An Open Geospatial Interactive Tool – a Community Mapping Case

Adapting and developing the OGITO application for new case studies

The Open Geospatial Interactive Tool (OGITO) is a open source application that supports collaborative spatial planning processes with a map table. OGITO was orginally developed by the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente (ITC) for use in different community mapping projects, for example noise mapping in Bochum (Germany). Two new case studies with users from the cities Zwolle (the Netherlands) and Herne (Germany) examine how interactive map applications, in particular map tables, can be used by people with physical or mental disabilities. Feedback from user groups will be used to explore how to improve the accessibility of interactive mapping applications.

OGITO’s web-based frontend builds upon the web application framework Angular and the open source mapping library OpenLayers. The backend uses a QGIS Server to make layers of spatial data that are defined and styled in a local QGIS project accessible for the frontend via OGC web services. PostGIS stores the spatial data that is integrated in the QGIS project.

52°North supports ITC in adapting the existing mapping application for the two new case studies. This includes, on the one hand, the integration of case study specific spatial data and, on the other hand, the improvement and further development of the application to increase usability and accessibility. Our team also plans to adjust the OGITO codebase in order to simplify the process of setting up new mapping projects for further case studies.

ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands