GISEIEL: AN OPEN SOURCE GIS FOR TERRITORIAL

MANAGEMENT

∗

Pedro A. Gonz

alez

Servicio de Asistencia T

ecnica a Municipios. Diputaci

on Provincial de A Coru

na. 15006 A Coru

na, Spain

Miguel Lorenzo

Servicio de Organizaci

on e Innovaci

o”n Tecnol”

ogica. Diputaci

on Provincial de A Coru

na. 15006 A Coru

na, Spain

Miguel R. Luaces, David Trillo and Jos

e Ignacio Lamas Fonte

Database Laboratory. University of A Coru

na. 15071 A Coru

na, Spain

Keywords:

Geographic information system, Spatial data infrastructure, Territorial management, Open source.

Abstract:

The provincial government A Coru

na, in Spain, has been working on the last years in the construction of a

geographic information system for the management of its territory. The result of this work are three software

products: WebEIEL, gisEIEL and the ideAC node. WebEIEL is the web application that publishes the infor-

mation on the Internet. gisEIEL is the desktop application that is used by the provincial government and the

municipalities to create, query, visualize, analyze and update the information in the system. Finally, the ideAC

node is a spatial data infrastructure that uses international standards to publish the information as a part of the

Spanish spatial data infrastructure. In this paper, we describe the functionality and the architecture of the sys-

tem and we present the problems that we had to face during the development of the system and the solutions

that we applied.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Spanish government requires every provincial

government to conduct each year a survey on the situ-

ation and condition of the infrastructure and facilities

in each municipality (named EIEL from the Spanish

Encuesta sobre Infraestructura y Equipamientos Lo-

cales). This information is used by the Spanish and

the provincial governments to discover the funding

needs of each municipality and to propose actions to

balance the living conditions in the different munici-

palities

The province of A Coru

na is located in northwest-

ern Spain. With more than one million inhabitants and

almost eight thousand square kilometers, it is densely

populated with more than a hundred and twenty-ﬁve

inhabitants per square kilometer. In the year 2000,

∗

This work has been partially supported by “Ministerio

de Educaci

on y Ciencia”(PGE y FEDER) ref. TIN2006-

16071-C03-03, and by “Xunta de Galicia” ref. 2006/4 and

ref. 08SIN008E.

the provincial government of A Coru

na decided to

broaden the goals of the EIEL with these new tasks:

(i) to extend the information to be collected, both in

terms of the different kinds of elements to be sur-

veyed, and the amount of information for each par-

ticular item, (ii) to reference the items surveyed to

its geographical location or extent, and to construct

a geographic database and applications for its man-

agement, and (iii) to publish the data through a user-

friendly GIS web application and through a spatial

data infrastructure to make it available to all the citi-

zens of the province.

These goals were achieved through a collabora-

tion with the University of A Coru

na. The work

was carried out in several phases. In the ﬁrst phase,

from the year to 2000 to the year 2003, the geo-

graphic location and/or shape of more than 100 dif-

ferent types of entities were surveyed to construct a

database of about seven gigabytes of alphanumeric

and geographic information. A large group of stu-

dents from the Civil Engineering school and the Ar-

177

A. González P., Lorenzo M., R. Luaces M., Trillo D. and Ignacio Lamas Fonte J. (2009).

GISEIEL: AN OPEN SOURCE GIS FOR TERRITORIAL MANAGEMENT.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages

177-182

DOI: 10.5220/0002004501770182

 SciTePress

chitecture school (about a hundred people) collected

the data by direct observation or interviewing the re-

sponsible staff in each municipality. All the soft-

ware engineering issues in the project were the re-

sponsibility of the Database Laboratory of the Uni-

versity of A Coru

na. Their task was to develop all the

GIS applications required to insert, maintain, manage

and publish all the collected data. The problems that

appeared during this task are described in (Brisaboa

et al., 2007).

Once the database was created and populated, the

second phase was the development of applications to

exploit the data. This was done between the years

2004 and 2006. The ﬁrst application (called gisEIEL)

was a desktop application deployed at the provin-

cial government and used by its staff to visualize,

analyze and keep the alphanumeric and geographic

data updated. The second one was a web-based GIS

(called WebEIEL) that can be accessed over the Inter-

net (Deputaci

on Provincial da Coru

na, 2008).

