IT: Open source GIS Tuscany for government, libraries and health care

The software allows users to view a map to access public available information. The system is also being used by museums, libraries, courts of law and by health care organisations in the region.

In fact, any organisation can use Tuscany's system to publish their own combination of geo-referenced databases and maps, says Viviana Cossi, one of the developers, based in the city of Firenze.

The Tuscany regional administration started working on the development of Sagabd (Sistema di Accesso Georeferenziato alle Banche Dati, geo-referential access to data banks) in 2001, says Cossi.

"The region started working on an application based on Grass GIS, one of the oldest open source GIS applications available. We used it to read and process our sets of geographic data."

The Tuscany region set-up offers a server to generate maps, which can be accessed by clients using Javascript and a web browser.

"Different needs in our administration required us to develop a flexible system. It needs, for instance, to support the creation of dynamic or pre-processed maps, where the graphic attributes can be processed by either the client or the  server."

Over the years the Tuscany developers added support for other data formats, which made their application more and more independent of Grass, she says. "But we owe to it the start of our application."

According to Cossi, the Tuscany regional administration decided to publish Sagabd as open source for two reasons. "Making it available as open source makes it easy to incorporate existing code into a project", she says. Secondly, the region as a matter of principle has a policy to select open source software wherever possible.

Sagabd is published using the GPL open source licence. "Most of the software we use is published with that licence."

The region hopes that Sagabd will become used and redistributed by other administrations.

More information:

Sagabd case study at e-Practice

Sagabd web site

Grass GIS