Open Geospatial Software and Data: A Review of the Current State and A Perspective into the Future All over the world, organizations are increasingly considering the adoption of open source software and open data. In the geospatial domain, this is no different, and the last few decades have seen significant advances in this regard. We review the current state of open source geospatial software, focusing on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) software ecosystem and its communities, as well as three kinds of open geospatial data (collaboratively contributed, authoritative and scientific). The current state confirms that openness has changed the way in which geospatial data are collected, processed, analyzed, and visualized. A perspective on future developments, informed by responses from professionals in key organizations in the global geospatial community, suggests that open source geospatial software and open geospatial data are likely to have an even more profound impact in the future.

Geospatial Computing Collaborations Geospatial algorithm development is a complex collaborative process involving remote sensing scientists with different expertise needing to cooperate on massive and diverse datasets. These datasets can range from satellite imagery to citizen scientist observations, and include both publicly available and proprietary resources. The traditional mode of work is for each participant to have their own desktop machine with large attached storage and to essentially work in a silo. This approach, however, inhibits effective collaboration because individuals must navigate a complex system setup and use adhoc techniques such as sharing a portable hard drive to coproduce data products. The limitation of running on a desktop computer also restricts the scale of questions that can be asked due to excessively long processing times, sometimes spanning several weeks. Another consequence of this process is the lack of data conformance standards, that tend to emerge from shared needs when communities collaborate to advance application frameworks.In this paper, we investigate the social and collaborative aspects of cloud architectures to support geospatial computing. These new architectures provide emergent modes of collaboration. We provide a concrete case study of a typical geospatial collaboration, and detail the build of a collaborative platform as we evolve it from a silo, to a research cluster, and finally to a public cloud. The architectures are evaluated in terms of costs and benefits from systems and software engineering perspectives.