Semantic GIS: Think First, Click Later.
GIS projects are often chaotic “black boxes,” making them difficult to trust, reproduce, or build upon. At the heart of semanticGIS is a desire to establish new Geospatial Practices that focus on a structured, transparent, and well-documented process, from the first question to the final map. Through this process, your GIS project should become collaboration-friendly, trustworthy and portable.
Our Approach: A new geospatial practice, Not Just a Tool
In the section Geospatial Practice, we outline five clear phases your GIS project should go through, plus one overarching activity of Project Stewardship, of which maintaining Design rationale is the key activity. Although semanticGIS focuses on the intellectual process, certain actions must be taken for the thoughts to manifest. The section on the Geospatial Technology Stack contains an overview of and guides to the most common software components of a GIS project.
To support this better Geospatial Practice, SemanticGIS includes two tools:
- SemanticGIS Pipeline language
We use a simple, human-readable Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to define the analytical workflow before implementing it in any specific GIS software. This abstract recipe is the single source of truth for your analysis and can be used to automatically generate several outputs:- Mermaid Flowcharts for visualising the logical steps.
- Step-by-step Recipes for desktop GIS software (e.g., QGIS).
- Executable Python Scripts for automated processing.
- A Geospatial Data Framework, a framework for understanding how “reality” is represented in terms of geospatial data.
What next?
To start on the SemanticGIS, it is recommended to start by following the recommended Geospatial Practice, where each phase contains links to tools and methods relevant to that phase. Once you have understood the recommended Geospatial Practice, you can use the website as a general reference tool. To navigate supports an advantage graph-based navigation available in the top right of each page