FOSS4G North America Conference 2013 Preliminary Program
FOSS4G North America Conference 2013 Preliminary Program
FOSS4G North America Conference 2013 Preliminary Program
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An Open Source Framework for Volunteer Field Data Collection<br />
S. Andrew Sheppard, University of Minnesota & Houston Engineering, Inc<br />
As budgets tighten and geographic and environmental data procurement becomes difficult,<br />
organizations are looking to alternative sources of information to help achieve their objectives.<br />
Fortunately, the widespread availability of GPSenabled internetconnected devices (e.g.<br />
smartphones) makes it feasible to collect locationdependent data from volunteers at a relative<br />
fraction of the cost. However, there are still two key challenges:<br />
There is a need to validate the *quality of data* contributed by volunteers a task that is<br />
necessarily domainspecific.<br />
There is a need for *sustainable software* platforms that can be reused between small<br />
projects in the face of limited and intermittent funding.<br />
Navigating these two challenges can lead to a difficult tradeoff. Generalized ""form builder""<br />
platforms may be reusable, but can lead to vendor lockin and don’t provide the flexibility needed<br />
to encode domainspecific QA workflows. On the other hand, custom software is inherently<br />
more expensive to maintain.<br />
To address this tradeoff, we assembled a number of modules that address common app<br />
deployment tasks without enforcing any particular workflow or data model. Our opensource<br />
framework builds upon and extends a number of stateoftheart platforms, including<br />
(Geo)Django, jQuery Mobile, RequireJS, d3, and Leaflet. We supplemented these with our own<br />
modules that facilitate:<br />
creating robust offlinecapable HTML5 apps<br />
publishing domainspecific REST services to integrate the apps with GIS databases<br />
generating text and binary geographic data formats to share the collected data between<br />
organizations.<br />
The framework serves as a distillation of our experience building inspection apps for local<br />
government agencies, and a suite of applications allowing citizen scientists to help monitor water<br />
quality, precipitation, and flooding in their area. This talk will provide a brief overview of the<br />
framework and underlying technologies, as well as some initial lessons learned from our<br />
deployment of the framework for these projectspecific workflows.<br />
Building Mobile Mapping Applications with Enyo JS<br />
Travis Webb and Jesse Griffis, NBT Solutions<br />
We are five years into the ongoing mobile computing revolution, and formidable software<br />
challenges stubbornly remain for both managers and developers as we work to adapt web<br />
applications and mapping tools to this new mobile paradigm. The diversity of the mobile device<br />
landscape has reincarnated old problems in new and complex ways, which our current<br />
established set of tools is illequipped to effectively and correctly solve. While many of our<br />
current serverside GIS technology solutions can continue to adequately support the usual crop<br />
of web mapping use cases, many of our clientside technologies languish conspicuously when<br />
implemented on mobile devices. Application support for the major mobile platforms such as
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