Case Studies

This page lists Case Studies of projects that include Geospatial Open Source components.

=Case Studies=

Valencian Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport
in Spanish (view English translation by Google)

Valencian Regional Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport is under a project of migrating "all" systems to open-source software. As a matter of fact, that was the reason to build gvSIG. All geospatial infrastructure (previously with ESRI) has been moved to open source (gvSIG, PostGIS, MapServer, deegree, geoNetwork opensource).

Hydrographic Confederation of Guadalquivir River, Spain
in Spanish (view English translation by Google)

A migration of a big part of ESRI components to open-source has been made, with use of gvSIG, Geonetwork opensource, MapServer, GeoServer, deegree.

NASA study ROI from Geospatial Open Standards
April 2005

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Geospatial Interoperability Office studied the Return On Investment from using Geospatial Open Standards. The study showed "There is a significant improvement in functionality and mitigation of cost when using open as opposed to proprietary standards. The project that implemented geospatial interoperability standards had a risk-adjusted ROI, or "Savings to Investment" ratio, of 119.0 percent throughout the five-year project life cycle."


 * Summary of Findings
 * Copy of Report (Original URL has suffered link rot)

Desktop Clients

 * Municipality of Trento (Comune di Trento), Italy, migration (2005-today): especially improvements in GRASS GIS are financed: new digitizer tool and better high quality cartographic output.

Army Corps of Engineers Wetlands Regulatory program
''25 September 2007. Powerpoint presentation from FOSS4G Conference''

The Army Corps successfully integrated a Proprietary Oracle Database, ARC SDE and Analysis tools, with Open Source WMS and WFS services, and free viewers like Google Earth and Google Maps.

PostGIS Case Studies
A collection of PostGIS Case Studies collected by Refractions.

=Why write a Case Study?= A case study discusses how a specific situation was identified, which solutions were investigated and selected, and a summary of the results.

Solution architects use relevant case studies to support a solution they are building.

Writing a case study about your project gives others the confidence to follow your footsteps which in turn increases investment in your tools of choice. Publishing your experience gives positive feedback to those involved in your project, reinforcing your success, encouraging colleagues to take on additional challenges, and allowing the project to continue to grow.

We would like to see case studies which cover a range of use cases, especially from organizations with a low risk tolerance. Many organizations approach Open Source in little steps gradually integrating it with existing infrastructure and find targeted small case studies valuable.

=What to write?=

One to three pages is good, with a graphic per page.

The case study should cover:
 * Problem
 * Evaluations
 * Implementation, including integration with other infrastructure
 * Problems faced and how they were overcome
 * Return on Investment
 * Future plans
 * Who else might benefit from your experience

More hints found by googling: How to write a Case Study

=How to publish?= Consider submitting an article to the OSGeo Journal. Here are the basic guidelines for authors.