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Open source geospatial tools and technologies for urban and environmental studies

Open geospatial data and tools are an increasingly important paradigm that offers the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and environmental opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data and open source geospatial software have greatly increased. The Open Source GIS research community believes that combining free and open software, open data, as well as open standards, leads to the creation of a sustainable ecosystem for accelerating new discoveries to help solve global cross-disciplinary societal challenges, from climate change mitigation to sustainable cities.

We invite original research contributions on all aspects of open source geospatial software and its applications, and particularly encourage submissions focusing on the following themes for this Special Issue.

●    The use of open source geospatial data, software and standards in scientific research
●    Architectures and frameworks for open source software and data
●    Quality of open data
●    Volunteered Geographic Information and Public Participatory GIS 
●    Human computer interfaces and usability in and around open GI systems
●    Big data
●    Open source GIS service/software implementations
●    Teaching geospatial sciences with open source solutions and open data
●    Applied applications in different use cases, e.g. government, health, climate change, energy, water, urban studies, location based services, etc.

Guest Editors: 
Francesco Pirotti, University of Padova, Italy (francesco.pirotti@unipd.it)
Giorgio Agugiaro, Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria (giorgio.agugiaro@ait.ac.at)
Amin Mobasheri, Heidelberg University, Germany (a.mobasheri@uni-heidelberg.de)

  1. Open geospatial data and tools are an increasingly important paradigm offering the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as w...

    Authors: Amin Mobasheri, Francesco Pirotti and Giorgio Agugiaro
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2020 5:5
  2. Several technologies provide datasets consisting of a large number of spatial points, commonly referred to as point-clouds. These point datasets provide spatial information regarding the phenomenon that is to ...

    Authors: Francesco Pirotti, Roberta Ravanelli, Francesca Fissore and Andrea Masiero
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:14
  3. Over the last decade, more and more cities and even countries worldwide are creating semantic 3D city models of their physical environment based on the international CityGML standard issued by the Open Geospat...

    Authors: Zhihang Yao, Claus Nagel, Felix Kunde, György Hudra, Philipp Willkomm, Andreas Donaubauer, Thomas Adolphi and Thomas H. Kolbe
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:5
  4. The road towards achievement of the climate protection goals requires, among the rest, a thorough rethinking of the energy planning tools (and policies) at all levels, from local to global. Nevertheless, it is...

    Authors: Giorgio Agugiaro, Joachim Benner, Piergiorgio Cipriano and Romain Nouvel
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2018 3:2
  5. The appropriate resolution of a zone system is key to the development of any transport model, as well as other spatial analyses. The number and shape of zones directly impacts the effectiveness of any further ...

    Authors: Joseph Molloy and Rolf Moeckel
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2017 2:19
  6. Scientific workflows have been commonly used in geospatial data analysis and Cyberinfrastructure. They allow distributed geoprocessing algorithms, models, data, and sensors to be chained together to support ge...

    Authors: Mingda Zhang, Xiaoqian Bu and Peng Yue
    Citation: Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards 2017 2:8