Oskari Incubation Application

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1. Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.

  • Owner: Oskari Network
  • Current coordinator of Oskari Network: National Land Survey of Finland, Jani Kylmäaho (jani.kylmaaho@nls.fi)

2. Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

In 2014 the development of Oskari platform was organised as an open network consisting today of 32 organisations from public and private sectors. Here are the main project owners of Oskari:

  • City of Helsinki, Outi Hermans (outi.hermans@hel.fi)
  • City of Tampere, Marko Kauppi (marko.kauppi@tampere.fi)
  • Dimenteq Ltd, Jan Lindbom (jan.lindbom@dimenteq.fi)
  • Finnish Transport Agency, Matti Pesu (matti.pesu@liikennevirasto.fi)
  • Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority, (sirpa.joukainen@hsy.fi)
  • National Board of Antiquities, Miikka Haimila (miikka.haimila@nba.fi)
  • National Land Survey of Finland, Jaakko Viitala (jaakko.viitala@nls.fi)
  • Population Register Centre, Marko Latvanen (marko.latvanen@valtionkonttori.fi)
  • Regional Council of Southwest Finland, Kaisa Savola (kaisa.savola@varsinais-suomi.fi)
  • Statistics Finland, Rina Tammisto (rina.tammisto@stat.fi)

3. Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers

TBA

4. Please describe your Project.

Oskari is an open source service platform for browsing, sharing and analysing geographic information from distributed data sources (e.g. national spatial data infrastructures). Furthermore it is a platform for publishing embedded maps on other websites.

Oskari was initially released as an open source project in 2011 by the National Land Survey of Finland. Now it is in use in several Finnish and European public and private sector instances. The development of Oskari began in 2009 when the National Land Survey of Finland (NLS FI) started to build a national geoportal to support the implementation of the INSPIRE directive. Since a traditional geoportal can't fulfil all user needs, NLS FI decided to create an open source service platform in order to support and encourage a wide use of the national spatial data infrastructure (SDI) as a part of e-Government services.

Oskaris main features are the ability to showcase OGC and INSPIRE compatible interfaces, offer embedded maps, add your own datasets, analyse datasets and combine statistical information in order to create thematic map layers. Embedded maps can be integrated easily into other websites and eGovernment services and interactively controlled using the remote procedure call (RPC) interface.

Oskari consists of two main entities: frontend (JavaScript-based user interface) and backend (Java servlet and other server-side components). The key idea is to reuse existing open source components and technologies and package them in a way, that the platform is extendable and configurable. This has made it possible to develop Oskari and add new features in collaboration with multiple organizations: there are guidelines how to extend the functionality in a coordinated manner. For example, a new type of data source for place name / address search can be added just by adding a plugin, not having to redevelop the whole search functionality.

Oskari user interface is implemented as a collection of reusable bundles. Bundles are used as uniform containers to ship and share new functionality to the application setups. Additions to existing functionality are implemented as Plugins shipped within the bundles. Server-side functionality of the platform is implemented as a Java servlet, which can also be extended to handle new functionality.

The platform is flexible: functionality can be added both to the user interface and the server, and the application libraries can be changed as new versions or more advanced implementations become available. The platform is designed to run under a servlet container such as Jetty or Tomcat, so it should run in environments for which all the dependencies are available.

Oskari is already reused across borders. The national mapping agencies in Europe have launched together a showcase application as a part of the European Location Framework (ELF) project and the Arctic Council has published the Arctic SDI Geoportal in collaboration with the member countries. In 2016 Iceland released the national geoportal powered by Oskari. In addition, Oskari is reused by administration at all levels in Finland.

5. Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

We need the support and visibility of OSGeo organisation in order to grow and make Oskari known world wide. We also need more users and contributors and OSGeo is a sign of stability and trust in the open source community. The aim is also to be part of OSGeo Live package and ease the setting up of Oskari package.

6. What type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

Oskari can be used as a standalone web-application, but the client and server are in separate repositories and they can be used independently. There is also a library-component as part of the project for controlling the embedded maps.

7. Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

Oskari uses standard Open Source components such as OpenLayers, GeoTools, GeoServer, PostgreSQL, Jackson and jQuery. The developed Open Source code stitches these applications together and makes it possible to extend the functionality of the platform in a coordinated manner.

8. Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

Oskari supports ESRI’s ArcGIS rest API.

9. Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

From the beginning the source code has been available by the dual open licences (MIT and EUPL).

10. Is there already a beta or official release?

Master branch has stable production ready code that is in use for example at [​Demo.oskari.org] (http://demo.oskari.org/) and ​[Paikkatietoikkuna.fi] (http://www.paikkatietoikkuna.fi/web/fi/kartta). Current version of Oskari is 1.40.0.

11. What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

Government

12. Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, ect.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?

Oskari supports OGC and the European INSPIRE directive compatible APIs. It can act as a geoportal showcasing e.g. CSW, WMS, WMS-T, WMTS, WFS, WFS-T interfaces. More supported standards are coming and described in the roadmap.

The software has not been certified to any standards. WMS-client Cite test could be applied if necessary.

13. Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

The code is free and open source. Current owner of the Oskari.org is Oskari Network.

14. How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

There are around 18 active contributors for code, 1 main architect for the project.

15. How many people have commit access to the source code respository?

[Frontend] (https://github.com/nls-oskari/oskari) -> 8 [Server] (https://github.com/nls-oskari/oskari-server) -> 7 [Support site] (https://github.com/nls-oskari/oskari.org) -> 11

16. Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

10 active project owners. 32 organisations are involved in Oskari Network in different ways. There are 188 members in Oskari communication channel Slack. Thousands of users through different projects.

17. What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc. )?

Government and commercial, end users are normally citizens or public sector organization.

18. If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?

At least the mailing list could be hosted by OSGeo infrastructure. Oskari will strive to be part of the OSGeo Live release. We are confident that Oskari is suitable as a OSGeo project, since Oskari is utilizing major OSGeo member projects, such as OpenLayers and GeoTools.

19. Does the project include an automated build and test?

The server-component of the project is built with Maven that produces Java WAR-files which can be deployed to Java-based application servers. Maven runs JUnit tests when compiling the code. The server code is compiled as nightly snapshots and updated to [Maven repository] (http://oskari.org/nexus).

The frontend has Grunt-based build-scripts examples, but as the application is modular, a one-size-fits-all solution cannot be provided. The frontend is currently tested internally with Selenium scripts that are run in SauceLabs, but the tests are not open sourced at the moment.

Both server and frontend code is analyzed with SonarQube nightly with results visible in [Demo Oskari](http://demo.oskari.org/sonar/).

20. What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)

The user interface is JavaScript, the oskari-server is built on Java.

21. What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

English and Finnish.

22. What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?

At the moment at least 17 project owners are hosting Oskari platform instances (some of them multiple instances for different purposes). We hope that the usage will increase in hundreds in the future.

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