MIGRATE: A FOSS WEB MAPPING APPLICATION FOR EDUCATING AND RAISING AWARENESS ABOUT MIGRATION FLOWS IN EUROPE

Abstract. Recent years have seen a noticeable growth in migration flows from Africa and Middle East to Southern Europe, thus generating a remarkable increase of attention on media and public opinion, sometimes resulting in stereotypes and prejudices. Funded by the European Commission – Joint Research Centre through the MYGEOSS program, MIGRation pATtterns in Europe (MIGRATE) aims at educating the citizens about migration fluxes in Europe using a gamification approach based on a trivia game. MIGRATE is completely developed with Free and Open Source Software. On the server-side Django is used to define the models that handle all the required data and tables are created in a PostgreSQL database. Questions and answers are sent in JSON format to the client, while the geospatial layers in GeoJSON format are rendered on the map interface using OpenLayers 3. Bootstrap, HTML5 and CSS3 are used for responsive design, while the jQuery library is used to ease the JavaScript programming. All the data sources used within MIGRATE are available as full and open access with no restrictions for reuse, except for the obligation to mention the source of the input data. Exploited data sources include OpenStreetMap for geospatial information, and UNHCR, IOM, Eurostat and The Migrant’s Files project for non-geospatial information. Overall, data shows how the users’ perceptions change while playing and that players’ awareness of migration-related problems increases with the number of games played. The source code of MIGRATE and the collected data are available respectively under the EU Public License (EUPL) and the CC BY 4.0 license.