PT: 'Authorities catching on to using open source'

Manghi was one of the speakers at the conference on the use of open source software by public administrations (Encontro sobre Software Livre na Administração Pública) (Eslap) that took place in Lisbon this Thursday. Manghi works at Faunalia, a Portuguese IT company specialising on open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS),

In his presentation 'Should governments use open source software?' he said that open data formats and open IT standards are key to any government plans on open this type of software. "If these are truly open, open source software and proprietary solution can coexist."

"Open source and open standards are tools accepted by many professionals, such as engineers, geographers, biologists, librarians and IT workers" Manghi notes. The Portuguese public administrations, he says, still have a long road ahead. "Especially in smaller public administrations it takes time for the advantages to become clear. There, simply using Firefox will make your colleagues think you are a geek. These are the same people that do not realise that OpenOffice does 99 percent of what they use Microsoft Office for."

GIS-database

The conference opening address of the conference was by the French engineer Olivier Dorie from the Institute Geographic National (IGN). He talked about the modernisation of the French topographic database, using the open source database management system Postgresql and Postgis, which adds support for geographic objects to this database system.

IGN's migration from various database systems for geographic information to a single system started in 2002. After several tests, including proprietary databases such as Oracle and DB2, the institute decided on the open source system. It was first used in 2005. The data on Paris and its surroundings were loaded into the system in the spring of 2006 and today, all the data on the entire country is on the server. That means a 160 million objects, in 118 Gbyte."

This combination of Postgresql and Postgis, is also used in Portugal.  Artur Seara, cartographic engineer at the Portuguese Geographic Institute (IGP) explained how this system is used for the country's vector topographic map, on a 1:10,000 scale. Another example is the GIS system developed by the Portuguese municipality of Albufeira.

IGP's software engineer Henrique Silva discussed his work on his open source GIS application MIG Editor, a tool to handle GIS metadata. "The most recent version, 2.2 released in February 2008, has been downloaded about a thousand times last year."

The Eslap conference was organised by the Portuguese Geographic Institute and the civil engineering laboratory. According to Paulo Martins, of the organisers, all presentation will be available on the conference website in the next few days.

More information:

Eslap website