Case Studies

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

Case Studies

Complete Infrastructure

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.

ROI from Geospatial Open Standards, study by NASA

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)

Predicted ROI for Australian Government to investment in a SDI

October 2007

ACIL Tasman study reports a 10 to 20 times ROI should the Australian government invest in a Spatial Data Infrastructure.

• Article
• Media Release

Desktop Clients

Review of Open Source Desktop Clients

April 2008 http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/

A comprehensive feature by feature comparison of all the Open Source 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.

Email threads discussing merits and disadvantages of OSGeo Desktop

18 April 2008: Geowanking: ArcView 3.1 replacement

"[Oxford Archaeology] are looking at gvsig and qgis as the main options [for ArcGIS], gvsig because it can use cad data, and qgis because we like the grass integration and it's slightly more user-friendly for english speakers (the translated version of gvsig still has some spanish bits in it). With slight changes to our work-flows, we are finding that these two packages will do almost everything we need a gis to do, with the exception of producing high-quality illustrations. To achieve this we are currently looking at export to svg or postscript for final editing in inkscape, but that's a work in progress."

24 April 2008: OSGeo-Discuss: Can I do the same GIS tasks with OS (as with ESRI)?

Numerous opinions for and against using OSGeo including:

uDig Case Studies

Collection of uDig case studies put together by Refractions.

Web Services

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.

Databases

PostGIS Case Studies

A collection of PostGIS Case Studies collected by Refractions.

Open Source Policies

These documents provide compelling reasons for selecting Open Source and Open Standards.

Australia

April 2005, [Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies]

It can offer original solutions to problems not addressed by proprietary software and it has the potential to lead to significant savings in Government expenditure on information and communications technology (ICT).

New Zealand

13 March 2008, [Ministry of Justice Open Source Strategy Paper]

Proposes when Open Source should be used over Proprietary software, and concludes that Open Source better than Proprietary, all other things being equal.

US Navy

April 2006, [US Navy Open Technology Development Roadmap Plan].

Describes how the US Navy will migrate to Open Technology Development when purchasing and building software.

Open Technology Development combines salient advances in the following areas:
* Open Standards and Interfaces
* Open Source Software and Designs
* Collaborative/Distributive culture and the and online support tools
* Technological Agility

Also, a much shorter news article on the same topic from March 2008. [The Navy will acquire only systems based on open technologies and standards].

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 in 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, 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.