Kids GIS Portal

Project Mission

The mission is to provide an intuitive environmental geospatial portal for kids of all ages, based on open source software, open exchange formats and industry standard data models such as ArcHydro and the Pacific Northwest Hydro framework.

Project Concept

Kid’s GIS Open Source Environmental Portal is an exciting new project under development by GIS professionals from around the State of Oregon. By encouraging collaboration among engineers, surveyors, scientists, faculty and students the project team aims to provide a productive and harmonious web-based learning environment for kids. Based on powerful GIS tools and standardized environmental data structures, the Kid’s GIS portal is being designed to engage kids and help develop interests in math and earth sciences.

Important measures of the program’s success include: Free access (developed using non-proprietary software and data structures) Fun and intuitive interface (much like Google Earth) Ability to easily share information between schools, universities and public organizations Ability to use the application on any computer Prolific use

The team aims to provide an enduring program to educate and enable future generations to identify, monitor, preserve and restore natural habitat along surface waterways. If successful, core project components will support environmental and public education needs well beyond the needs considered in the initial project design.

See Kids GIS web page for more information.

Core Team

• Allan Branscomb, University of Oregon
• Andy Morsell, Spatial Integrators Inc.
• Brandt Melick, City of Springfield
• Cy Smith, Oregon Dept. Administrative Services
• Frank Warmerdam, Open Source GeoSpatial Foundation
• Rick Ellis, Cadapult Software Inc.
• Robert Harmon, Oregon Water Resource Dept.

Relationship to OSGeo

At this time this project is independent, and not directly affiliated with OSGeo. However, it is closely aligned with several goals of OSGeo, and so OSGeo is contemplating providing hosting an initial development and deployment server (on Telascience hardware).

System Status

Prototype is operational. Please see: Kids GIS Prototype Portal

The telascience blade in use is 198.202.74.217, a Fedora Core 4 linux system.

Installed Packages (/usr/local):

• PROJ 4.5.0
• OSSIM (CVS?)
• FDO 3.1.0
• MapGuide 1.0.1
• PostgeSQL 8.0.8 (/usr)
• PostGIS 1.1.5 (with proj, but not geos support)

Information on restarting the server in case of problems can be found at:

 http://trac.osgeo.org/kidsgis/wiki/restartServer