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Open Source Geospatial Software

The use of open source software has nowadays become well-established in our society. In the geospatial domain, the creation and evolution of open source software projects are typically based on a crowdsourcing mechanism counting on communities (project leaders, users, developers, translators, etc.) from all over the world. The importance of open source geospatial software, also termed FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial), has become so high that the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) was created to support and promote its development and widespread adoption. In addition to being chosen for ethical reasons, nowadays open source geospatial software is exploited in science and research, as the transparency of code ensures reproducibility of analyses and results, and in education, as it allows sustainability by avoiding dependence on proprietary vendors. Open source geospatial software represents also an established business model for many companies worldwide. 

Guest Editors
Marco Minghini, European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Italy (marco.minghini@ec.europa.eu)
Amin Mobasheri, Heidelberg University, Germany (a.mobasheri@uni-heidelberg.de) 
Victoria Rautenbach, University of Pretoria, South Africa (victoria.rautenbach@up.ac.za) 
Maria Antonia Brovelli, Politecnico di Milano - DICA, Italy (maria.brovelli@polimi.it)


  1. This paper is the editorial of the Special Issue “Open Source Geospatial Software”, which features 10 published papers. The editorial introduces the concept of openness and, within the geospatial context, decl...

    Authors: Marco Minghini, Amin Mobasheri, Victoria Rautenbach and Maria Antonia Brovelli
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2020 5:1
    Content type: Editorial Published on:

  2. PyWPS 4 is a re–make of the Python implementation of the WPS standard. It is the result of the work of over a dozen individual contributors, during a period of almost three years. One of the goals driving this...

    Authors: Luís Moreira de Sousa, Jorge Mendes de Jesus, Jachym Čepicky, Athanasios Tom Kralidis, David Huard, Carsten Ehbrecht, Suzana Barreto and Jonas Eberle
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2019 4:13
    Content type: Software Published on:

  3. Crowdsourced, open geospatial data such as the data compiled through OpenStreetMap have proven useful in addressing humanitarian, disaster and development needs. However, the existing ways in which volunteers ...

    Authors: Kshitiz Khanal, Nama Raj Budhathoki and Nancy Erbstein
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2019 4:12
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  4. OSM2LULC is a software package developed to automatically convert OpenStreetMap (OSM) data into Land Use Land Cover (LULC) maps using Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) tools. It needs to be...

    Authors: J. Patriarca, C. C. Fonte, J. Estima, J.-P. de Almeida and A. Cardoso
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2019 4:11
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  7. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project collecting geographical data of the entire world. The level of detail of OSM data and its data quality vary much across different regions and domains. In order to...

    Authors: Martin Raifer, Rafael Troilo, Fabian Kowatsch, Michael Auer, Lukas Loos, Sabrina Marx, Katharina Przybill, Sascha Fendrich, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik and Alexander Zipf
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2019 4:3
    Content type: Software Published on:

  8. While there exist international standards for geospatial metadata (ISO 19115), these are rarely used in practice for 3D datasets, and one of the OGC standards for 3D city models, CityGML, does not offer a mech...

    Authors: Anna Labetski, Kavisha Kumar, Hugo Ledoux and Jantien Stoter
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:16
    Content type: Original article Published on:

  9. The Application Domain Extension (ADE) is a built-in mechanism of CityGML to augment its data model with additional concepts required by particular use cases. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview o...

    Authors: Filip Biljecki, Kavisha Kumar and Claus Nagel
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:13
    Content type: Review Published on:

  10. On the web there is a large number of useful geospatial datasets available, exposed via web map services using open standards or open protocols. Just as web search engines enable users to reliably search and f...

    Authors: Paolo Corti, Benjamin Lewis and Athanasios Tom Kralidis
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:8
    Content type: Software Published on: