Abstract
Geographic Information System (GIS) technology has many applications and plays a vital role in the majority of the daily operations by government and public administration. However, due to its technical complexity and cost, communities lacking the expertise and resources cannot benefit from this technology. The OpenCIS project, a user‐friendly free Open Source GIS‐based Web Community Information System, seeks to address this issue by bridging the gap between a simple map viewer and full GIS, representing one of the first steps towards the goal of grassroots empowerment through GIS technology.
Acknowledgments
The project was funded by Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation (QPSF). The following people assisted or were involved with this project: Wayne Delaforce, Bruce Rich, and Carly Hall (Centre for Social Change Research QUT) and Nick Buys (School of Human Services Griffith University). Thanks also to the organisations that provided data used in this project: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), GeoscienceAustralia, TransLink and Education Queensland. Special thanks to Bernadette Savage and Ashley Wright (HPC QUT) whose assistance was greatly appreciated.
Notes
∗. ∗WMS (Web Mapping Service) and WFS (Web Feature Service) are standards defined by the OpenGIS consortium to provide standard interfaces for querying and accessing map layers from mapping servers.