Fossgis: open source for emergencies - Marco Lechner¶

Tags: fossgis, geo, python, plone

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 fossgis conference).

He works for the Bundesamtes fuer Strahlenschutz, basically the government agency that was started after Chernobil to protect against and to measure radioactivity. The software system they use/build is called IMIS.

IMIS consists of three parts:

• Measurements (automatic + mobile measurements + laboratory results).

• Prediction system. Including documentation (managed in Plone, a python CMS system).

• Decision support. Help support the government layers that have to make the decisions.

They have a simple map at odlinfo.bfs.de.

The current core of the system is proprietary. They are dependent on one single firm. The system is heavily customized for their usage.

They need a new system because geographical analysis keeps getting more important and because there are new requirements coming out of the government. The current program cannot handle that.

What they want is a new system that is as simple as possible; that uses standards for geographical exchange; they don’t want to be dependent on a single firm anymore. So:

• Use open standards, so OGC. But also a specific world-wide nuclear info protocol.

• Use existing open source software. OSGEO.

• If we need something special, can we change/extend existing open source software?

• If not, then it is OK to create our their software. Under an open source license.

They use open source companies to help them, including training their employees. And helping getting these employees used to modern software development (jenkins, docker, etc.)

If you use an open source strategy, what do you need to do to make it fair?

• Your own developments should also be open source!

• You need your own test and build infrastructure. (For instance Jenkins)

• You need to make it easy to start working with what you made: documentation, docker, buildout (!), etc.

(Personal note: I didn’t expect to hear ‘buildout’ at this open source GIS conference. I’ve helped quite a bit with that particular piece of python software :-) )