Summary

This is a project by the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) that seeks to address vulnerability reduction in the Pacific Island Countries through the development of an integrated planning and management system. Information and communications technology (ICT) development and related capacity building are very important to the project. A key component of the project is the Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) that facilitates the collection and sharing of geographical data among the stakeholders in the project. The creation of this GeoCMS is a key innovative outcome of the project. As there was no suitable software available for a GeoCMS at the time the project started, a new GeoCMS application was developed from two existing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) applications, MapServer and Tikiwiki. The GeoCMS system has made it possible for the Pacific Island Countries to publish their geographical data for access and sharing over the Internet and open to contributions from all over the world. All this helps in the development and vulnerability reduction of these nations as important information can now be made available more easily as and when needed.

The mapping and GeoCMS parts of the project have benefited a lot from FOSS as they were built by enhancing and modifying existing FOSS applications. The use of FOSS makes it affordable and practical to build and deploy the GeoCMS application in every participating country. This in itself leads to local capacity building in ICT and the local recipients are able to learn and understand the technology behind the system. The development of local content is facilitated as the people contribute towards the information in the maps and these are made available to all.

The GeoCMS software application is currently still being enhanced and new features are being added. The main project currently is at its midpoint stage, with the deployment of the GeoCMS in the participating countries actively taking place.

Background of Organization

The South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission is an inter-governmental, regional organization providing services to promote sustainable development in the Pacific Island Countries that it serves. In particular, it provides assistance, through its Secretariat based in Suva, Fiji, to its member countries in three key programme areas: Ocean and Islands, Community Lifelines and Community Risk. To effectively provide these support services, SOPAC maintains an information technology unit, provides publication and library services, and offers technical and field services for specific project work.

Member countries of SOPAC are Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. American Samoa, French Polynesia and New Caledonia are associate members.

SOPAC is funded by member-country contributions and also supported by donations from countries and organizations such as Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, France, Japan, Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the European Union (EU), and certain UN agencies.

Objectives of Project

The project seeks to reduce vulnerabilities and provide better decision-making in 14 of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP)  through the development of an integrated planning and management system. The participating countries in this EU-funded project are the Pacific Island Countries of Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The project concentrates on three key focal areas in the island system:

• hazard mitigation and risk assessment
• aggregates for construction
• water resources supply and sanitation

The project addresses problems such as: unavailability of accurate and timely data; weak human resource base; limited resources (financial and infrastructural); and lack of appropriate management plans, and policies and regulatory frameworks to deal with these three focal areas. It is implemented using the Island System Management (ISM) approach, in which the issues of environment management, and social and economic developments are tackled for a ‘whole island’ or sub-systems within an island.

The ISM facilitates the integration of ecosystems, the economy and social issues with an enabling institutional framework. The main constraint to the successful application of ISM is the access to information. As such, ICT development and related capacity building are very important to the project and a fourth project activity and deliverable is in the ICT area. This activity cuts across the three focal sectors. Ongoing ICT activities include the following:

• training in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) and its applications for planning
• setting up of ICT networks, including a GeoCMS, in each of the 14 participating countries, to enable sharing of information/resources and promote awareness
• providing spatial data and information for sound planning

The project has five key objectives and outcomes:

• sustainable development of coastal zones, in particular through identifying alternative sources of aggregates
• improved planning practices installed for safe and adequate water supplies and sanitation systems
• implementation of comprehensive hazard and risk management tools within the framework of an Integrated Holistic Approach for Sustainable Development - ISM
• ISM infrastructure established and in use in each country
• strengthened capacity of the Pacific ACP States

The main beneficiaries of the project are the governments and decision makers of the 14 Pacific ACP States. These include planners, land, water and marine management agencies, communities and villages of case study and project intervention areas, educators/trainers, environmentalists and national/regional NGOs.

The governments of the participating Pacific ACP States are also responsible for the maintainability of the system in their countries and also to promote and develop it. The local and regional organizations provide datasets to the GeoCMS.

FOSS Application

Description

To achieve the goal of vulnerability reduction and better decision-making, it was determined that a GeoCMS was needed to organize new and existing geographical information. There was no suitable software available at the time the project started and so a new FOSS application was developed by utilizing two existing FOSS applications - MapServer and Tikiwiki.

MapServer is a development environment for building spatially-enabled Internet applications. It is not a full-featured GIS but it excels at rendering spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) for the web. MapServer has well-defined application programming interfaces for various web scripting languages, and so it is possible to integrate it inside a web application. Tikiwiki is a full-featured web-based Wiki and Content Management System (CMS) written in the scripting language, PHP  and it enables the easy creation and management of web pages. A “Maps” interface was built for Tikiwiki to integrate MapServer into Tikiwiki to become a GeoCMS. By enabling this Maps feature in Tikiwiki, a user can display interactive maps of any area in the world in any projection. The user can zoom on a map, select which geographic layer to see and query any geographical object.

