15-09-2017, 01:02 PM
The European Commission is developing, under the responsibility of the Joint Research Center and in close collaboration with international and national partners, the Water Knowledge Management Platform. This platform will integrate a dynamic management of different support tools and guidelines for the water management sector in developing countries. The support tools will be based on open source desktop GIS technologies to provide end users in developing countries with a technology that is sustainable both financially and technologically. In this study, an extensive list of several hundred open source GIS software packages is organized through an extensive search and then examined for a list of 31 packages for consideration. Several criteria were developed to exclude 17 packages and the remaining 14 went through a series of installation and performance tests; first on a PC (Pentium ®, E5200 @ 2.50 GHz, 1.98 Gb RAM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Version 2002, Service Pack 2). Several packages were dropped due to general skills and functionality. Four packets (QGIS, gvSIG, MapWindow and openJUMP) performed well in rendering large file size maps (up to 125 Mb) and were tested on a Pentium III computer. The QGIS package outperformed others in very poor computing conditions. The gvSIG and openJUMP packages worked reasonably well, but their startup times were long, while MapWindow had problems. QGIS, gvSIG, openJUMP and MapWindow were recommended for the EU Water Knowledge Management Platform (WKMP).