See user, administrator, and developer documentation in the wiki

Terrapyn is an Open Source spatial data and analytics infrastructure based around unifying many of the open source python geography projects into a content management and collaboration framework. Terrapyn is meant to be a framework that handles both classical and exotic formats in a unified way, setting up a system of drivers that connect these data sources to web services.

From there, data can be catalogued, described, queried, and Terrapyn' CMS can serve as a host to a myriad of domain-specific applications.

Terrapyn was developed at RENCI to deal with various projects centered around providing application infrastructure around scientific geographic data. It has been used in 11 projects at RENCI in:

• Environemtnal sciences (hydrology, weather modeling)
• Earth science
• Epidemiology
• Public health
• Decision support
• Emergency management and mitigation
• Digital humanities
• Digital media

It is now an integral part of TerraHub, and is used to provide map tiles and styling to enhance TerraHub's geographic offering. TerraHub LLC now commercially supports the Terrapyn project and actively contributes to its continued development in Open Source.

We are actively seeking collaborators and contributors that can help grow the usage and sustainability of the Terrapyn endeavor. The biggest thing we need right now is documentation. If you can read Python code and write readable documentation either as developer or user documentation, we need your skills!

Geography used to be the exclusive domain of GIS systems such as ArcGIS and MapInfo. Web-mapping, data APIs such as those provided by Facebook, Twitter, and the like, and huge datasets like those that come from NASA have become far more important to the average researcher and are difficult to work with in these traditional platforms.

Terrapyn' lofty goal is to solve this problem and provide a mechanism for analytists, experts, and researchers to use these data in a way that's fundamentally easier and more fluid than current tools provide.

We also aim to provide a way to publish map data in a way that treats maps, cartography, and visualization as "not special." We aim for publishing tools that are more like Wordpress than they are like Apache Server.

Terrapyn is based around treating data sources as curated content, and on supporting the development of applications and data APIs that enable people to work with data through a unified, well-understood interface. Toward this, we embrace OGC standards for interoperability and will work actively to support and more fully implement these standards.

We also follow and embrace open source projects in geography and cartography that have gained community traction and where these are more widely used or more capable than current OGC standards, we adopt these instead. For example, rendering maps is provided by Mapnik and stylesheets are compiled through Carto.

Terrapyn incorporates a number of reusable apps that work in concert:

• terrapyn.geocms: Data publishing, semantics, and metadata. WMS and soon to be WFS web services that provide OGC standard ways of accessing and visualizing datasets on a map or providing them to be consumed GIS or analytics systems like Arc, SAS, or qGIS.
• terrapyn.ows : WMS and WFS webservice code that can be adapted to projects.
• django_docker_processes : Container driven analytics. Deploy complex analytics as a simple web service that integrates with Terrapyn data using GitHub and Docker!

Terrapyn is licensed under an MIT-style license. See LICENSE.txt for details