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The Open Source GIS Stack (OSGS)

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The Open Source GIS Stack (OSGS)
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351
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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In the last few years, open source GIS has been developing relatively rapidly with an increase in the number of open-source GIS software available for performing various specialty functions. With this increase came the problem of managing the dependencies of different software when installing them on the same machine or getting them to work together to accomplish a task. How was the setting up process the last time you needed to make a map, share it and write about how you made the map? This is where the docker-based Open Source GIS Stack (OSGS) comes in. OSGS is a rich, integrated, and opinionated GIS Stack with a focus on configurability and ease of use built from open source components. The primary objective of the OSGS stack is to provide simple and effective end-to-end solutions based on open source geospatial technologies. Some of the key services offered by the OSGS platform are Nginx and Hugo for web publishing using static web pages, File Browser for file management, QGIS-Server for publishing web maps, PostgreSQL and PostGIS for database management, and Metabase for visualizing your data. We’ll take a look at how easy and painless making, sharing and writing about maps can be. The Open Source GIS Stack by Kartoza is maintained in the Kartoza OSGS repository (github.com/kartoza/osgs).
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Hello, my name is Victoria Nema, I'm from Nairobi, Kenya, and I will be presenting on the open source GIS stack by Katoza. One of the most common tasks in GIS is making maps. On screen is a simplified view of what the map making process looks like. We have the data collection stage, you can get your data from various open sources
like OpenStreetMap, government sites, or you can take the way of collecting your own data using tools like margin maps and Qfield. Next step is data storage. You can store your data using shape files, most commonly known, or geo packages or using
a database. Third step is a data processing where you clean up your data and make the actual map. Now you can take the step of publishing your map as a service because it makes it easily shareable, especially in the final stage where you talk about your map. Now you can talk about your map on a Twitter post, medium article, or on your GitHub
project readme. Now I've just mentioned a few of the most commonly used tools in the map making process, but there are many more interesting and different technologies that you can choose to use, and the numbers are continuously increasing every day. Now once we've chosen our tools, installing and configuring our tech stack can be difficult,
especially when trying to manage all the different dependencies for each component. Now this is where we at Catoza come in with the OSGS stack. Now OSGS is a rich, integrated, and opinionated GIS stack with a focus on configurability
and ease of use built from open source components. Simply put, OSGS is a set of docker orchestration routines to bring up different services in different containers, make them all talk together, and present them as one cohesive infrastructure. Now OSGS also provides some scripts to do various management commands and tasks.
For example, bringing up and bringing down services using the make utility. The objective of this platform is to make setting up the different technologies you need for your workflows as easy and as painless as possible. What we've done is to select key components from the open source ecosystem, wire them
up together in a way that's easy to use and maintain, and provided a series of sample end-to-end solutions which you can use as is or which can act as a launchpad for new projects. This allows you, the user, to focus on making solutions rather than deployment and
maintenance of the infrastructure you need. Going back to our map making process, this is what it looked like. This is what it looked like based on the OSGS platform. We can pull OSM data for an area of interest using the Docker OSM service.
The data is stored in a Postgres database using the Postgres service. We've got QGIS desktop to make our map. We've got the file browser and QGIS server services to publish our map. And finally, a static website using the Hugo service where we can post articles about our map.
Now getting the above services I've mentioned is as simple as running the commands on screen in your terminal. This will deploy the services you need and you can get started making your map as easy and as painless. Good. Some of the changes we're planning to introduce in the platform are to get rid of the make file. This is because we currently have a heavy dependence on make targets and
a relatively complex Docker compose configuration. We're planning to move to a cloud native infrastructure design using Kubernetes. We're also planning to introduce blueprints which will provide default configurations, boilerplate projects, sample data, and other components for application specific purposes.
We'll also be adding an admin UI to provide a click to run experience for stack deployment and a front-end management console. Now on screen are the links for the project. We've got the GitHub repository and also the documentation, especially in the workflow section of documentation.
We've provided tutorials on how to use the platform for different applications. We also have a demo site where you can check out what the staff and interns at Cartoza have been able to accomplish using OSGS. Thank you.