Educational material development on mobile spatial data collection using open source geospatial technologies

Abstract

Mobile spatial data collection is one of the major tasks carried out under the United Nations (UN) to quantify targets of various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Even though there are readily available proprietary solutions to ease mobile spatial data collection, there is often limited educational resources that rely on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G). The ongoing efforts of UN OSGeo Committee are to satisfy the requirements of UN operations in terms of identifying and developing open source geospatial software and services. The aim of this paper is to describe and discuss the educational material (tutorial) that is prepared to address the 2019 UN OSGeo Committee Educational Challenge entitled ‘Open geospatial data and software for UN SDG 16, Peace justice and open institution’. The educational material utilised various technologies, including QGIS, QField, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and NodeJS, by relying on a simple mobile spatial data collection scenario, which is collecting information about trees. The scenario serves as an analogy for many different UN operations that might fall under SDG 16, such as interviews with a victim or a vulnerable person or estimating to what extent decision-making is inclusive and responsive. The developed educational material addresses some of the practical requirements of mobile spatial data collection, including handling multiple users, offline data collection, attaching photos to recorded events, editing of spatial features in the field and displaying the collected data on the internet using Heroku. Even though the educational material intends to be self-explanatory, quantitative and qualitative measures are needed to evaluate its efficacy. Therefore, a group of geomatics engineering students were trained with the educational material and their feedbacks were collected through a satisfaction questionnaire as well as the completion time of the tutorial. The outcomes of this paper will be useful in terms of guiding researchers and practitioners who develop online educational material, especially in the geospatial domain.