Assessment of open source GIS software for water resources management in developing countries

The European Commission is developing, under the responsibility of the Joint Research Centre and in close collaboration with international and national partners, the Water Knowledge Management Platform. This platform will integrate a dynamic management of different support tools and guidelines for the water management sector in developing countries. The support tools will be based on open source desktop GIS technologies in order to provide the final users in developing countries with a sustainable technology from both financial and technological points of view. In this study, a comprehensive list of several hundred open sources GIS software packages are put together by an extensive search and then screened to obtain a list of 31 packages for further consideration. Various criteria were developed to exclude 17 packages and the remaining 14 went through a series of installation and performance tests; firstly, on a six years old PC (AMD Athlon™XP 2800+, 2.13GHz, 512MB of RAM, under MS XP). Several packages were dropped due to the general suitabilities and functionalities. Four packages (QGIS, gvSIG, MapWindow and openJUMP) performed well in map rendering of large file sizes (up to 125Mb) and were further tested on a Pentium III computer. The QGIS package outperformed others in very poor computing conditions. The gvSIG and openJUMP packages performed reasonably well but their start-up times were long, while MapWindow struggled. QGIS, gvSIG and MapWindow were recommended for the EU Water Knowledge Management Platform (WKMP).