The Tuscan region's environmental protection organisation, ARPAT, prefers to use open source, says Cinzia Licciardello, one of the IT engineers at the agency. "If an organisation has the internal skills available, it is better off with this type of software solution."
It allows ARPAT, the Agenzia regionale per la protezione ambientale della Toscana, to develop solutions that neatly fit the organisation, Licciardello said at the Inspire Conference 2013, taking place in Firenze, last month.
The agency has been moving toward open source since 2007, following an internal test of several of the available open source solutions related to geographic information systems. "Openness, standardization, interoperability and affordability are now our key principles."
Open layers
The agency for instance uses the open source Javasript library Openlayers, used by ARPAT to build a system to monitor and manage soil contaminations, combining aerial photographs, cartographic maps and cadastral data. It is planning to combine the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library and the Quantum GIS mapserver to make internal geodata publicly available.
In addition to infrastructure and server management, ARPAT based its organisation's website on the open source Plone CMS. Other examples include the Inspire pages - for geodata viewing and downloading - and other services, like the 'Balneazione' pages which allow visitors to check data on the quality of bathing water. ARPAT also uses open source for its 'Circom' and 'Sisbon' CMS for online data collection of Radio TV/cellphone antennas and contaminated soils. And recently, it developed a mobile app allowing realtime access to its environmental data.
Key combination
ARPAT's preference for open source does not imply it is abandoning proprietary software, the agency writes in a newsletter published in 2006. "But it should be noted that if the adoption of a solution is allowed with minimal costs, it triggers a mechanism that leads to greater agility in trying to implement, to experiment and design new information services."
Licciardello: "Key to integrate proprietary and open source, is our layered software architecture, and the use of open source."