OpenWebGISPresented by: Rob Fitzgerald

Spring 2017

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http://opengis.dlinkddns.com/gis/opengis_eng.html

Project Status

! Open Source, Browser-Based GIS Utility

! GitHub Repo: https://github.com/openwebgisystem/OpenWebGIS

! Also: https://github.com/openwebgisystem/OpenWebGIS2 (in development)

! GitHub project for OpenWebGIS 1 began October 2015

! Currently in development

! News at http://openwebgisystem.blogspot.com/

! latest post Dec 20 2016

! Latest modification to GitHub 1 month ago

! Open Source?

! “Feels” like a late alpha product

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Overview

! OpenWebGIS is a fully browser-based product, performing all calculations in your browser’s memory space

! Loads from a long list of file types

! Provides some calculations and some transformations on spatial layers

! No documentation (!)

! Suggests it is designed to integrate with a server backend for storing spatial data in PostGIS (unable to verify)

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Overview

! Support for Shapefile and some additional formats via the Edit menu

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Some requirements of the current implementation“Local” version also requires giving your browser file system access (NO WAY DUDE!)

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Overview

Features

! Built-in calculations and transformations

! transformations produce a new layer

! “Interpolate” menu includes a heat map

! Results for calculations appear in popup windows

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Loading data layer in OpenWebGISData from https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/shopping-centers - a list of shopping centers in Fairfax County, VA. Loaded via .csv and .json (http://geojson.org/).

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Features

Heatmap of dataA few mouse clicks from the previous slide and a heat map was generated based on the data column that was selected.

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Features

Features

! Interesting list of add-on databases with built-in menus to quickly produce visualizations of known large data sets

! Localized in English, Russian, and French language interfaces

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Issues

! Some operations, such as hotspot transformation and project export, typically results in a “browser not responding” warning on MacBook Pro quad core i7 2.5GHz with 16GB ram, and can take minutes to render

! No spinners/alerts to notify that processing is occurring or is completed

! No explanation for some parameters to features

! Entirely mouse-operated workflow

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Issues

! Many awkward “classic” web interfaces

! Drop menus with a hundred elements

! Popup windows must be activated in the browser

! Sparse and unclear/undocumented/unlabelled user interface elements

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Issues

! The Javascript code base is mostly written directly into the html file in a <script> tag (unclear project structure / code modularity)

! This project does not follow safe JS coding practices, has no tests, no description of available work, and has no comments

! The project has one contributor on GitHub, and it will likely stay that way - not approached as an open-source project, but as a pet project

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Conclusion

! OpenWebGIS is an open-source alternative to QGIS, built in JavaScript

! This design choice may help future-proof it in ways that QGIS does not have (compiled vs interpreted)

! It does not have the support of an open source community (pretty necessary to survive as a free tool)

! Real hard data size limit (browser memory allocation) and computation limits (unmanaged worker processing prone to performance issues)

! Not suitable for truly large data sets, and difficult to use

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