FIONA - Online Agricultural Subsidy Application System
From MapbenderWiki
The Ministry of Agriculture of the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany operates the online portal FIONA. The portal provides authenticated and secured access to 80,000 farmers who can measure, digitize and calculate their farmland areas to apply for subsidy grants.
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Abstract
- Name of Organization
- Ministerium für Ernährung und Ländlichen Raum Baden Württemberg (Ministry of Agriculture, Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany)
- Contact Person
- Operator: Andreas Höhne Informatikzentrum Landesverwaltung Baden Württemberg (IZLBW)
- Service Provider: Arnulf Christl (CCGIS)
Project Implementation Summary
The IZLBW computer center implemented a wide spectrum of proprietary GIS technologies over the past 15 years. The traditional work processe involved processing geospatial data on more than 10 workstations. Operation involves highly qualified GIS staff (power users). For years the large geospatial datasets presented ongoing management problems regarding distribution, actualization and processing of the data involved, resulting in a highly fragmented infrastructure.
New legal requirements implemented by the European Union regarding application and documentation of agricultural subsidies could not be handled with the operative GIS infrastructure. An alternative was sought and it was identified that the only technology capable of handling the requirements would be a web based distributed spatial data infrastructure. A detailed analysis of several proprietary solutions followed, requirements were collected and an evaluation followed. The results showed that non of the proprietary solutions on the market could fulfill all requirements, not even the existing operative proprietary software, which in parts already complied to some of the technical requirements:
- implementation period of less than 3 months
- threefold operation (development, test and operative environments)
- budget limits
- staff capacities (administration, configuration and operation control)
- load distribution on arbitrary number of hardware during peak operation
- minimal client hardware requirements
- full functionality without additional plugins
- distributed operation on differing operating systems (Windows, Linux, UNIX)
The key factor in deciding for an Open Source architecture was the positive experience made with an equivalent system named FLOrlp operated by the neighboring state of Rhineland Palatinate which went into production a year earlier. As the core components of that system are all licensed as Free and Open Source software the migration into the environment of the state of Baden Wurttemberg only involved little technical overhead. Most of the customization had to reflect the different organizational structure of the subsidy request application between the two states. Some development done in Baden Wurttemberg went into enhancing functionality which was implemented as generic functionality in the Open Source software. These enhancements could be transfered back to the original "donor" state of Rhineland Palatinate resulting in a positive overall ROI for all involved parties.
Hosted Spatial Data
The state of Baden Wurttemberg covers an area of 35.751,65 km² resulting in a raster data set of uncompressed approximately 1.3 terabyte of rectified aerial imagery with a ground resolution of 25 cm (approx. 10 inch). 80,000 of the 10 million inhabitants are entitled to request for agricultural subsidy. These comprise the potential users of the system. They received their access credentials via snail mail (paper letter) as the State's Single Sign On infrastrucutre was not yet operative at the beginning of the subsidy grant period.
The cadastral basemap comprises 8.5 million land parcels additional data sets comprise a topographical basemap as scanned raster data and vectorial infrastructure network (highways, railroads, roads, places, geographical names database), etc. These features reside in a PosgreSQL / PostGIS database.
Open Source technologies used
The Online system components are implemented using GNU Linux operating systems, running Apache http Server and TomCAT servlet engine. The GIS functionality is implemented as part of the service oriented architecture of the IZLBW. The spatial data infrastructure relies completely on Free and Open Source Software components which are described in this section.
PostgreSQL Object Relational Database
The cadastral base map, user data and farmland parcels originally reside in an Oracle database. Unfortunately the data was originally not accessibla as interoperable OGC standard format but a proprietary version. The traffic caused by the online system was estimated to range between 100,000 and 250,000 requests per day, which the operative GIS infrastructure was far from being able to handle. Therefore the complete dataset was migrated to a PostgreSQL database.
PostGIS Spatial Data Extension
The Spatial Data Extension PostGIS took care of spatial storage, standardized access by web and feature services, indexing and high performance. User access restrictions resulting in display and accessibility to personally owned farmland parcels was implemented using the OWS Secutiry Proxy infrastructure.
GeoServer WFS-T
Read and write access to geographic features (farmland parcels, landscape components) are provided by The GeoServer Project (based on GeoTools). It is used as OGC WFS for spatial queries on the 8.5 million cadastre base map. Additionally it manages read and write access to the farmland database of approximately 100,000 lots. The queries return GML objects which are transformed into JavaScript objects that can be highlighted by the client browser using the Walter Zorn library. In the current stage of extension theses objects will also be accessible for editing (currently only creating and deleting is possible) including automatic snapping vastly improving the quality of newly created objects.
UMN MapServer WMS
The University of Minnesota MapServer is used as the main WMS engine serving the imagery for the cadastral basemap and aerial photography. Both GeoServer and MapServer access the same central database PostgreSQL / PostGIS. Load distribution is implemented for the WMS services only which have to handle approximately 10 times more requests than the GeoServer.
Mapbender OWS Portal
The Mapbender portal manages user access and orchestrates the OGC services GeoServer and MapServer. The imagery served by MapServer is overlayed with features served by GeoServer. The layout was configured following the style guides (as far as available) of the web site infrastructure. Most of the functionality is out of the box Mapbender standard except for the authentication which was implemented to access an external service containing all registered farmers of Germany.
Further Information and Distribution
This case study has been forwarded to the OSGeo Website and Visibility Committees (mailto:dev@webcommittee.osgeo.org, mailto:dev@visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org).
