Agi North

Open Source GIS in the UK
(with particular reference to archaeology)

Jo Cook
OA Digital
http://oadigital.net
j.cook@oadigital.net
+44 (0)1524 880212

Introduction
What *is* happening in the UK?
●

Preconceptions
●

Not just open source, but open everything
●

Where next (otherwise known as shameless
●

plug)
●

What *is* happening?

Universities
Heritage

Some
business
Where else?
use

Preconceptions
No good for “real” use
●

●Where's the support?

●Where's the hidden catch?

●What if it all goes horribly wrong?

Advantages of open source
Supplier independence
●

Transparency, controllability and manageability
●

Interoperability
●

Sustainability
●

Also:
●

Reliability
●

Security
●

Performance
●

1) Ministry of Economic Affairs (Netherlands), 2007, The Netherlands in
Open Connection: An action plan for the use of Open Standards and
Open Source Software in the public and semi-public sector
2) http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

Archaeology
Preservation by record
●

Difficult “status”
●

Not much money
●

Variable working environment
●

And finally...

Open Source GIS
● peace
Give a chance!

Thank You!
oadigital.net
www.osgeo.org
wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To
view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California
94105, USA.

Jo Cook
OA Digital
+44 (0)1524 880212

Open Source GIS in the UK
(with particular reference to archaeology)

Jo Cook
OA Digital
+44 (0)1524 880212

Thanks to everyone for turning up.
I work for Oxford Archaeology as an IT research and
development officer. You might have some preconceptions
about what an archaeology unit is- we don’t always work for
universities, we’re not volunteers, and we have some fairly
strong opinions about Time Team and Bonekickers. We are
the largest commercial archaeological organisation in the
UK, possibly in Europe, with 400 staff across 3 UK offices
and 1 French. We have the same concerns over data
management, efficiency, staff training and basically getting
the job done as any other professional company.
However, as it is important to us to maintain our records and
data in perpetuity, as it’s the often the only record of what we
have dug up, we have made the decision to embrace an
“open” ethos: Open access to our data, open standards, and
open source software where possible.
This talk is an entirely personal exploration of the issues that
have become clear to me over the last year or so as we try
and move towards using entirely open source GIS.

1

Introduction
What *is* happening in the UK?
●

Preconceptions
●

Not just open source, but open everything
●

Where next (otherwise known as shameless
●

plug)
●

When I gave a variant of this talk at the AGI conference in September, I
asked people to get in touch if they worked with open source gis, or if
they wanted to. I got a lot of feedback from companies that support
open source, along with people from academia, so I feel that the
situation is more positive than I thought at that point. Bringing everyone
together is difficult though, and that's something we're working on,
within the AGI and within OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation,
in particular the UK local chapter).
Some things are still the same though- there are a lot of
preconceptions about open source, and whether it's too much of a risk
to use in a company environment. I'd like to think it's easier to address
some of those issues now.
Also, I can also talk a lot more about what we have done in one
archaeological unit, in moving towards our open ethos.

2

What *is* happening?

Universities
Heritage

Some
business
Where else?
use

The situation is not entirely dire...
We know that some universities are
starting to offer courses in open source
GIS. Software such as GRASS is often
used for high-end GIS analysis.
Obviously we know that open source
software is beginning to be used in the
heritage industry- we need to future-proof
our data and make it as open/archivally
stable as possible.
But where else? I’m sure that there are
people who are using open source GIS
software, but they are keeping quiet about
it.

3

Preconceptions
No good for “real” use
●

●Where's the support?

●Where's the hidden catch?

●What if it all goes horribly wrong?

Comments that have been made to me by people in my own company
or in others (including a national body) include:
It’s only good for “home” use- wrong! The examples of apache, mysql
and firefox should prove otherwise.
You don’t get the same level of support- correct! It's often better, but it's
a totally different support paradigm. It is possible to get enterprise-level
guaranteed support if you need it.
Where's the hidden catch? If you give the software away, where do you
make money? From the support, from adding value to the product.
What if it all goes horribly wrong? Well what if your proprietary software
company goes bankrupt? There have been a number of occasions
where governmental organisations have been burnt by contractors
walking away with software at the end of a project, leaving them with
nothing. At least if it's open source, you have a working programme,
and the code to rebuild it should you need to. In the absolute worst-
case scenario, you can find another developer to work on it, or choose
a different package (particularly in the modular approach).

