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What drives developing countries to select free open source software for national spatial data infrastructure?

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Abstract

While there are many discussions that free open source software for geospatial could provide a cost-effective solution for the construction and management of national spatial data infrastructures, little empirical evidence exists of what actually leads developing countries to adopt such software. To fill this void in the literature, this study fulfills an empirical assessment of the main factors that affect the adoption of free open source geospatial software in developing countries. In particular, the study uses the analytical hierarchy process method to evaluate how the functional, economic and public values of free open source geospatial software contribute to the software selection of developing countries. A survey for 10 respondents from 9 Asian and Latin American countries revealed that economic values were the most important, functional values the second most, and public values the least important factor. The survey also showed that the adoption rate of free open source geospatial software would be similar for different purposes of national spatial data infrastructures such as data management, sharing, utilization, and servicing. The results of the study mean that developing countries, to date, want to introduce free open source software for national spatial data infrastructures mainly from economic motivations. This finding was possible since the study took a comprehensive approach to the adoption of free open source geospatial software, in contrast to other studies that often focused only on software engineering aspects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Spatial Information Office, Korea Land and Housing Corporation, Seongnam-si, South Korea

    Junyoung Choi

  2. Geospatial Information Research Division, Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, Anyang-si, South Korea

    Myung-Hwa Hwang

  3. Lx Education Institute, Seoul, South Korea

    Hyungtae Kim

  4. Department of Geoinformatics, Kyungil University, Gyeongsan-si, South Korea

    Jaeseong Ahn

Authors
  1. Junyoung Choi
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  2. Myung-Hwa Hwang
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  3. Hyungtae Kim
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  4. Jaeseong Ahn
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Correspondence to Jaeseong Ahn.

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Choi, J., Hwang, MH., Kim, H. et al. What drives developing countries to select free open source software for national spatial data infrastructure?. Spat. Inf. Res. 24, 545–553 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41324-016-0051-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41324-016-0051-9

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