Michael Byrne, geographic information officer, and Juan Marin, lead geospatial software architect, from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission presented the case study of the creation of the National Broadband Map at the FOSS4G introductory workshop today. Byrne’s team were charged with creating the National Broadband Map under the auspices of the National Telecommunications Information Administration with a seven-month timeline to deliver a prototype that has been mandated by congress — a very accelerated timeline for a government project. Thankfully, the FCC had robust IT infrastructure with stacks for developers, DBAs, and infrastructure. There were three teams to develop the solution, with quality assessment, data integration and map development.
Congress said that the map must be online and searchable, which meant to the developers that it must have 100% OGC-compliant services, and needed to be RESTful. The only solution given the timeline was open source – with the volume of data, the speed it needed to be delivered, and a funding issue. The entire stack for the National Broadband Map is open source. The license support was provided through OpenGeo. Upon launch there were 4 million viewers with a peak of 9,000 requests per second.
The open source stack included OGC and REST services, an application server (Geoserver and a custom application), and the Postgis database. After developing a prototype using COTS software, the development team determined that the amount of custom software would have posed too many challenges. It came down to a performance and agility issue, according to Byrne. They could have thrown more hardware at it to make it work, but with the open source stack it was performant.
Another consideration of support with the tight timeline is that with the open source model you speak directly to the people that developed the software, whereas with commercial software the support is a process that can be quite cumbersome.
Byrne shared a few anecdotes about the response that the team has received. As a former member of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee, having to leave when he became a federal employee, he is well versed with the FGDC and the mandate to deliver the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. In just four months, the FCC were able to create a detailed and flexible online national map, and he’s been asked repeatedly by others, “Why isn’t the FGDC building the NSDI like this?”
Another anecdote from Byrne is that wthin ten days of the launch of the National Broadband Map, a developer completed a completely re-skinned version within just a day, showing the flexibility. The reaction that he’s had that, “I didn’t know you could do this kind of thing with this kind of data,” speaks to the ability to do quickly mash up Census Data and other geospatial and non-geospatial data and serve it up on the Web.
The National Broadband Map was obviously a watershed moment for government-developed online solution development. The fact that it used open source tools, with the reasoning and benefits outlined above, makes it a worldwide case study of interest for what these tools enable and provide.
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Juan Marin is an employee of Computech, Inc. The firm that designed and developed the National Broad Map under contract with the FCC with Funding provided by NTIA.