Collecting, Distributing and Analyzing field data is a crucial part in any geospatial study. Field data collection tools and methods have been developed significantly due to the advancement of technologies such as Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) and development of smartphones. Accurate field data collection is also a necessary task for broad spatial data analysis and proper decision making. Development of Web technologies led to share the data and information effectively. This study tries to develop a framework based on the Geospatial Semantic Web technologies for disseminating and processing field data. Experimental results from an implemented prototype show that the proposed framework allows to visualize and process the field data in any context. The system of this study is capable of distributing and processing field data using web application. Moreover, the study demonstrates the importance and the capabilities of web services for spatial data gathering and processing. The system has been developed based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages such as ZOO-Project, Open Data Kit, etc. It enables user to further improve or deploy the system for variety of studies.

1. Field Data Collecting, Processing and Sharing:
Using web Service Technologies
Niroshan Bandara*, Venkatesh Raghavan*, Daisuke Yoshida*, Gerald Fenoy**
*Osaka City University, Japan
**GeoLabs sarl, France
INTRODUCTION
Collecting, Distributing and Analyzing field data is a crucial part in any geospatial
study. Field data collection tools and methods have been developed significantly
due to the advancement of technologies such as Global Navigational Satellite
Systems (GNSS) and development of smartphones. Accurate field data collection
is also a necessary task for broad spatial data analysis and proper decision
making. Development of Web technologies led to share the data and information
effectively. This study tries to develop a framework based on the Geospatial
Semantic Web technologies for disseminating and processing field data.
Experimental results from an implemented prototype show that the proposed
framework allows to visualize and process the field data in any context. The
system of this study is capable of distributing and processing field data using web
application. Moreover, the study demonstrates the importance and the capabilities
of web services for spatial data gathering and processing. The system has been
developed based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages such as
ZOO-Project, Open Data Kit, etc. It enables user to further improve or deploy the
system for variety of studies.
COMPONENTS
Main components of the project can be categorized as Mobile data collection
applications and GIS applications concerning Desktop and Web.
1 2 3
2. QGIS
QGIS is a user friendly Open Source GIS software package which can import
layesr locally and online from a server as a service such as WFS, WMS. And QGIS
has capabilities to manipulate various types of spatial data formats such as KML,
SVG, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, PostGIS, SpatiaLite, MSSQL, etc.
1. ZOO-Project
ZOO-Project is an Open Source Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation project that
enables existing open source libraries to interact through its WPS framework. It
consists with three components as describe below;
ARCHITECTURE
Users can exploit their mobile devices to record field data using ODK suite. The
data will be sent to ODK Aggregate, which is running on an Apache Tomcat server
backed with a PostgreSQL database. Then the data is published through the
GeoServer. Finally data can be visualized using web viewer or it can be processed
by ZOO-Project as WPS or QGIS as desktop client.
WPS
XLS Forms
Convert
Database
WMS WFS
ODK COLLECT
Desktop GIS
Web viewer
Web GIS
application
Client side Server side
AGGREGATE
DATA VISUALIZATION
Data Visualization; (a) View submission; (b) Web viewer
(a) (b)
DATA COLLECTION
Data are collected by using ODK collect. The application let the user to insert the
GPS location automatically. And other data such as multimedia and text/numbers
can be entered manually.
ODK Collect; (a) Survey forms; (b) GPS information; (c) Input Images; (d) Additional data inputs
(a) (b) (c) (d)
As web processing
Data imports to QGIS and process ; (a) Import from PosrgreSQL database; (b) Import as WFS (c) Analyse in QGIS
Web processing interface; (a) Data points; (b) Result after processing
As desktop client
DATA PROCESS
(a) (b) (c)
(a) (b)
CONCLUSION
Advancement of Mobile phone and Web technologies has been able to simplify the spatial analysis and field data collection. Barriers and gaps in the geospatial science
can be truly addressed by developing such systems.
ZOO service
ZOO API
ZOO Kernel
• Code – C, Python, java, Perl, JavaScript
• .zcfg – zoo configuration file
• JS script – for WPS chaining
• Classes – zoo request, zoo process, etc
WPS Engine
OpenLayers | UDIG | Your Client
WPS Client
3. Open Data Kit
ODK consists of three modules as shown below:
Aggregate
ODK Build is used to
create and design the field
survey forms.
ODK Aggregate is server-
side module which
provides blank forms to
ODK collect and work as a
data repository.
ODK collect is the client-
side module and it is an
app which can be installed
on the Android mobiles.
FOSS4G 2016 NARA.KANSAI