With an aim of developing and delivering open source geospatial solutions to the UN, the UN Open GIS Initiative was established in March 2016, taking full advantage of mission partner expertise from UN member states, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGO’s and private sector.

In order to fulfil the diverse requirements of UN field operations, the scope of the UN Open GIS Initiative covers the geospatial software of the UN Spatial Data I nfrastructure. The activities are organized into four working groups, referred to as ‘spirals’; Spiral one for geo-portal and system infrastructure, Spiral two for capacity building, Spiral three for geo-analytic functions, and Spiral four for geospatial data collection.

This talk will cover an overall introduction of the UN Open GIS initiative including the vision, strategies, technical roadmaps, and achievements of each working group. The experiences and lessons learned from the initiative will be shared during the talk, which we hope will be helpful to the UN as well as developing countries. We will also discuss how to leverage the FOSS4G community and the UN Open GIS Initiative.

Working Group 4, also called Spiral 4, of the UN Open GIS Initiative aims to provide solutions to collect geospatial data for UN missions. Due to the diversity and complexity of source data and mission fields, one single solution for geospatial data collection could not satisfy the requirements from the UN. Furthermore, most of the UN missions take place in regions where geospatial data are very limited. Spiral 4 has been working to develop and provide several solutions for divers and difficult requirements from the UN. In this talk, we will present the vision and solutions that we are developing so far, such as live drone maps, open geo-CMS, and quality control tools. We will also discuss and share the lessons learned from Spiral 4.

Due to the growing population in urban areas, the building structures become more huge and complicated. The demands for geospatial information and services in indoor space are increasing as well as outdoor spaces. An OGC standard, called IndoorGML, was published to provide a standard indoor spatial model and exchange data format. And inous R&D initiative has been established to set up an eco-system for IndoorGML based on open source software. In this talk, we will present an overview of this initiative and details of the achievements so far. First, it will covers several approached for 3D indoor map construction in IndoorGML from point cloud, blueprint maps, as well as crowdsource. Second, the conversion issues from CAD and BIM data to IndoorGML will be also discussed in the talk. Third, we will present several interesting application services of the initiative such as sharing IndoorGML data via 3D geo-portal and voice map service for blind people.