Open source GIS: Frontlines and bottom lines

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1 Open source GIS: Frontlines and bottom lines Martina Doolan, Data Manager, West Midlands Fire Service Tim Needham, Software Architect, West Midlands Fire Service Executive Summary In recent years, West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) has been transforming its IT assets to reduce costs and improve the quality of its service delivery. Embracing both the technology and philosophy of open source has assisted the brigade in avoiding costs estimated at 470,000 per annum. A highly successful, central-government sponsored project proves that the combination of open source technology and the innovative software developed by the WMFS can bring significant benefits to other organisations. At the centre of this nationally-recognised work lies a variety of open source GIS projects. From loading, transforming, styling and interacting with the latest map products to deploying innovative self-generating gazetteers at an incident ground - open source GIS plays a mission-critical role. What is open source? Open source is a term given to software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute it without paying royalties or fees. Major open source GIS projects such as GeoServer, GDAL, PostGIS and OpenLayers offer powerful functionality, which is free from licensing costs and vendor lock-in. The UK Government is committed to invigorating the use of open source software and open standards with the public sector. The latest Cabinet Office guidance states Wherever possible government will avoid lock-in proprietary software solutions. 1 WMFS is currently finalising arrangements to publicly offer its own in-house software projects under an appropriate open source license. Background Until recently, fire and rescue services throughout the UK had been considering their long-term technological directions as they prepared for the [now abandoned] Regional Fire Control project. The mechanism to transfer geographic information to a national mobilising and resource management system was left to the discretion of each Brigade. Many of the technical solutions on offer were based on customisation of middleware products, which were often costly and encouraged vendor lock-in. Such commitment typically did little or nothing to improve the quality of existing back-office systems or data. During preparations to ready itself for regional control, a combination of financial considerations, a willingness to share the work of its in-house development team and, perhaps crucially, a maturing of open source GIS products encouraged West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) to take the decision to go open. This key decision has since proved highly beneficial. 1

2 Open relationships Early progress made by WMFS in preparation for Regional Fire Control (and its cost-effective implementation) was recognised by central government, which subsequently sponsored a project with Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) in order to assess if the WMFS model could be transferred to other fire and rescue services. The project was deemed a huge success by all parties, major efficiency gains were instantly achieved within SFRS and the positive feedback received from frontline staff mirrored the experience at WMFS. Notably the reliability and performance of an integrated open source mapping component has outperformed a national alternative. SFRS has since extended their open platform to encompass community safety functionality and a second brigade has recently committed resources to help grow the WMFS open source project. Open source GIS in action WMFS has successfully embedded open source GIS technology throughout its daily activities thanks to the selection of mature products and adherence to open standards. A software application developed by WMFS called Vega (incident command software for use during major emergencies) clearly demonstrates the impressive capability of open source GIS products. The development process of Vega was efficient and highly cost-effective. The resulting application has been built to meet key objectives for enabling improvements to be made to frontline service delivery. The open nature of the core technology has allowed reuse of key components, bringing added benefits to other areas of the organisation. Figure 1: Screenshot taken from Vega incident command software

3 Putting it all together One of the goals of this paper is to highlight the many (and often brilliant) open source GIS projects on offer today. The technology mentioned below has been successfully incorporated into Vega and is publicly available, without restriction or fee. With reference to Figure 1: The base map-layer comprises of five Ordnance Survey products. The vector data (MasterMap, ITN, Vectormap Local 2 and Vectormap District 3 ) was loaded into a PostGIS-enabled database via OGR, styled via the open SLD standard and served from Geoserver fronted by GeoWebCache. The processing of change only updates and custom transformation is achieved using a WMFS product called Chimp. GDAL was used to process Ordnance Survey s raster products. Rich map-interaction and drawing functions are courtesy of OpenLayers. The complexities of the user interface and the processing of real-time updates (e.g. vehicle movements) is handled by Google Web Toolkit. The search on the left is again via the Python-scripted Chimp, which has dynamically generated a PostgreSQL gazetteer around data products from several suppliers. Here a simple postcode search has intelligently ranked results from Ordnance Survey s CodePoint and NLPG properties. The yellow triangles denote locations containing known risks, and the blue water drops provide information about pumping from open water sources. Both of these data sets are collected and distributed via WMFS products known as Activity Assistant and Alchemy. Vega allows drill down from any map feature to detailed risk-critical information stored in a PostgreSQL database. The blue polygon shows the Environment Agency s Floodmap product, again loaded into a PostGIS-enabled database via OGR. Going open WMFS has been writing GIS-orientated software since However until 2007 the brigade s GIS technology strategy had been focused largely on the use of proprietary products. The brigade s experience with commercial GIS companies and technology during this time was very positive and productive. WMFS was the recipient of the AGI award for Innovation and best practice (local government) in 2006 for developing a software product based exclusively on proprietary technology. The move to open source GIS was an important strategic decision for WMFS. Partnership working and collaboration is becoming an increasingly large part of fire service business, as indeed is the need to implement efficiency savings. Given such circumstances it became important to investigate ways technology could enable WMFS to reduce costs and collaborate with other organisations. It became evident the use of proprietary technology at the core of WMFS software created a sizeable barrier-to-entry for other organisations and inflated internal costs, and that the adoption of an open approach addressed these issues. Major advances in open source GIS 2 Available free to signatories of the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) 3 Available freely from Ordnance Survey OpenData

