Overview

Geo Engine is a platform for processing and analyzing biodiversity data with geographic information. It consists of several components. The backend manages access to the data and its processing and supports various data standards for raster data and vector data via the popular GDAL translator library. The backend provides the functionality via a web service layer (APIs). The frontend serves either as a Geographic Information System (GIS) with full functionality or as a component library for building custom portals and dashboards. The GIS-based option is used for the implementation of VAT system that is a community-agnostic service at the Application Layer. The component library is used for creating community-specific applications for a data product of the Semantic Layer.

RDC Integration

Geo Engine offers good integration into the RDC. It supports SSO and the VAT instance is running fully containerized on the de.NBI cloud. A prototypical implementation exists for accessing data from the Aruna Object Storage.

Getting started

The easiest way to become familiar with Geo Engine is to take a look at the publicly accessible VAT instance, which is a community-agnostic GIS web application backed by Geo Engine.

You can also use the python package, either connecting to the VAT instance's backend, which runs at https://vat.gfbio.org/api/, or to your own backend.

For running your own backend (and frontend) take a look at the backend and frontend GitHub repositories. You can find instructions on how to compile and run them in the respective readme files.

User Guide

There is documentation available where you can learn about Geo Engine's architecture and e.g. the operators available. Also see the python API reference and the Jupyter Notebook examples.

Developer Guide

Since Geo Engine is open-source, you can easily extend and customize it to your own needs. Most relevant for creating new community-specific applications are the options to add datasets, data providers and create custom dashboards.

As an admin of an existing Geo Engine instance you can already manage datasets via the python API (https://python.docs.geoengine.io/datasets.html), but you also have the option to extend the backend with entirely new data provider implementations here.

New dashboards can be added here, where you can also take a look at existing dashboards. A dashboard can reuse existing core components and thus offers an easy way to only perform customization where needed to create a community-specific dashboard.