A GIS water management system using free and open source software

Abstract

Water management systems are having an increasing impact for sustainable development on all types of urban infrastructures. This paper describes the framework of a water management system, as a project of transformation from a traditional commercial software approach to a new, open source flexible system, capable to afford new demanding requirements. Among these new demanding requirements we cover analysis and implementation issues for: an open source GIS for water management, the challenge to big data management, reusing existing data, and network integrity and robustness. A real case scenario is thoroughly described. The integration of a powerful data model and spatial process model into a water modeling framework is proved to enhance the software capabilities for water management system.