OSS4gEO: a FOSS4G resources platform initiative
In this talk we introduce a community led initiative part of the wider Open Innovation framework at European Space Agency that works to develop an open, interactive, user intuitive platform for a constantly updated, comprehensive and detailed overview of the dynamic environment of the open source digital infrastructure for geospatial data storage, processing and visualisation systems. OSS4gEO is designed as a repository that functions as an extended metadata catalogue, curated by the community and a tool for metrics computation, visualisation, ecosystem statistical analysis and reporting.
The initial development of the Open Source for Geospatial Software Resources platform builds on previous extensive work started in 2016 that has materialised into a pioneering overview of open source solutions for geospatial, voluntarily updated by the team. Starting in 2023, OSS4gEO has become a part of a wider ESA Earth Observation (EO) Open Innovation initiative to actively support and contribute to the EO and geospatial open source community and it is intended as a seed action to better understand, represent and harvest the geospatial open source ecosystem.
There are 3 main objectives that OSS4gEO aims to achieves:
(1) It aims to offer an informed and as complete as possible overview of the open source for geospatial and EO ecosystem, together with various capabilities of filtering and visualisations, within the platform as well as technical solutions to programmatically access and extract data from the database (APIs) to use in any purpose, including commercial;
(2) It aims to provide guidance through the complexity of the geospatial ecosystem so that one can choose the best solutions, while understanding their sustainability, technical and legal interoperability and all the dependencies levels;
(3) It aims to serve as a community building, a promoting and maintaining platform for new and innovative open source solutions for EO and geospatial, developed within various projects, research centres, small or large companies, universities or through individual initiatives.
