”– SDI Cookbook

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)

The theory of SDI

developed before

we learned what was

possible with the Internet

...what an ideal SDI would be like

Imagine...

...an SDI that makes

uploading, sharing, and working

with data

as easy as blogging

Imagine...

Publishing data

Anthony has some spatial data and wants to display it as part of a blog post.

Publishing data

Anthony uploads it to a public SDI, styles it, provides a background, and then puts a map

widget on his blog.

Publishing data

Meanwhile, the data, style, and map remain available on the public SDI

for others to use.

Metadata and reputation

The World Organization tells Cameron, their consultant, to put data she has gathered on their

SDI.

Metadata and reputation

Other users notice mistakes in the metadata. They notify Cameron and give it a low rating.

Metadata and reputation

Cameron fixes the mistakes, and the other users rate the data more highly. Her reputation on the

SDI improves.

Federated search

A regional Health agency and a regional Transit agency have separate SDI systems.

Federated search

Tom, a GIS analyst doing research, seeks out correlations between health and bicycle routes

Federated search

Tom searches for data in a single federated index and downloads the data as a batch.

GeoNode is a spatial data infrastructureIt focuses on data, then users, then metadata.

Data upload, sharing, cartography, user profiles, dynamic metadata generation, and more.

What is GeoNode?

GeoNode builds on open source geospatial projects like

GeoExt, OpenLayers, GeoWebCacheGeoServer, GeoNetwork, and PostGIS

with application functionality built on Django.

What is GeoNode?

GeoNode Vision

⇒

GeoNode Involvement

⇒

GeoNode Community

GeoNode Vision

⇒

GeoNode Involvement

⇒

GeoNode Community

How did this happen?

Can the lessons learned can help other ICTD projects?

A case study GeoNodesheds light on international disaster

reduction efforts.

Disaster Risk Modeling 101

• Used for determining development investments

• Once were a mess• Now standardizing:

Risk(busted stuff)

=

Hazard(boom)

x

Exposure(stuff)

x

Vulnerability(bust per boom)

The World Bank had a problem:

Disaster risk modeling requires lots of data   Central American Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) initiative needed participating agencies across various governments to share data

Top-down approaches didn't work

Needed to work bottom-up

GeoNode History

The World Bank had a problem:

Costly proprietary GIS solutions are a burden to developing nations The Bank wanted to build local capacity around financially sustainable software

Smart folks within the Bank turned to open source geospatial software

GeoNode History

GeoNode Vision

OpenGeo had an idea for a solution:

The Bank provided the perfect use case for OpenGeo's vision for open source architectures of participation in geospatial Providing freely available web-based tools could be a great way to collect and share data.

GeoNode was born.

GeoNode Involvement

Traditional SDIs have typically been designed by 'experts' with abstract needs in mind—hence a focus on metadata.

GeoNode is being designed in response to the needs and concerns of institutional partners as they implement real-world projects—hence a focus on data and users.

Metadata Pain

Good metadata for geospatial data is important but hard to produce.

GeoNode has user profiles and features them prominently Those profiles have ISO metadata fields within them

Metadata Made Easy

Metadata Published

Metadata is published

with open standard

CSW

using GeoNetwork

Open Data Skepticism

Isn't GeoNode an open data platform?

Doesn't open data raise concerns about

data quality and data security?

Open Data Optimism

Yes, GeoNode is designed to promote open data.

Open Data Optimism

Features like

User reputation

Organizational endorsement

Flexible security

address data quality concerns

Open Data Optimism

GeoNode supports

the continuum

of openness with a common platform

for institutional GIS and neogeography

GeoNode Involvement

GeoNode seeks to unify data management across organizations.

Thus many different organizations have reason to get involved.

The opportunity and challenge is effective collaboration.

GeoNode Involvement

As more organizations got involved, development had to decentralize.

Not just a single team within OpenGeo, but a larger community

How do we continue growth whenvision and development are decentralized?

How do we continue growth whenvision and development are decentralized?

That's whatopen source communities

are for.

But how do we get institutions to get their employeesto participate in the open community?

Need to align broader visions, including...

• Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction• Geoscience Australia• Global Earthquake Model• Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction• Secretariat of the Pacific 

are mapping infrastructure in developing nations, performing disaster modelling, etc. using GeoNode.

Disaster Reduction

MapStor Foundation and Harvard's WorldMap seek to collect and share data across disciplines and institutions using GeoNode.

Academic

Spatial Marketplaces

The Australia–New Zealand Spatial Marketplace seeks to increase data availability in the South Pacific by creating an online

marketplace built on GeoNode and open to all.

The World Bank's vision was the collaboration of many institutions and governments

around common goals of data management

Community

As a result,many organizations are involved

in building and extending GeoNode

Community

How can we keep these efforts coherent, not divergent? Efficient, not redundant?

Community

 GeoNode's development requiresmany visions to be aligned.

Community

OpenGeo

• Benefits from contributions back to core software• Has led effort to coordinate between institutions

o easier management and developmento stronger open source communities

Our task has been to scale up open source development

practices to large institutions

Roadmapping Summit May 2011

• Explicit transition to open source community modelo Established a proper Project Steering Committeeo Passed policies for contributions and code review

• Official decentralization from OpenGeo's core team• Identified common development goals

How to discover common development goals?

We

collected

individual organization's roadmaps

We

standardized

individual organization's roadmaps

Participants shared their visions with each other,explored the roadmap,

and contributed new items that were missing.

We

identified

a common roadmap

Then we collectively

prioritized

those roadmap items.

Which do we build first?

Outcomes

• "Rock Solid" 1.1 • People entered the summit to big ideas to impress their

bosses• People left having committed resources to docs, bug

fixes, and other work necessary to keep the project running.

Outcomes

• Framework for future improvements• We have principled roadmap for the software with real

institutional backing• We know who to call when we have the resources 

Outcomes

• Community solidarity

• “From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world”— St. Arnold

Remaining challengesfor OpenGeo

Achieving open source best practices while being a primary contractor.

Remaining challenges

Maintaining consensus among large organizationsdespite natural tensions and turnover.

Remaining challenges

As the process decentralizes, who is responsible for the hard work of this coordination?

Remaining (technical) challenges

Can the GeoNode community developtechnology that works in regions

with low connectivity?

Remaining (technical) challenges

Is the dream of asecure federated data network

(both spatial and social)realistic?

This ties into questions of federated social networking.

Remaining (research) challenges

This perspective on GeoNode is fromoffices in New York City and Washington, DC

What does it look like in the countrieswhere it is being deployed

Remaining (research) challenges

Is the open source modelliving up to its development goals?

Thank you.

Any questions?