FOSS4G North America Conference 2013 Preliminary Program

The Nexus Research Group at the University of Minnesota focuses on understanding the
intersections of transportation and land use. In this presentation, we will examine case studies of
how open­source geospatial software has fit into specific research projects. We will discuss
why and how open­source software was chosen, how it strengthened our research, what areas
we see as most important for development, and offer suggestions for increasing the use of
open­source geospatial software in transportation and land use research. Over the past two
years, we have begun incorporating open­source geospatial data and analysis tools into a
research workflow that had been dominated by commercial packages. Most significantly, we
implemented an instance of OpenTripPlanner Analyst for calculation of transit travel time
matrices, and deployed QGIS and PostGIS for data manipulation and analysis. The project
achieved a completely open research workflow, though this brought both benefits and
challenges. Strengths of open­source software in this research context include cutting­edge
transit analysis tools, efficient parallel processing of large data sets, and default creation of open
data formats. We hope that our experience will encourage research users to adopt open­source
geospatial research tools, and inspire developers to target enhancements that can specifically
benefit research users.
Lightning Talks (5min)
To be announced
Panel Discussions
To be announced