4 projects, a renewed commitment from the Cabinet Office and frustrating limitations of existing technology also contributed to the decision to go open. Figure 2: Integrated open source mapping in Activity Assistant The first major product to deliver open source GIS throughout WMFS is known as Activity Assistant (see Figure 2). This software simplifies the burden of data capture throughout the brigade by adopting a holistic approach and establishing a single point-of-entry for all data entry. Open source GIS technology was used to build an intuitive and seamless user experience to capture essential geographic information across the organisation. Activity Assistant was short listed in the 2009 e-government awards in recognition of its innovative ideas and use of open source technology. Benefits It is estimated the combination of Activity Assistant ingenuity, the continual reuse of established technological assets and embracing open source technology now enables the brigade to avoid costs of 470,000 per annum at the same time as delivering many other compelling benefits: Mapping servers, free from licensing costs, have been installed in specialist vehicles. The complexities and costs associated with training and supporting a brigade in using a variety of software solutions is negated. Specific technical limitations of the proprietary GIS technology originally used by WMFS prevented sought-after functionality from being delivered. Such limitations were not present in open source alternatives. Performance and reliability improvements have been achieved by using open source GIS compared with commercially offered alternatives, especially in regard to incident placement. The need to tender for, appraise, finance and customise proprietary software is negated, allowing significant cost savings and administrative efficiencies to be made. This model is wholly aligned with Cabinet Office best practice for software procurement. West Midlands Fire Service technology is as future proof as practicably possible and is continually monitored to ensure compliance with statutory and CLG requirements including

5 changes in data format and supplier arrangements. For example, the dynamic selfgenerating gazetteer solution developed by WMFS has been designed to allow simple migration from National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) to National Address Gazetteer (NAG) using open-standards based technology. An embryonic community is now forming around WMFS open source products, allowing for exciting collaborative ventures and cost sharing. In practice As may be increasingly evident in this paper, WMFS is enthusiastic about its experience with open source GIS technology to-date. Pre-conceptions regarding reliability have conclusively been proved to be unfounded: the Geoserver application delivers high volumes of maps without issue. The deployment of the exclusively open source Vega application into life-critical situations powerfully demonstrates the confidence WMFS has with this technology. The communities, on-line resources and commercial training courses surrounding the major open source products have proved to be excellent. Fears of a lack of customer support incurred from using this technology have been unwarranted. As can be expected, several technical challenges have been encountered while working with open source GIS products. The most notable being the need to load Ordnance Survey GML vector data into a PostGIS database, while retaining lists of styling attributes. With a small amount of perseverance an excellent solution was soon found which could be quickly embedded into existing end-user software (by incorporating the latest GDAL/OGR software in this example). Investigations such as this soon unearth the true depth of open source GIS software, which is inspiring and wholly reassuring. Conclusion For the needs of West Midlands Fire Service and other organisations, the GIS-orientated technology on offer from today s open source products is conclusively fit-for-purpose and helps bring tangible benefits that are wholly attuned to the challenges facing the whole of the public sector. References More open source enthusiasm Cabinet Office guidance on open source Geoserver GeoWebCache PostGIS Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) PostgreSQL OpenLayers Google Web Toolkit