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Technology

Groundwork runs on the open-source libraries and OGC standards listed on this page.

Built on the FOSS4G stack

OpenLayers

Rendering, interaction and projection handling all run on OpenLayers, the open-source map engine.

WFS and WFS-T

Groundwork edits features on QGIS Server and other WFS-T servers with Insert, Update and Delete transactions, over GML and Filter Encoding.

QGIS project files

Groundwork loads layers, symbology, field aliases and display fields straight from a .qgs or .qgz project. There is no separate config format.

GeoStyler

GeoStyler converts OGC SLD and QGIS QML styles into one common style model.

proj4

Groundwork reads each source's coordinate reference system and reprojects it automatically, using proj4.

GeoJSON

Groundwork saves edits to a cloud folder as GeoJSON, and you can download any feature layer as a GeoJSON file.

STAC

STAC is Groundwork's internal catalogue model. Groundwork normalises every source a map connects to onto STAC, and connects to external STAC catalogues directly.

Vector basemaps

Groundwork draws the OpenFreeMap street map with ol-mapbox-style, and takes aerial imagery from Bing Maps.

Built on Portolan Spec v0.1.0

Groundwork is an early adopter of Portolan, the emerging open standard for cloud-native geospatial catalogues, and uses it as its own catalogue standard.

  • Loads GeoParquet, PMTiles and COG, the formats Portolan requires
  • Picks assets by role and matches Portolan's registered media types
  • Follows child links to load a catalogue that is split across files
  • Checks each new version of the spec while Portolan is pre-1.0

The fields Groundwork adds to a catalogue are called QUAC. The QUAC field reference lists each one and the values it takes.

Read more

See the Administrator Guide to connect a WFS server or QGIS project.