Conference Paper

GEOIDEA.ro stands for Geodata Openness Initiative for Development and Economic Advancement in Romania. It is a research project and a collaboration between the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation (IKG) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and the Groundwater Engineering Research Center (CCIAS) at the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania. It aims at improving the scientific basis for open geodata model adoption in Romania. Led by the belief that publishing government geodata in Romania over the Internet, under an open license and in a reusable format can strengthen citizen engagement and yield new innovative businesses, we are building a collaboration with six selected governmental geodata producers in order to define the best methodology and tools to release geodata. The legislative context is favorable. In 2011, Romania signed the Open Government Partnership and in 2012 presented its National Action Plan. The Directive 2003/98/EC also known as the Public Sector Information Re-use Directive, has been revised in 2013, enforcing clearer and stronger actions for the release of public data. With respect to this legal framework, a collaboration agreement has been signed between the GEOIDEA.RO project and the governmental department responsible for the OGP implementation in Romania.

Important research efforts are dedicated to the creation of a pilot web geoportal to host relevant samples of geodata by taking into account research issues such as data harmonisation, user involvement and collaboration, user friendly navigation, data quality and quality markers visualisation. The geoportal architecture is based on state-of-the art, standard compliant, open source solutions. The main functionalities of the geoportal are provided by the GeoVITe framework, which is built on top of QGIS Server, a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, the GDAL/OGR librariy and the Carto.net framework. Specific stand alone demos, based on HTML5/CSS3 compliant web clients like OpenLayers3 and Leaflet, are under development.

The presentation, focusing on the GEOIDEA.RO project, will emphasize the possibilities of using FOSS to build tools and platforms for the publication and easy access to open geodata while involving public bodies and civil society in the process.