4

Advantages of open source
Supplier independence
●

Transparency, controllability and manageability
●

Interoperability
●

Sustainability
●

Also:
●

Reliability
●

Security
●

Performance
●


Advantages of an open source approach:
No vendor lock-in, no format lock-in. No worries about changes to
licensing agreements.
Transparency, control and manageability.
Interoperability and sustainability.
More controversially, perhaps- reliability, security and performance.
Refs:

5

V
N
D
P
A
ie
v”
a
m
o
b
n
t
r
k
w
lg
y
c
d
●

Archaeology and open source go very well together for a number of reasons.
The whole point of doing archaeology is to make a record of something that was
dug up- without the data the artefacts (if there are any) are useless. So our
records take the place of the archaeology, and it's our duty to keep them
(accessible) in perpetuity. This leads to our open ethos- open access to our data,
open standards for our file formats, and open source for our data.

Archaeological units are often also in a funny position regarding status. We are
not usually part of universities, we are commercial organisations, but are often
educational charities. We fall between two stools for both software and data
licensing. Not only that, but archaeology is one of the poorest graduate
professions around. We don't have much money in the first place.

So open source software is attractive because it's free in both the speech and
beer sense.

6

Highlights of open source GIS

This is a very quick introduction to three
open source gis packages that you may or
may not be aware of. There are, of course,
many others, but these in particular are
perhaps closest to providing you with a
replacement to your current proprietary
option.

7

gvSIG

gvSIG is a desktop GIS package that was developed by the Valencia
Regional Council for Infrastructure and Transportation. It has all the
analytical tools that you might want for in a standard desktop GIS,
along with connectors to web-based services and databases. It has an
advantage over other open source desktop gis of reading (closed
source) cad files.
It has now been fully translated to English (partly by Oxford
Archaeology) and has been developed to run on mobile devices such
as the openmoko phone (more later).
We are now using this as our primary desktop GIS package, although
we use Quantum GIS and GRASS when we need to, and keep a few
licenses of ArcGIS for things like opening proprietary mxd files.

8

PostgreSQL/PostGIS

PostgreSQL is “the other open source server-based database”. When
you add in the postGIS extension, you have an extremely powerful
geospatial database.
PostgreSQL itself has several really important features that make it an
enterprise-level offering. It offers support for transactions, allowing you
to roll-back a command, or set of commands if everything goes wrong.
It has very powerful security options.
PostGIS gives it the ability to store spatial data, as an alternative to file-
based data storage. It has many built-in spatial commands, such as
buffering and intersections. It is possible to perform complex spatial
queries from the command line without even needing to open your
map.
Most of the leading open source desktop GIS packages provide read-
access to postgreSQL databases, some like gvSIG even allow write-
access. Even some of the proprietary packages will connect to
postgreSQL!
We are experimenting with postgresql for backend databases, text-
based connections from microsoft access and open office base, and
gvsig for a spatial front-end. There are open source data replicators too
for synchronising data from laptops out on site.

9

Openlayers/Mapfish

There are many open source web-based front-ends but openlayers and
mapfish are possibly my favourites right now. Openlayers is entirely
javascript based, so requires no extra software on your web server.
Then mapfish is a framework built on top of it for quickly deploying nice
looking maps.
We are trying to deploy a lot of our standard data as web mapping
services to save on disk space, deal with versioning issues and so on.
These will be accessible from both desktop and web-based gis
packages, with securities set for editing rights and so on.

10

Where to go for help?

So if companies or individuals are interested, where can they go for
help? Well the obvious place is OSGeo, and the local chapters (more in
a bit), but there are also a number of companies that support open
source products or data. These will offer enterprise-level support,
should you need it.

11

And finally...

Open Source GIS
● peace
Give a chance!

12

Thank You!
oadigital.net
www.osgeo.org
wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To
view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California
94105, USA.

Jo Cook
OA Digital
+44 (0)1524 880212

Thanks again for listening, this talk is
available online with notes, should you
wish to replay it in the comfort of your own
office.

13

Agi North

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