Gispo brought the Oskari community together – Oskari community day 2024
Gispo has coordinated the Oskari developer community since the beginning of this year.
For those of you who are not familiar with Oskari, here’s the thing in a nutshell: Oskari is an open source web map service where you can view, visualise and analyse different map layers that can come from various APIs. The best example for this is Paikkatietoikkuna (from which Oskari project started!) where the end-user can browse maps and various other data maintained by various different organisations. The user can also make upload their own datasets and share the maps as an iFrame to their website. And like always, behind such a great open source project is a community that develops it and meets regularly either live or via Teams, to discuss ideas, bugs, roadmap etc. and also organized an annual Oskari Community Day.
The Oskari Community Day 2024 brought together about 20 participants in Helsinki in mid May. There were a couple of familiar faces from Oskari’s Joint Development Forum and the National Land Survey among the participants, but also some new people showed up at the event. Making people join in and make new contacts is the most rewarding part of coordinating networks, so we were very happy about this!
Let us share a bit of the content of the Community Day now.
What’s new in Oskari?
Sami Mäkinen from the National Land Survey presented new features and fixes implemented during the past year, namely Oskari 2.12 and 2.13. The latest release focuses on improving user experience on mobile devices. Small details make a big difference! E.g. on smaller screens Oskari now hides certain functionalities by default and gives more space for the map view. Sami also answered and commented on participants’ more technical questions and took us on a quick tour around Oskari’s GitHub. In case you didn’t make it to the event or missed it the first time around: if you want to find Oskari release notes for front-end, look here, release notes for server side here – or if you’re looking for the guide on how to update Oskari, see here.
Oskari helping out at a sorting station
Henna-Kaisa Stjernberg from Helsinki Region Environmental Services (HSY) presented the SeutuMassa tool and other Oskari map services of HSY. SeutuMassa is a soil management tool that was made because there was a need to present and organise the objects of the Ämmässuo waste sorting station on a map. Now the data that was earlier collected to an Excel file can be used in a web-based map application. This way it is easier to see e.g. the mass and location of the materials. This is also valuable for the monitoring of the environmental permit.
Data is updated the same way as in normal Oskari web service but now it is also possible with the built-in content editor. The employees of Ämmässuo waste station also create their own layers by drawing features on a map based on the aerial imagery of the area. The map service allows for accounting of the material and can be used for finding the places where there is surplus of the material.
Instructions for procuring Oskari-based map services
During spring there had been discussions in the Joint Development Forum about procuring Oskari and the members called for guidelines on procuring. Oskari communications coordinator Juho Rekilä from Gispo gave a small introduction to the topic and presented some examples of what to take into consideration before procuring Oskari. Three different scenarios were introduced: procuring a new Oskari instance (in a situation where the organisation doesn’t have an existing Oskari map service), procuring an update to an existing Oskari instance (from version x to the latest version) and procuring configurations to an existing Oskari instance (new functionalities or tailoring).
There was a lively discussion on the topic and the ideas and thoughts were collected for future use. The Instructions for procuring Oskari document will be on the new Oskari website in autumn 2024. The instructions will hopefully make the procuring process a bit easier and help the procurers to think about their needs and what is required from the consultants.
Accessibility of map services
After the workshop and coffee break we had an accessibility specialist Juha Sylberg from the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired to talk about how the visually impaired use map services. Accessibility has been a hot topic this spring in Oskari’s Joint Development Forum and it was great to have Juha share his insights. He talked about how visually impaired and blind people navigate to different places and what kinds of services (such as mobile applications) they use instead of the usual map services.
New Oskari website coming up
Finally, Sini Pöytäniemi closed the event by presenting the upcoming Oskari website. The new website will have a completely new design and all the relevant information will be easily accessible. The work on the website has been ongoing for some time, and the new site will be launched in early autumn. An extra effort has been made to make the documentation more approachable, better organised and more comprehensive. Also the overall user experience of the website has been improved to make it intuitive to use.
It was rewarding to see so many enthusiastic Oskari fans in the event! Also at Gispo we’re always happy to help anyone with Oskari-related questions. Don’t hesitate to ask for more information if you got interested in either Oskari itself or in the work of the Oskari community!