During the third phase, from the year 2006 to the

present day, the provincial government decided to mi-

grate the application to open source software and to

implement a spatial data infrastructure (named ideAC

node) that publishes the information using standards

as a part of the Spanish spatial data infrastructure. In

this paper, we describe this migration process, the

functionality and the architecture of these applica-

tions and the problems that had to be faced during

their development process. The rest of the paper is

structured as follows: ﬁrst, we describe in Section 2

the migration process from the ﬁrst version of the

applications developed using proprietary software to

the current version developed using open source soft-

ware. Then, we describe in Section 3 the function-

ality and the architecture of WebEIEL and the ideAC

node. After that, Section 4 describes the application

gisEIEL paying special attention to the functionality

and the methodology for the survey. Finally, we end

the paper with conclusions and future work in Sec-

tion 5.

2 MIGRATION TO OPEN

SOURCE SOFTWARE

When the project started in the year 2000, all the ap-

plications were implemented using the GIS develop-

ment tools provided by Intergraph, particularly Geo-

media Professional and Geomedia Web Map (Inter-

graph Corporation, 2008). There were two main rea-

sons for this decision. First, time and cost require-

ments for the project forced us to use existing GIS de-

velopment tools instead of implementing the applica-

tions from scratch using custom-developed modules.

And second, when the analysis and design of the sys-

tem started in the year 2000 the relevant international

standards were not mature. The ﬁrst consequence of

this decision was that the applications only worked on

a Microsoft operating system. Given that the provin-

cial government uses Linux on their servers, the ap-

plications had to run in a virtual machine with the

consequent loss of efﬁciency. Another consequence

was that the web publishing service (Geomedia Web

Map) was only compatible with Microsoft Internet

Explorer. Therefore, the users were forced to use

this web browser. The third consequence was that the

data had to be stored using a read-only proprietary

format (Geomedia SmartStore) in order to achieve

an acceptable efﬁciency rate in the web publication.

This implied that the information was duplicated with

all the problems associated to this fact (e.g.: com-

plex publication process and incoherency problems).

A ﬁnal consequence was that Geomedia Web Map

did not conform to the Open Geospatial Consortium

(OGC) standards when the applications were devel-

oped, therefore, the applications could not be used as

a spatial data infrastructure.

These problems, along with the publication of the

INSPIRE directive (INfrastructure for Spatial InfoR-

mation in Europe (European Commission, 2008)),

determined a deep change in the philosophy of the

project and in the selection of technologies that are

the foundation of the system. In the year 2006, the

provincial government and the Database Laboratory

started a new project to migrate all the system to open

source software and to create a node of the Span-

ish spatial data infrastructure for the province of A

Coru

na (Pedro A. Gonz

alez, 2004). Figure 1 shows

the evolution of the system. The architecture of the

system using proprietary software is depicted on the

left side of the ﬁgure. The new architecture using

open source software is shown on the right side of the

ﬁgure. The equivalent components on each architec-

ture are depicted with boxes and arrows joining them.

The ﬁrst task of the process was the migration

from Microsoft SQL Server (Microsoft Corporation,

2008) to PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL Global Develop-

ment Group, 2008) and PostGIS (Refractions Re-

search, 2008). This implied a migration from a GIS

architecture using opaque binary large objects for the

representation of geographic features to a GIS archi-

tecture using an extensible database system following

the Simple Features for SQL standard (OGC, 2006a).

The migration of the data was performed by a custom

application that used the Geomedia Professional API

to read the information from the source database and

created the SQL scripts used to restore the database in

ICEIS 2009 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

178

Figure 1: Migration of the architecture from proprietary software to open source software.

PostGIS.

