Thursday, April 2. 2009

Maine Uses Open Source and Open Standards to Deliver Imagery

Government Technology reprinted an article by Mike Smith of the Maine Office of Information technology, describing how the Maine Office of GIS (MEGIS),with the Maine Library of Geographic Information (GeoLibrary), has put together a tool using mostly open source software to prepare and deliver imagery of the state via a WMS. Among the tools: GDAL, Python, and MapServer. The goal is make any publicly available imagery available in a standard way for use in the many software clients via a webpage.

With only two municipal datasets online, the site already gets 2000-3000 hits per day. And, teh cost saving?

Earlier attempts at providing web imagery services were costing the state $110,000 per year, prohibiting the inclusion of municipal data. Using WMS and open-source software, that cost is slashed to $6,000 per year.

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Oh...let me guess. Were they trying to use an Image Server product to serve their data?

C'mon, people. You're paying for these things with your taxpayers' money. And by the way, if you save (what was it, 94% over the previous method?) license fees you can spend that coin on the O&M costs to staff the downstream care and feeding. And maybe even on some other services, too.

When will government learn? Freeware isn't free, but if you've already got reasonably talented people (and of course you do, because you've been dorking around with that cranky 'other stuff' from the Flat Earth Society for years) the staffing cost to program and maintain the freeware is already baked.

Good job, Mainiacs. Show them people from Away how it's done.

#1 Anon Y. Mouse on 2009-04-02 20:03 (Reply)

Good job to those who did it.Save Taxpayers money and same time provide them the best ROI.

I am sure some GIS SERVER product company would have tried to sell a software and get yearly fee as well.

Things like these must be posted more often and be appreciated. KUDOS!!!

#2 LoveGIS on 2009-04-03 14:51 (Reply)

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