Köbben, B.

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University of Twente Research Information

From the Editor...by Barend KöbbenWelcome to this issue ofthe OSGeo Journal, com-prising five research papersselected from the submis-sions to the Academic Trackof FOSS4G 2014, whichtook place in Portland (Ore-gon, USA), from 8 to 13September 2014.FOSS4G, the global con-ference for Open SourceGeospatial Software, is notan academic conference.The core audience has always been the people whomake up the open source communities: The peoplethat develop, create and craft the open source geo-spatial software. The actual applications are the gluewhich binds the community together; the aim ofthe FOSS4G community is to enable and enfranchiseanyone to harness the power of geo-spatial software,regardless of their economic status. To acknowl-edge this, and to not create an isolated, exclusive,part of the conference, we scheduled presentationsof the papers clustered with other, non-academic,papers based on subject matter. By this, we hopeto have generated attention for academic input inthe community and to cross-pollenate with industry,developers and users.This year, the Academic Track submissions werea bit disappointing in number, but fortunately not inquality. At the conference itself the AT track chairshad fruitful discussions with the authors. This sys-tem of having an extra iteration based on the presen-tation and personal contact proved to be very useful.What we finally ended up with was a selection of tenpapers, out of which the reviewing team consideredthree candidates fitting contributions for the WileyJournal “Transactions in GIS”. Another seven wereoffered publication in the OSGEO Journal and five ofthese have ended up in this issue.Phillip Davis reports on the extensive work doneto create a new innovative geospatial curriculumbuilt around open source software, to increase boththe quantity and quality of geospatial workers. Al-though funded and founded in the USA, the wholeFOSS4G community benefits from this work. Specif-ically the curriculum that was developed, and isshared under a Creative Commons license, is awelcome source of teaching material for educatorsworldwide.In their paper on UrbanSim2, Fletcher Foti andPaul Wadell describe an open source software plat-form for agent-based geospatial simulation, focusingon the spatial dynamics of urban development. Thisscientific tool library is an excellent case study forthe power of combining open source work in the sci-entific programming community, to avoid having tobuild customized solutions in each domain.Another example of the use of FOSS4G in sci-entific work is the paper of Jeffery Cavner et al.They have added phylogenetic capabilities (for thedescription of ecological processes, calculating andmapping biodiversity indices and such), to severalopen source platforms: As a QGIS plugin, and asweb services, in the form of WPS algorithms.Web Processing Services (WPS) are also the sub-ject of the work of Ebrahim Poorazizi and AndrewHunter, who report on an extensive analysis of fiveWPS servers (52◦ North, Deegree, GeoServer, Py-WPS, and Zoo). They performed a quantitative anal-ysis of the performance, as well as qualitative metricssuch as software architecture, perceived ease of use,flexibility of deployment, and quality of documenta-tion.Finally, the paper on “GRASS GIS, Star Trek andold Video Tape” is a reflection of one of the highlighttalks of the conference. The restored video of WilliamShatner explaining the virtues of GRASS version 2.0in 1987 caused quite a stir, and in his paper PeterLöwe explains the importance of this video and thepreservation process.I’d like thank my fellow AT chair, Franz-JosefBehr, and the reviewers (listed on the imprint page atthe end of this issue) for making the Academic Trackand this journal issue possible.Barend Köbben, ITC–University of TwenteFOSS4G2014 Proceedings Editor OSGeo Journalhttp: // wiki. osgeo. org/ wiki/ BarendKobbenb.j.kobben@utwente.nlOSGEO Journal Volume 14 Page 1 of 48

From the editor... Selected papers from FOSS4G 2014

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https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/276909800/OSGeoJournal_vol14_editorial.pdf

From the editor... Selected papers from FOSS4G 2014

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