Open Source Geospatial Foundation

8 min readAug 2, 2021

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 2006 to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader Free and open-source geospatial community.[2] It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources.

OSGeo draws governance inspiration from several aspects of the Apache Foundation, including a membership composed of individuals drawn from foundation projects who are selected for membership status based on their active contribution to foundation projects and governance.

The foundation pursues goals beyond software development, such as promoting more open access to government produced geospatial data and completely free geodata, such as that created and maintained by the OpenStreetMap project. Education and training are also addressed. Various committees within the foundation work on implementing strategies.

Governance[edit]

The OSGeo Foundation is community driven and has an organizational structure consisting of elected members and nine directors, including the president.[1] Software projects have their own governance structure, by requirement. see FAQ. The OSGeo community collaborates via a Wiki, Mailing Lists and IRC.

Projects[edit]

Several OSGeo projects can communicate with each other and other geographical tools.

OSGeo projects include:

Geospatial Libraries[edit]

FDO — API (C++, .Net) between GIS application and sources; for manipulating, defining and analyzing geospatial data.
GDAL/OGR — Library between GIS application 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[edit]

QGIS — Desktop GIS for data viewing, editing and analysis — Windows, Mac and Linux.
GRASS GIS — 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.

Web Mapping[edit]

Server[edit]

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

Client[edit]

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 — AJAX library (API) for accessing geographic data layers of all kinds.