The second task of the process was the migration

of the web application (WebEIEL) and the construc-

tion of the ideAC node. The ideAC node includes a

Web Feature Service (OGC, 2005), a Web Map Ser-

vice (OGC, 2006b), a catalog service (OGC, 2007a)

following the ISO19115 standard (ISO/IEC, 2003)

and the Spanish metadata proﬁle (Consejo Superior

Geogr

aﬁco, 2005b), and a gazetteer service (OGC,

2008; Consejo Superior Geogr

aﬁco, 2005a). Fur-

thermore, the web application was redesigned to use

J2SE technologies in the implementation of the server

side. Finally, the client side user interface was also

redesigned. Instead of displaying the geographic in-

formation using an ActiveX plugin provided by In-

tergraph (Active CGM Plugin), two different user in-

terfaces were developed using a Java applet and dy-

namic HTML. This improves the accessibility of the

application because it does not require an speciﬁc web

browser from the user.

The last task of the process was the migration of

the desktop applications for the management of the

information in the system. We left this task for the end

of the process because there was no software com-

ponent fulﬁlling our requirements at the beginning

of the project. The migration process also allowed

us to integrate in a single application several appli-

cations that were developed in the ﬁrst phase of the

project, namely: (i) the desktop application for the

management of the information, (ii) the applications

that computed in an automatic way some information,

(iii) the applications for the validation of the informa-

tion in the database, and (iv) the applications to gen-

erate printable maps and reports.

3 WebEIEL AND THE ideAC NODE

The right side of ﬁgure 1 shows the architecture of the

ideAC node and the WebEIEL application. The bot-

tom part of the ﬁgure shows the database of the EIEL

of A Coru

na. The information collected consists only

of vector-based geographic features, that is, no cover-

ages are needed for the information in the data model.

Therefore, the only requirement on the database man-

agement system (DBMS) is to conform to the Sim-

ple Features Speciﬁcation for SQL standard (OGC,

2006a) proposed by the OGC and ISO. In our case,

we have chosen PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL Global De-

velopment Group, 2008) with the extension module

PostGIS (Refractions Research, 2008) for the repre-

sentation of the geographic information. The main

reason for this decision is that PostGIS is more mature

in terms of the implementation of the SFS standard.

For instance, all the spatial operators proposed by

the standard are completely implemented in PostGIS

whereas other database management systems, such as

MySQL (MySQL AB, 2008), implement these oper-

ations using the bounding box of the geographic fea-

tures. This functionality was considered more impor-

tant than the fact that PostGIS is slightly slower than

other alternatives.

The following level of the architecture is com-

posed by the services of the ideAC node: the Web

Feature Service (WFS), the catalog and metadata ser-

vice (CS-W), the gazetteer service (WFS-G) and the

Web Map Service (WMS). The Web Feature Ser-

vice (OGC, 2005) is in charge of serving the geo-

graphic information in the database encoded using

GML (OGC, 2007b). This ﬁle format is an XML

application for the representation of geographic in-

formation. By using this service, any client appli-

cation can retrieve the information in the database in

a format that preserves the identity and the alphanu-

meric information associated to each geographic fea-

GISEIEL: AN OPEN SOURCE GIS FOR TERRITORIAL MANAGEMENT

179

ture. Deegree (lat/lon GmbH, 2008) was used for

the implementation of this service because of its ef-

ﬁciency even though the conﬁguration of Deegree is

very complex.

The catalog and metadata service allows the users

to query and discover the information that is available

in the node, the way in which the information in the

node is related to each other, and all the additional

information that can be assigned to each information

element following the ISO 19115 standard (ISO/IEC,

2003). We implemented this service from scratch

because no existing implementation fulﬁlled our re-

quirements.

Regarding the gazetteer, we also had to ana-

lyze, design and implement a service following the

Gazetteer Service for WFS speciﬁcation (OGC, 2008)

deﬁned by the OGC and the deﬁnition of the Span-

ish Gazetteer Model (Consejo Superior Geogr

aﬁco,

2005a) proposed by the Spanish National Geographic

Institute. The service was designed as a set of inde-

pendent modules that enable reusability.

The last service of the ideAC node is a Web Map

Service (OGC, 2006b). This service is used to pro-

duce cartography from the geographic information

stored in the system. In this case, the result of a query

is a map with the information requested encoded us-

ing an image format using the visualization styles re-

quested. The identity of each individual element and

the alphanumeric information is lost in the process.

Therefore, the result of this service can only be used

to display cartography but not to retrieve the original

information. We also used Deegree (lat/lon GmbH,

2008) as a basis for the implementation of this ser-

vice.