The operating platform used is the Mandriva distribution of GNU/Linux. This distribution was selected as it is very easy to include the built application into the Mandriva distribution packages that will be maintained and included in the distribution. As a result of this, the Tikiwiki GeoCMS package is now fully integrated as part of Mandriva Linux, thereby helping to ensure the sustainability of the project. The project needs to gain a worldwide support base and not a Pacific Islands-only support base.

Choice of FOSS

Current commercial applications that provide mapping applications over the web are expensive, costing possibly several tens of thousands of US dollars. The cost of deploying such an application in every Pacific Island Country would have been prohibitive. Furthermore, it is important that the mapping service is located in the user-country itself to ensure capacity building and development of local content. While it is possible to put all of the maps on a single server located overseas, it would have brought little in the development of local expertise.

At the time when the project started there were no applications available that mixed the power of wikis with maps as this is a rather new concept.

Development and Implementation

FOSS provided all the tools needed to develop the GeoCMS application. Using MapServer to incorporate a “Maps” feature in Tikiwiki was something new that was developed in this project. The design considerations for the developed GeoCMS include ease of use, easy entry of metadata and other information via wiki and easy sharing and representation of geographical data.

The Tikiwiki GeoCMS application system runs on Mandriva GNU/Linux. The MapServer and Tikiwiki software are needed for the application. Tikiwiki, in turn, requires the Apache web server, PHP scripting language and MySQL database server. Access to the GeoCMS is from a web browser.

Deployment

The developed GeoCMS application facilitates the collection and sharing of geographical data. This information is needed for decision-making and must be available to a wide range and class of stakeholders, governments, organizations, companies, and the general public. Currently there are eight systems deployed, with seven fully online. On completion of the project there will be in total 15 systems deployed (including the GeoCMS in SOPAC) in 14 Pacific Island Countries.

Impact

The Tikiwiki GeoCMS application is a core component of the ISM system. By using the information sharing features of the GeoCMS, geographical data collected and created can be shared more easily amongst all the stakeholders.

Only developed countries have published their geographical data over the web and made it available to the public. In many ways the Pacific Island Countries are more advanced in this domain than some developed countries. All this data helps the development of each nation by making crucial information available easily for access and sharing from all over the world. In the case of disasters, it helps to have information on the country before sending experts. It also helps people to gain knowledge of their local geography and develop curriculum for schools. Some of the information from the GeoCMS is being used by universities in the Pacific Island Countries as an aid for lectures.

Lessons Learned

Several important lessons were learned from this project. To locate developers, focus should be on the international FOSS community as there are not many local developers and the local FOSS community is not strong. In fact, it was found that it is very difficult to build a local FOSS community. Also, open systems instead of closed systems or “black boxes” should be provided so that the recipients of the system can learn and understand what is being provided and they should be given systems that they can financially support.

Current Status of Project

The Tikiwiki GeoCMS software application is an active FOSS project with enhancements and new features being added constantly. The main SOPAC/EU project is at its midpoint stage in the deployment of the GeoCMS in the participating countries.

Benefits and Challenges

The project benefited a lot from the use of FOSS in the development and deployment. In particular, the GeoCMS application benefited from the main MapServer and Tikiwiki projects.

Other Information

Interns from eight countries have been trained to be in charge of maintaining and developing data sets on the GeoCMS, as well as train others in their respective countries. In some countries, the server has also been used as a mail server and file server for the government department where it is deployed. This has made it possible to provide email and communication facilities to many of the government workers.

Conclusion

The project has resulted in the creation of a new GeoCMS system built from two existing FOSS applications. In addition, the new “Maps” feature of Tikiwiki that was developed in this project will add on to the usefulness of the original Tikiwiki and MapServer software. The ability of the developers in this project to easily build on the two established software to create the new GeoCMS application shows clearly the importance of having access to source code as well as the "freedom to modify and extend" aspect of FOSS, as such development would have been very difficult if not impossible to achieve with proprietary software. The usage of FOSS in the development and deployment of the system has also resulted in ICT capacity building for the nations involved.

Contact Information

Project: Reducing Vulnerability of Pacific ACP States
Organization: South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC)
Contact Person: Franck Martin
Street Address: Mead Road, Suva, Fiji
Postal Address: Private Mail Bag, GPO, Suva, Fiji
Email: franck@sopac.org
Phone: +679 338 1377
Fax: +679 337 0040

Websites

The Tikiwiki GeoCMS website
http://maps.tikiwiki.org

Interactive Maps and GeoCMS in the Pacific Island Countries
http://www.sopac.org/maps