POIs for the Greater Bremen Region (2015) |
| Development of a web application for the presentation of POIs based on open source technologies |
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The project Points of Interest (POI) for the greater Bremen region (ZVBN) aims at creating a uniform, cross-thematic and cross-boundaries representation of interesting points for the territory of the ZVBN union and surrounding areas.
Point of interest (POI)in the context of this study are private and public locations such as tourist destinations, agencies, institutions of general interest, leisure destinations, shops and shopping malls, carsharing stations and others that are for locals but especially for visitors and tourists of particular interest. The presentation of these places documents the variety, attractiveness and quality of locations of the Bremen region. The visibility of and intelligent linking of these places in the context of a single Web application, as they will be created as part of this study, complements existing online mobility offerings of ZVBN and should thus contribute to sustainable, eco-friendly mobility.
As a prerequisite for the development of the web application, a unified geodatabase of POIs needs to be composed, created from geometry and associated attribute data. The geodatabase as well as the web application will rely on open source solutions like OpenStreetMap (OSM) (data), Postgres / PostGIS (database) and OpenLayers / Leaflet (web application) in order to ensure an adequate and economical use of resources.
The area to be considered includes the area of the Municipal Association of Lower Saxony / Bremen. Some counties, cities and municipalities in this area already maintain own mapping portals to present their POIs, as part of their general web presences. The databases used in these cases and the existing web applications however differ significantly in their contents and technologies used.
On the other hand, ZVBN already extract regularly POIs for all local authorities in the context of so-called VBN mobility planner from the central OpenStreetMap database as input data for its mobility portal. The idea is to make this POI data also available to create a new, unified POI portal for all unitary councils.
The aim of this study is therefore to create a unified web application based on a uniform database for the entire local network that is centrally hosted at the ZVBN, and all communities can integrate into their own websites. The geometries of the database are based on OpenStreetMap (OSM), enriched with additional factual information to the institutions where they do not exist in OSM.
The advantages of this solution from the perspective of ZVBN and unitary councils is that the POIs future
- are presented in a unified web application with the same content, appearance and functionality for the entire federation area (Regional Marketing)
- can be centrally maintained and updated in a single database
- Changes to content and functionality must be carried out for all unitary councils in one place only once
- Which means cost savings for system maintenance and greater flexibility in the future
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