The Geo Engine

Geo Engine is a cloud-ready geospatial data processing platform. Here, we give an overview of its architecture and describe the main components.

Architecture

Geo Engine consists of the backend and several frontends. The backend is subdivided into three subcomponents: services, operators, and data types. Data types specify primitives like feature collections for vector or gridded raster data. Moreover, it defines plots and basic operations, e.g., projections. The Operators block contains the processing engine and operators, i.e., source operators, raster- and vector time series processing. Furthermore, there are raster time series stream adapters, which can be used as building blocks for operators. The Services block contains protocols, e.g., OGC standard interfaces, as well as Geo Engine specific interfaces. These can be workflow registration, plot queries, and data upload. Each of the subcomponents can have additions in Geo Engine Pro, for instance, User Management, which is only available in Geo Engine Pro.

Frontends for the Geo Engine are geoengine-ui for building web applications on top of Geo Engine. geoengine-python offers a Python library that can be used in Jupyter Notebooks. 3rd party applications like QGIS can access Geo Engine via its OGC interfaces.

All components of Geo Engine are fully containerized and Docker-ready. Geo Engine builds upon several technologies, including GDAL, arrow, Angular, and OpenLayers.