Jupytergis Breaks Through to the Next Level

JupyterGIS uses OpenLayers as its visualization backend. It runs entirely in the browser and supports GPU-accelerated rendering through WebGL when available

This seems to be a Python based Jupiter notebook (style?) thing for collaboratively working with GIS data/visualizations.

OpenStreetMap is a project to "map the world". In the end, OpenStreetMap provides data (and map tiles) for other things to use.

Going out on a limb (since I haven't used it) but JupyterGIS can probably make use of OSM data, along with other data sources.

JGIS builds on OpenStreetMap and other open geospatial data sources as basemaps or overlays. JupyterGIS itself is a Jupyter-based interface for working with GIS data—so you can visualize, query, and process OSM or any other data directly from notebooks alongside Python tools like GeoPandas.

Openstreetmap is not mentioned anywhere in the JupyterGIS repo [1]. As is mentioned OSM data can be used anywhere.

[1] https://github.com/search?q=repo%253Ageojupyter%252Fjupyterg...

Osm is a database (in the Wikipedia sense not the Postgres sense). You will be able to use osm data in this tool.

Ok, you link to a deployment, and also the docs say this:

> Collaborative GIS Environment: Work together on geographic data projects in real-time.

How does that work? I can apparently make changes to the files, and even save them, but then my changes are gone when I reload it. Where were the changes saved? This is exactly what I'm wary of when using Jupyter...

I guess things might get nasty when you try to _run_ simultaneously, unless they actually have implemented a CRDT for the whole notebook state (it would still be nasty from a usability POV, but at least it would be consistent). Just writing on the notebook would work just as any other collaborative editor out there, I expect.

Yes, Jupyterlab has a collaboration extension.

I've spent the past month writing a HTTP+WebSocket proxy to be used with Jupyterlab for an ESA-adjacent company, and spent a good deal of time trying to make the collaboration system work behind this proxy.

That said, I don't think my contribution is at all related to this post.

I see a few advantages. For my work in particular, I have to rely on creating desk study reports via exporting PDFs from QGIS - this depends on export DPI, page size etc. Following that I have to pull those plans into e.g. Word and it's a messy system.

A python notebook would be a nice way of generating reports of GIS data in an interactive way without being forced to use pages, PDFs, and embedded image files.

Notebooks is a nice and soft way to bring a programming mindset to non-programmers.

Your actions are repeatable and can be stored in a centralized repository.

There are probably some macro abilities in QGIS (it is an amazing tool), but this means moving to "script first" from "click first".

I can see it for programmers. Here you can use industry standard python libraries (shapely, geopandas etc.). Nobody really wants to learn PyQGIS (the python interface for qgis). So while qgis is much more full featured for "desktop" gis (designed to compete with esri arcgis) i can see the use case here for people who want to build their own extensions and port code from this to other python projects more easily.

If you're doing primarily analytics rather than making a map, I could see how JupyterGIS might be a better choice.

(but you can always just use proj/GDAL at the import/export layer...)

Drag with middle mouse button is supposed to scroll, but actually does nothing on this page.

It seems like something called "nicescroll" hijacks the scrolling on the page, its compiled in the minified javascript so a bit hard to tell though.

Turning off javascript seems to fix it though.

Since it was the ipython notebook I have only ever used jupyter locally. So my first instinct is to do it all on the backend too, but maybe they care about network latency? It looks like they're using this as a collaborative tool. So kind of like a multiplayer online video game, you don't want to waste time rendering graphics server side.