Timo Aarnio
GIS Expert
National Land Survey
Finland

Biography
Timo Aarnio works as a GIS Expert at the National Land Survey of Finland’s SDI Services department. With a background in IT Administration, Timo has a lot of experience with open source software especially on the server side. At NLSFI he has been working as a product owner for the Oskari open source software with a focus on the analysis and thematic mapping functions as well as an expert in INSPIRE implementation with OGC compliant services. Timo’s biggest interests are agile development, user-centered design, and web applications.

Abstract
Oskari Platform - A Collaborative Effort towards Better Map Applications

Developed in a collaborative network of some two dozen organizations from the public and private sectors, the open source Oskari Platform (www.oskari.org) is a key technology within the Finnish Spa-tial Data Infrastructure. It is also used in international projects such as Arctic SDI and European Loca-tion Framework (ELF) to provide access to different kinds of web services. Oskari utilizes the most important OGC web services for spatial data searching (CWS) viewing (WMTS/WMS), downloading and exploring (WFS), and processing and analyzing (WPS). In addition, a support for REST/JSON APIs has been built to enable thematic maps and support for OGC Table Joining Service is underway. Oskari can be used in a variety of ways. The most typical use case is a geoportal for searching and viewing data. It has also been used for providing download services for large datasets and as a tool for basic spatial data analysis. One of the key features is the possibility to create embedded maps on other websites. The user can freely decide what components and map layers to include in the resulting map application. This covers a lot of use cases ranging from traditional showing of POIs to more advanced interactive and real-time reporting. While Oskari relies strongly on OGC web services and APIs importing data is also supported. For spa-tial data that means support for GPX, Shapefiles, KML and MIF/MID-files. Statistical data can be im-ported by simply copying and pasting from a spreadsheet or CSV-file. The release of Oskari 2 is just around the corner and it will bring a lot of improvements under-the-hood. This is most exciting for developers but will also better the user experience of end users.