GIS mapping options

Mike's Notes

Some thoughts about adding Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping to Pipi 10, the next major release of Pipi.

Spacetime

An unresolved issue is how to integrate GIS with 4D spacetime. See the work of Ontologists Chris Partridge on BORO and NATO, and Matthew West on 4Dism, Shell Oil Refineries, and the Ontological foundations behind the UK Digital Twin Project for Built Infrastructure. Chris Partridge also raised a related question in the Ontolog Forum recently.

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Last Updated

09/02/2026

GIS mapping options

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 08/02/2026

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

Pipi 4 (2005-2008)

NZERN, with the help of Parker Jones at Eagle Technology, secured an ESRI Conservation GIS grant to add GIS mapping capabilities.

I gave a live demo and presentation of Pipi 4 at an NZ ESRI User Conference held in Wellington. The head of engineering at ESRI was in the audience. In a few weeks, over NZ$600,000 worth of ESRI software was on its way.

ESRI gave us everything they had. Multiple (up to 10) licenses at version 8.2

  • ArcIMS
  • ArcSDE
  • Workstation
  • All the extensions.
  • Everything!
There was so much boxed software that it came on a pallet.

The plan was to provide free, dedicated, and customised web map hosting for every conservation project in NZ that wanted it. The smallest mapped project was 1500 sq m, scaling up to large landscape-scale, whole catchment projects. Every project was different, so the provided GIS was customised to meet their needs. There was even a visit by an ESRI staff member who proposed enabling NZERN to extend this to conservation efforts in the Pacific Island states, by providing training using ESRI-supplied laptops.

I got to create all the GeoDatabases and hack JTX to run in reverse to manage user map-edits history.

It was going very well, and many individual projects were getting dedicated dynamic web maps with all their data and GIS layers. All labour was donated (Ten thousand hours). 

QE2 National Trust and other national conservation-related organisations were also interested in using this shared GIS system.

Then the government funding that covered the core annual running costs dried up.

Core costs included;

  • Power
  • Bandwidth
  • Hardware
  • Repairs
  • Software books

Then the Key government came in, followed by the Christchurch Earthquake.
What a waste of opportunity for conservation.

After that, governments love to reinvent the wheel, so there have been many well-funded attempts to develop GIS for biodiversity/stream health for community use in NZ. None of them has been as good as Pipi, and most of them disappear after a while. So we are going to do something about that, except it will be available globally in many human languages, across many industries, and will use open-source GIS software.

Parker Jones, with Bonita, went on to create a GIS for Conservation organisation in NZ, and has done a great job. All power to them.

Pipi 9 (2023 - )

GIS Plugins include

  • Apple Map
  • ArcGIS Map
  • Azure Map
  • Google Map

Pipi 10

Customers will be able to integrate Pipi with their own ESRI GIS account deployments. Pipi GIS will use OGC standards. I have to say here that I love ESRI software, and the Eagle Technology people were great, but it is far too expensive and restrictive for this social-enterprise startup.

Options

Use open-source; it's free, and DIY everything.

Default Option

  • QGIS
  • GeoServer 3
  • GeoNode
  • PostGIS + PostgreSQL

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 

These products are mature and conform to the OGC standards.

Geospatial Libraries

  • FDO – API (C++, .Net) between GIS application and sources; for manipulating, defining and analysing geospatial data.
  • GDAL/OGR – Library between GIS applications and sources; for reading and writing raster geospatial data formats (GDAL) and simple features vector data (OGR).
  • GeoTools – Open source GIS toolkit (Java); to enable the creation of interactive geographic visualization clients.
  • GEOS – A C++ port of the Java Topology Suite (JTS), a geometry model.
  • MetaCRS – Projections and coordinate system technologies, including PROJ.
  • Orfeo ToolBox (OTB) – Open source tools to process satellite images and extract information.
  • OSSIM: Extensive geospatial image processing libraries with support for satellite and aerial sensors and common image formats.
  • PostGIS – Spatial extensions for the PostgreSQL database, enabling geospatial queries.

Desktop Applications

  • QGIS – Desktop GIS for data viewing, editing and analysis — Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • GRASS GIS – an extensible GIS for image processing and analysing raster, topological vector and graphic data.
  • OSSIM – Libraries and applications used to process imagery, maps, terrain, and vector data.
  • Marble – Virtual globe and world atlas.
  • gvSIG – Desktop GIS for data capturing, storing, handling, analysing and deploying. Includes map editing.
  • uDIG - 

Web Mapping Server

  • MapServer – Fast web mapping engine for publishing spatial data and services on the web; written in C.
  • Geomajas – Development software for web-based and cloud-based GIS applications.
  • GeoServer – Allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Written in Java using GeoTools.
  • deegree – Java framework
  • PyWPS – implementation of the OGC Web Processing Service standard, using Python
  • pygeoapi - A Python server implementation of the OGC API suite of standards for geospatial data.

Web Mapping Client

  • GeoMoose – JavaScript Framework for displaying distributed GIS data.
  • Mapbender – Framework to display, overlay, edit and manage distributed Web Map Services using PHP and JavaScript.
  • MapGuide Open Source – Platform for developing and deploying web mapping applications and geospatial web services. Windows-based, native file format.
  • MapFish – Framework for building rich web-mapping applications based on the Pylons Python web framework.
  • OpenLayers – an AJAX library (API) for accessing geographic data layers of all kinds.

Hosting

The GeoServer and PostGIS + PostgreSQL Geodatabase will need to be deployed in the Pipi Data Centre and used by the spatial agent engine. Providing hosted GIS to customers will require Ajabbi to purchase or lease bare-metal servers to host open-source GIS Web Servers.

GeoServer 3 will be available in Docker. All doable.

Support

Sponsor open-source and pay for support from GeoSolutions, etc.

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