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.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Open Source, Standards, Remote Sensing at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

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)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Anon Y. Mouse on 2009-04-02 20:03 #2: LoveGIS on 2009-04-03 14:51
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry