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Department of Physical Development and Urban Renewal

What is the Open Source GIS Stack?

In the open source geospatial world, there are different interesting technologies that have been developed to allow one to manipulate, visualize, publish, manage, edit, etc. geospatial data. These technologies are often in disparate projects. Programs like the QGIS project, are often ensemble applications that take some of these different technologies as components and use them to provide some higher level functionality. In some cases the integration is in silos or vertical applications, for example QGIS, PostGIS, Geoserver, etc. The aim of this project is to take a number of those different silos and incoporate them into a single platform, therefore making it really easy to access and publish the different types of services that are easily available on their own but not so easily available in a consolidated platform.

The Open Source GIS Stack (OSGS) is a platform based on Docker, which is a container deployment environment. Containers are isolated application runtimes. They typically contain a minimal version of an operating system, typically Linux. In that minimal version of the operating system the containers will typically have one single task they are responsible for doing, for example running PostGIS or running Geoserver and so on. Each container has a very specific task and the design intent that you do not deploy mutliple services in a single container. You must deploy each service in its own container then orcherstrate those containers together. This is all managed using Docker and Docker Compose which is the orchestration environment for Docker. OSGS is simply 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 architecture.

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