Scholarly record

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR GEOPORTALS CREATION

Izabela Basista

Abstract

Geoportals has become more significant and more common communication platform, used between institutions, companies and clients. The most important feature of mapping portals is sharing of spatial data to a wide audience quickly and easily. However, despite of all benefits accrued through their use, the popularity of geoportals is still too small. Probably the reason for that is the conviction of the high cost of implementation, or the lack of knowledge about the possibilities of presenting spatial data in this form. Free and open source (FOS) software is developing rapidly, particularly for the construction of mapping portals. It can provide a feature-complete alternative to a proprietary software in most system designs. FOS software is adaptable to user?s needs, without restrictions and fees, but customization can be difficult to achieve for users (lack of programming knowledge) or it can cost a lot (salary for a programmer). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the FOS software for the construction of geoportals and check whether the programming knowledge is necessary to build a functional geoportal. The author focuses on three applications: deegree3, geoserver, and MapGuide Open Source Platform. Each of them was tested and described in terms of ease of installation, commissioning and configuration of the individual components of the system. Availability and clarity of the user?s manual and tutorials were checked. In the first part of the paper the aim, theory and detailed assumptions about the study are presented. Further the typical architecture of geoportals is described. The next section presents selected applications in terms of their practical use to create geoportals. The final part of the paper presents the conclusions of the researches carried out.

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