The ministry of infrastructure and transport in Valencia, one of Spain's autonomous regions, last week began migration of three of its open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications and projects to the European Union's Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR).
The applications, gvSIG Carreteras, gvSIG Sandbox and gsSIG Mobile, are currently hosted on the gvSIG software development site of the ministry in Valencia or on a development website hosted by the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
All three tools are part of the gvSIG suite of GIS tools to manage, analyse and use geographic information. The gvSIG Carreteras for instance, provides tools to manage and analyse road data.
The application, written in Java and published using the GNU General Public License (GPL), helps users to manage cartographic data on roads. The database is designed to be able to handle historic information on roads as well, notes Dolores Arteaga Revert, involved with the gvSIG Carreteras project, in her introduction to the tool.
"In a future version, we hope to add ways to manage data on traffic, and to include road maintenance reports", she writes.
Finals
gvSIG Sandbox is the second project added last week by the administration of Valencia. It is meant to become a common space for different experiments on gvSIG. "It will allow us for example to offer Geography students a place to work on projects for their final exam", says developer Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas.
The Sandbox will allow gvSIG developers and managers to organise such tests and pilots, using a selection of the development tools offered by OSOR.
The third project, gsSIG Mobile, makes the gvSIG tools available on mobile devices. It is the first open source client application written especially for such devices, introduces developer Mario Carrera. "We hope this will be useful to the increasing number of users of mobile devices, who wish to use GIS on different types of devices."
The Java application, published under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Development started two years ago and runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Windows XP operating systems. "Recently, one of the developers began working on support for devices running Linux", adds Gaspar Sanz Salinas.
The three projects are being migrated to the OSOR development website. "Source code and other files should be available soon, but that is a work in progress."
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