Open Source Map site faces success and growing pain

WE SAT with Pablo Cecconi from GIS unit at Buenos Aires government to learn more about the city's official map site, built with and running on open source software. He tells of its story, budget worries, hiring challenges and overloaded servers.

In case you missed the original story you can find it here. Pablo Cecconi works at the Geographical Information Systems Unit, or USIG for short in its Spanish acronym, part of the city's statistics body and the body responsible for the map site. Today, here's our Q&A with him.

FC: How was the mapa.buenosaires.gov.ar project born?, and when did you join the effort?
PC: I entered USIG back in July 2002 and joined its project to bring back under state control a series of services which were privatised ten years ago. I was part of a team of excellent professionals, many of whom came from the University of Buenos Aires (National Tech University). Due to our sympathy for Open Source software, by 2004 we were requested to evaluate the available GIS software under a free software license at the time, to find the feasibility of developing a simple tool to provide geographic information over the web.

The idea was to avoid costly software licenses associated with commercial GIS software since the service were originally thought to be of very little scope. Nonetheless, we found existing open source GIS software at the time to be of a good enough quality to develop complex applications, and with every step we raised the stakes from the original project to include routing and more.

FC: How many people worked initially on the map site project and how long did it take them to have a working prototype before the service went public?

PC: Originally, we were three people, and the first prototype was developed in our "spare time" so to speak. It took us approximately six months.

FC: ...and what did it include?
PC: by then it included the first version of the routing algorithm and we presented our work at a congress of municipal governments by the end of 2004. Due to what we learned while developing the prototype and the positive feedback we got about our work, by then we started working full-time on what would become mapa.buenosaires.gov.ar. By June 2005 the product was working completely, and at that point the Communications are of the government gave us a big hand by providing us with its graphics designers to give the site a professional image. By August 2005 the first version went live.

FC: How easy was it for you to learn to work with the Mapserver open source software?
PC: at the beginning there was a steep learning curve because we had no GIF background at all, and that made reading the documentation difficult, which was also scant. As time went by both the technology and its documentation matured, along with our own knowledge. Mapserver grew a lot since then.

FC: So I guess the map site is no longer running in that 1.7GHz Pentium 4 cited in your project history page. What is the current hardware that powers the site?.

PC: the site was launched originally running on a HP ML370 G3, but demand sky-rocketed after the first press stories on our site, so we had to sacrifice our development server, a HP ML350 G3 and put into to work as well. These machines have two dual CPUs and four gigabytes of RAM each.

However, the number of monthly visits to the site has been rising considerably and in the last 18 months it grew fourfold. Unfortunately, this increase in visits has not been followed with hardware upgrades to match demand and nowadays the services is nearly all the time operating at its limit and this brings complaints from users about the low performance of the service. We hope we have a better budget next year.

FC: I see in your web page that you sell the coordinates and other data on CD for a low price. Wouldn't it be interesting as an alternative revenue and funding option to charge more to those who use the data for commercial purposes -like corporations with names beginning with G-, as opposed to hobbyist use?
PC: We price the information delivered on CD as high enough as needed to recover our costs. To put things clearer: we put a price on data sold on CD to recover costs in manpower, technical resources etc. to deliver it, but it's not a price put to obtain a profit. We can't obtain a profit by selling information which is of public nature to begin with.

FC: Looking at the success of Google Maps in other parts of the World, have you guys thought about allowing some "web 2.0" usage of your site by third parties like blogs, for instance to allow linking from a blog to a given location on the map, or to embed maps, etc?
PC: Some of those features you mention like linking destinations, is technically possible... we don't advertise it however as this kind of usage might increase server load a lot and right now we're unable to face an increase in demand for the reasons explained moments ago.

FC: what additional information "layers" were added recently to the database and map site that you find worth mentioning? and which ones will be added in the future?
PC: The following are some of the ones updated recently: neighbourhood names, schools, scholl districts, health centres, community centres, etc. We also added new layers as bike lanes, heavy traffic lanes, traffic density, power transformers in use, antennae measurement locations, etc.

Soon, we will add a lot of layers related to Culture for instance: cinemas, theatres, art galleries, libraries, tango places, and many others. Users can always check the site's updated layers by clicking in the "what's new?" option - dubbed in Spanish “¿Qué hay de nuevo?”.

FC: have you thought about allowing personal log-ins to the site so every map visitor can store map views and target locations/addresses, or frequent routes?
PC: That's not planned in the near term, mainly because we lack the hardware infrastructure needed to sustain something like that. We however do not rule out something like that for the future.

FC: Does the USIG are have outside contractors working in its area who might be affected by the wages cuts that has also affected the city's portal buenosaires.gov.ar?
PC: The city's web portal is maintained by another area of the municipal government, which is independent from the Statistics directorate to which this Geographical Information Systems unit belongs. We haven't had similar cuts for our outside contractors. However, the freezing of wages for contractors reaches the whole municipal government and has caused an important number of resignations and departures during the last two years, among of which is about the whole original team who developed the interactive map.

FC: so is Buenos Aires' map site in danger now that there's a change of political leaning at the head of the city?
PC: the map web site won't be in danger as long as the new administration provides the resources needed for its work. That is, renewing contract terms with outside contractors (frozen for the last five years), hiring new personnel to fill the vacancies of those who resigned and the purchase of new equipment that allows us to provide a good service.

FC: what plans are in the drawing board for the future?
PC: there's plenty of projects, but fulfilling those will depend largely on what course of action the new city government takes. Just to name the most important: plotting public transportation routes (buses, subways, trains), and its use from mobile phones.

FC: does the Geographical Information Systems unit at the municipal government have any internship agreements with the University of Buenos Aires? And what kind of students might find an interest in your GIS work?
PC: The city's statistics directorate has internship agreements with U.B.A. for students of geography, architecture, and of course information systems.

FC: leaving aside developing and enhancing this on-line map, what other tasks does your unit perform on a daily basis?

PC: USIG promotes, coordinates, administers and integrates all geographically referenced databases at the different areas of the municipal government. We also link with the different areas at the municipal government, the federal administration, and the private sector. We also provide the IT solutions to the government for the retrieval and analysis of all geographical information available.

FC: Back to "the map". When we talk about all that data, put together, what volume of data are we talking about, including photos, coordinates databases, etc.?
PC: All the data made available through mapa.buenosaires.gov.ar does not go above 60 gigabytes, approximately.

FC: What is the source of the satellite imagery and when was it updated?
PC: The satellite images currently available were acquired from DigitalGlobe. There is no plan to update images during next year. [last update was 2004]

FC: to end this nice chat... what is your background and what areas do you like about IT?
PC: I studied computer science at the UBA. Besides GIS I focus on software engineering and I'm very interested in numerical methods applications and graphical computing.

FC: do you read IT news sites?
PC: I generally don't have time to read any particular site. Nonetheless, I keep an eye on RSS feeds and read articles whose headlines interest me.µ

[At that point this scribbler abruptly brought the interview to an end, after the subject failed to mention the INQ in particular, despite this writer's herculean efforts of repeated winking and pointing at his business card while making the last question ;).
But now seriously, the described sad state of affairs shows how difficult it is to retain qualified IT people at the public sector, and the terrible effect that budgetary measures like budget cuts or freezing wages can have when applied without any care throughout an entire organization, without prioritizing its internal "brains", that is, the knowledge workers and IT developers that it created and trained from scratch.]