The topmost layer of the architecture is formed

by the application WebEIEL. This application is in

charge of providing a user-friendly interface to query

and visualize the geographic information, the meta-

data catalog, and the gazetteer. We decided to offer

two different versions of the user interface targeted at

two different user types. The ﬁrst type of user inter-

face was designed for advanced users. Its main char-

acteristic is that it works in a very similar way to a

desktop GIS visualization tool. This user interface

uses active vectorial maps encoded using the SVG ﬁle

format (World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2003)

and the visualization is performed by a Java applet.

The main advantage of this user interface is that it can

provide many more functionality than a pure web ap-

plication. Moreover, the user interaction is bigger and

the quality of the maps is higher because they are in a

vector-based format. The main drawback is that this

user interface requires a higher knowledge level from

the user because the Java virtual machine must be in-

stalled in the computer and its learning curve is more

steep. Furthermore, the application needs more time

to start and the information requires a longer time to

load.

The second type of user interface was designed for

common users whose only interest is visualizing the

geographic information. This user interface is more

simple because it uses images to display the cartogra-

phy and it is implemented using only dynamic HTML

and JavaScript. Therefore, it can be used in any web

browser without having to install any additional soft-

ware. Hence, it is the most suitable for non-expert

users in GIS applications.

We designed and implemented most of WebEIEL

from scratch. The only third-party component that we

used is MapBuilder (Community MapBuilder, 2008)

as a basis for the user interface based on dynamic

HTML and JavaScript.

4 gisEIEL

gisEIEL is the desktop application used by the staff at

the provincial government for querying, visualizing

and correcting the information in the database. Fur-

thermore, it is also used by the surveying teams to up-

date the information of the survey every year. There-

fore, the application is used by around ten people in

the provincial government and around twenty simul-

taneous users in the university. Figure 2 shows the

methodology that is followed by the surveying teams

and the provincial government when the survey is per-

formed using gisEIEL. The ﬁrst step consists in creat-

ing and updating the information in the database us-

ing the digitalization tools. Then, the modules that

perform the automatic computation of the informa-

tion are used. After that, the validation task is per-

formed and, depending on the result, the surveying

teams may have to update or create new information

(if there were errors), or the workﬂow may advance

and proceed to the task of creating the database that

will be sent to the Spanish government. This modules

are described in more detail below.

gisEIEL allows the user to visualize the informa-

tion in the database by means of map windows where

the user can also edit the geographic and alphanu-

meric information of the different data layers. The

application provides tools for the visualization, local-

ization and edition of the geographic features as well

as tools for printing maps and reports. gisEIEL also

provides functionality for the analysis of the informa-

tion, the validation of the data and the generation of

the database format required by the Spanish govern-

ment.

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180

Figure 2: Survey methodology using gisEIEL.

The basis of the application is gvSIG 1.0 (Gen-

eralitat Valenciana, 2008), which is an open source

GIS application developed by the regional govern-

ment of Valencia, in Spain. The reason for choos-

ing this software is that it was the only one in 2007

that fulﬁlled the requirements of gisEIEL, namely: (i)

reading and writing from database management sys-

tems using the Simple Features Speciﬁcation for SQL

standard (SFS), (ii) visualizing geographic informa-

tion using different coordinate systems, (iii) support-

ing the edition of geographic information and (iv) in-

cluding a Web Feature Service (WFS) and a Web Map

Service (WMS) client.

The functionality provided by gvSIG was ex-

tended to adapt it to the speciﬁc requirements of the

users of gisEIEL. First, a user authentication mod-

ule was implemented that deﬁnes roles, permissions

for each role and users associated to each role. This

allows to control the operations that each individual

user can perform on the system. Another improve-

ment is that the data catalog was used to ease the way

the users load the information. The usual way of load-

ing information in gvSIG implies that the user has to

set up the connection, to choose the source table and

to select the columns in the table. However, in gi-

sEIEL, the information in the catalog (maps and lay-

ers) is presented to the user who can load a complex

map with a single mouse click. Furthermore, gisEIEL

controls the amount of information that the user re-

quests from the database. The application forces the

user to work at a municipality level, that is, when

the user starts the application, he/she selects a mu-

nicipality to work with. Later on, gisEIEL ﬁlters all

the information and displays only the information re-

lated to that municipality. This makes the applica-

tion faster because the amount of information that is

loaded is limited and, furthermore, it does not over-

load the database server nor the network. However,

if the user wants to work with more than one munic-

ipality at the time, he/she can choose more than one

municipality. This eases the task of connecting the ge-

ographic information in the municipality boundaries.

