Field Data Collecting, Processing and Sharing: Using web Service Technologies

Niroshan Bandara*, Venkatesh Raghavan*, Daisuke Yoshida*, Gerald Fenoy** *Osaka City University, Japan

**GeoLabs sarl, France

INTRODUCTIONCollecting, Distributing and Analyzing field data is a crucial part in any geospatial study. Field data collection tools and methods have been developed significantly due to the advancement of technologies such as Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) and development of smartphones. Accurate field data collection is also a necessary task for broad spatial data analysis and proper decision making. Development of Web technologies led to share the data and information effectively. This study tries to develop a framework based on the Geospatial Semantic Web technologies for disseminating and processing field data. Experimental results from an implemented prototype show that the proposed framework allows to visualize and process the field data in any context. The system of this study is capable of distributing and processing field data using web application. Moreover, the study demonstrates the importance and the capabilities of web services for spatial data gathering and processing. The system has been developed based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages such as ZOO-Project, Open Data Kit, etc. It enables user to further improve or deploy the system for variety of studies.

COMPONENTSMain components of the project can be categorized as Mobile data collection applications and GIS applications concerning Desktop and Web.

1 2 3

2. QGISQGIS is a user friendly Open Source GIS software package which can import layesr locally and online from a server as a service such as WFS, WMS. And QGIS has capabilities to manipulate various types of spatial data formats such as KML, SVG, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, PostGIS, SpatiaLite, MSSQL, etc.

1. ZOO-ProjectZOO-Project is an Open Source Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation project that enables existing open source libraries to interact through its WPS framework. It consists with three components as describe below;

ARCHITECTUREUsers can exploit their mobile devices to record field data using ODK suite. The data will be sent to ODK Aggregate, which is running on an Apache Tomcat server backed with a PostgreSQL database. Then the data is published through the GeoServer. Finally data can be visualized using web viewer or it can be processed by ZOO-Project as WPS or QGIS as desktop client.

    

WPS

 

 

 

 

XLS Forms Convert

Database

 

 

WMS

  

WFS

ODK COLLECT

Desktop GIS

Web viewer

Web GIS application

Client side Server side

AGGREGATE

DATA VISUALIZATION

Data Visualization; (a) View submission; (b) Web viewer (a) (b)

DATA COLLECTIONData are collected by using ODK collect. The application let the user to insert the GPS location automatically. And other data such as multimedia and text/numbers can be entered manually.

ODK Collect; (a) Survey forms; (b) GPS information; (c) Input Images; (d) Additional data inputs

(a) (b) (c) (d)

As web processing Data imports to QGIS and process ; (a) Import from PosrgreSQL database; (b) Import as WFS (c) Analyse in QGIS

Web processing interface; (a) Data points; (b) Result after processing

As desktop client DATA PROCESS

(a) (b) (c)

(a) (b)

CONCLUSIONAdvancement of Mobile phone and Web technologies has been able to simplify the spatial analysis and field data collection. Barriers and gaps in the geospatial science can be truly addressed by developing such systems.

ZOO service

ZOO API

ZOO Kernel

• Code – C, Python, java, Perl, JavaScript• .zcfg – zoo configuration file

• JS script – for WPS chaining • Classes – zoo request, zoo process, etc

WPS Engine

OpenLayers | UDIG | Your Client

WPS Client

3. Open Data Kit ODK consists of three modules as shown below:

Aggregate

ODK Build is used to create and design the field survey forms.

ODK Aggregate is server-side module which provides blank forms to ODK collect and work as a data repository.

ODK collect is the client-side module and it is an app which can be installed on the Android mobiles.

FOSS4G 2016 NARA.KANSAI