4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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The conceptual design of basemap.at’s architecture and its workflows is partly based on experiences of the involved province administrations as well as of the private sector partner. The Vienna city administration gained practical experiences in the Open Government Data (OGD) Vienna WMTS (Web Map Tile Service) which is online since 2011 Still, the basemap.at project brings up new challenges, especially in the technological field, that were never experienced in similar form in Austria. This includes the organization of the supply of always up-to-date base data in a distributed manner as well as the technology of very fast updating and copying the database. A lot of hardware-tests were done to get the best solution.
Our conceptual design includes the following workflow: All partners who contribute data transfer their geodata to a central file service. It is important to note that it is not centrally specified when or in which quantity those uploads have to be done. These decisions are in the sole responsibility of the distributed data partners. However, file name standards and minimal data model requirements have to be met. A centrally controlled process accesses the uploaded files at the file service and prepares them for the tile caching software. The biggest challenge here is the translation of geodata into a cartographic model that meets the high performance requirements. The resulting proprietary tile cache is transformed into the standardized Web Mercator (Auxiliary Sphere, EPSG:3857, EPSG 2012) tile cache, which is then accessed by the centrally implemented Web Map Tile Service. Of course, the production system (tile cache and WMTS web service) is implemented in a fail-safe manner. This not only requires adequate hardware dimensions but also a data processing center with service monitoring components and trained standby staff. All of this is given in the data processing center of the Vienna city administration.
The implementation of this project is done in two phases. In the first phase, a prototype (containing data from eastern parts of Austria) was completed as WMTS until the ITS World Congress 2012 in October 2012. In the second phase, which was finished with the end of 2013, the workflow for constant data supply by the data contributors and the incremental tile cache updates were implemented. Additionally, the production system (including suitable hardware) was set up until the end of 2013. Since 2014 basemap.at is official released.
The project was managed by the City of Vienna. During the whole phase of implementation, there was no delay, quite the contrary: because of the great success of basemap.at the project team decided to develop further basemap.at product variations in 2014. These additional products concern a gray-version, a transparent overlay-map and a high resolution map, which fits best for high resolution displays of mobile devices.
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5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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Collaborative partners of basemap.at are the GIS-Departments of the 9 federal provinces of Austria (GEOLAND.AT), Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region (VOR) GmbH, ITS Vienna Region, SynerGlS Informationssysteme GmbH and Vienna University of Technology. The project was sponsored by the Climate and Energy Fonds, Austria. There were associated partners like the Austrian Association of Cities and Towns, ARGE OEVV, AGEO (the umbrella organisation of geoinformation in Austria) and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management
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6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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All partners in this project have done their share of human and financial resources. In addition, the project was cofunded by the Climate and Energy Fund.
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7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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Basemap.at is offering a first up-to-date and harmonized web base map for the whole state of Austria,which is primarily based on administrative data. The sustainability of basemap.at is a core topic.
Basemap.at can be used free of charge, even for commercial purpose.
Basemap.at is hostet in a high performance and stable environment.
Basemap.at covers the whole state of Austria in a level of detail up to 1:1000 with entire information on buildings and addresses-
Since the launch at the beginning of 2014, basemap.at has be integrated in many applications, like “Firmen A-Z” of Austrian Economic Chamber, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance, the Austrian traffic information portal (www.verkehrsauskunft.at).
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8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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The project was guided by a strict project management through the city of Vienna (=project coordination). There were regular meetings for coordination of the project progress. Furthermore, earnings reports were delivered. All information sessions and meetings were delivered via the Folio Cloud (www.foliocloud.com) with all project partners online. The settlement of resources was carried out according to strict specifications.
In addition there were semi-annual detailed reports to the Climate and Energy Fonds Austria, which cofounded the project.
During development, there were several testing phases and test results influenced further activities.
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9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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The main challenges identified so far are Cartographic (data harmonization, generalization) and technical implementation. Harmonization: basemap.at is based on data created by different institutions (mainly province administrations). Even though there are major efforts for standards in data creation, applying unified visualization styles exposed smaller and bigger differences in the data creation. For now, this will be handled by using partly province-specific style definitions to avoid an unbalanced design. For the future, it will be a task for all partners to further harmonize their data. Generalization: The scale of basemap.at range from approximately 1:100 to 113,000,000. The data from the contributors are usually created in one defined level of detail, fitting a certain scale. To ensure a legible and aesthetically pleasing result on all the other zoom levels, generalization is needed. Of course, this is not a new topic in cartography and a large field in cartographic research is dedicated to it (e.g. ICA Commission on Generalization and Multiple Representation). However, it's still a challenge to implement generalization in an automated visualization environment, which allows incremental updates. Similar to harmonization, this is not just a technical issue, it also identifies requirements for the data.
A further challenge, was the implementation of the production workflow and the finding of the best hardware “setup”. Basemap.at is updated bimonthly. This requires an outstanding architecture to manage the great amount of processed data.
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