City of SF takes its master address system open source

Reposted from CivicCommons.org, by Karl Fogel

We’re pleased to announce that San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System has now been open sourced!

EAS is a web-based system for managing the city’s master database of physical addresses, tied to Assessor’s parcels and the City’s street centerline network. We posted a short screencast of EAS in action a couple of months ago, and since then there’s been a lot of interest in it from other jurisdictions.

Responding to this, San Francisco decided to open source it right away, even before it goes into production in early 2011. Working with lead programmer Paul McCullough and GIS manager Jeff Johnson, last week we moved the source code out to a public repository — preserving a year and a half of development history — and transferred all the bug tickets and documentation likewise. Paul wrote a setup script to help new developers turn the raw source code into a deployable app, and we created a discussion group where those trying out the software can ask questions and share experiences.

From this point forward, all of SF’s development on EAS is taking place in the public project. If you’re interested in trying EAS, please go to code.google.com/p/eas, check out the tree, and be ready to contribute to improving the deployment procedures. Remember that SF has been developing this internally for a year and a half — the system is tuned for deployability in SF’s environment, but it will take a while to make it easily deployable elsewhere. …