Regarding the digitalization of geographic infor-

mation, we have developed several tools in addition to

those provided by gvSIG. gisEIEL supports two types

of digitalization according to the type of geographic

feature: simple and complex digitalization. In the case

of simple digitalization, the user only has to draw a

single geometry of a speciﬁc geometry type (point,

line or polygon). In the case of complex digitaliza-

tion, the user has to draw a set of geometries for a sin-

gle feature. For instance, for a road section, the user

has to draw a polygon for the surface of the road and

a line for the middle line. In both cases, gisEIEL con-

trols the workﬂow and ensures that the correct type of

geometry is provided by the user. gisEIEL also pro-

vides many new tools to modify the geographic infor-

mation stored in the database. For instance, there is a

tool in gisEIEL to digitalize a small portion of a given

geographic feature, a tool for moving and inserting

vertices in a geographic feature, and a tool for split-

ting geographic features. With respect to geographic

feature validation, gisEIEL can also check whether

the geographic feature drawn by the user fulﬁls cer-

tain restrictions in order to ensure the quality of the

information. These checks are used, for instance, to

ensure that a given equipment (e.g: a school) is drawn

within the correspondent municipality and not outside

the limits, or to ensure that the water network or the

road network are connected and there are no dangling

nodes or surfaces. Finally, we have also improved the

snapping tools of gvSIG. We have deﬁned three new

types of snapping: snap to a vertex, snap to a line seg-

ment, and snap to a polyline.

Finally, considering that some of the information

in the survey can be derived from the raw data in-

serted by the surveying teams, gisEIEL provides func-

tionality to automatically compute this information.

For instance, the survey requires the teams to spec-

ify the elements of the water network that give ser-

vice to each population entity. That is, for each pop-

ulation entity the user has to specify the water pipes,

GISEIEL: AN OPEN SOURCE GIS FOR TERRITORIAL MANAGEMENT

181

water tanks, treatment plants, water catchments and

all the other elements that provide a service to the

entity. Instead of associating manually this informa-

tion, gisEIEL provides functionality to perform this

task automatically creating a graph for the water net-

work and using graph exploring algorithms. Another

automatic computation that gisEIEL includes are al-

gorithms to compute information from the data stored

in the database using spatial analysis. For example,

it includes algorithms to compute the populated areas

with deﬁcit of street lights, estimations of waste pro-

duction, or milestones.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

We have described in this paper the open source geo-

graphic information system developed by the provin-

cial geovernment of a Coru

na and the Database Lab-

oratory of the University of A Coru

na. We have de-

scribed the migration process from the previous GIS

based on proprietary software to the current system

based on open source software. We have also de-

scribed the main applications of the system: WebEIEL

and the ideAC node, the web applications for publish-

ing the information in the Internet, and gisEIEL, the

desktop application for querying and updating the in-

formation in the database. We have also presented the

current effort to distribute the software and the infor-

mation between the municipalities of the province.

Our work is not ﬁnished yet. We have a plan

for the following years that includes the following

tasks. First, we plan on including the information

from previous surveys. There is historical data start-

ing in 1988. The database includes only the current

state of the survey. We plan on importing the histori-

cal data and providing tools for querying and analyz-

ing this information. Furthermore, we must design

and implement a method to store the future modiﬁ-

cations to the database. This implies storing historic

versions of the geographic features when the user up-

dates and commits the change. Moreover, the current

version of gisEIEL distributes the information but it

is not prepared to recover the information updated by

the municipalities. We plan on designing a method-

ology to include the information modiﬁed by the mu-

nicipalities in the survey, and thus, decentralize the

task of surveying. Finally, gisEIEL is a great tool for

the municipalities to query the information in the sur-

vey, but it does not provide any tool to perform their

daily tasks. We plan on including tool to manage the

processes of urban planning, licenses, demography,

taxes, and many other municipal management tasks.

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