A highlight of the SA Geotech conference in Johannesburg was a presentation by Ryno Goosen of Suritec Geospatial.  Ryno, who was awarded the Best Paper prize at SA Geotec, gave a fascinating presentation about how he developed an open source GIS solution to fight copper cable theft.

In Canada copper cable theft costs the Canadian electricity sector an estimated $40 million annually.  In South Africa in 2014 there were 72,533 reported incidents of copper cable theft resulting in 10,736 arrests.  Copper theft incidents in the U.S. have tripled in the last 5 years.

Goosen Goosen’s solution architecture was based on open source geospatial software.  He chose open source for several reasons.  First and foremost, it enabled massive scalability by providing an elastic IT infrastructure.  Secondly it provided open interoperability with other open source software as well as proprietary systems. He also emphasized the importance of using software that was “battle-tested” in both military and commercial environments. 

His solution architecture was built on Cesium, GeoServer, Boundless Desktop/QGIS, Protobuf, Cassandra, WildFly, Solr and GeoTrellis.  Using this solution he was able to combine data from different sources including ground patrol and remote sensors.  By analyzing this data geographically and temporally he was able to determine spatial and temporal patterns of copper cable theft.  This enabled optimum deployment of resources.  The results were impressive.  Over a 30-month period cable theft was reduced by 69%.

The success of Goosen’s shows that open source GIS software has become a viable alternative for building complex and highly scalable solution-oriented architectures.  He also suggested that it levels the playing field for small to medium size enterprises by providing them with similar intelligence capabilities to their larger counterparts.