Introducing GeoJupyter
We believe that geospatial data analysis and exploration should be free, open source, and accessible for everyone!
Matt Fisher 
🧩 Need
We believe that geospatial data analysis and exploration should be free, open source, and accessible for everyone!
Currently, a divide exists between two worlds: The desktop GIS world, in which QGIS and ArcGIS provide intuitive visualization-first interfaces to exploring data; and the programming-based GIS world which provides cutting-edge editing, reproducibility, and automated publishing experiences. While this is an oversimplified framing, it highlights contrasts to set the stage for GeoJupyter.
Between those two worlds, users of programming-based workflows face the daunting problem of a blank page and steep learning curves, while non-coders are missing out on the power of programming-based workflows to enable low-friction modular reuse, reproducibility, and publishing.
🔭 Vision
GeoJupyter is an open and collaborative community-driven effort to reimagine geospatial interactive computing experiences for education, research, and industry.
We aim to combine the approachability and playfulness of desktop GIS tools, the flexibility and reproducibility of coding-driven GIS methods, and the collaborative and storytelling power of Jupyter to enable more researchers, educators, and learners to confidently engage with geospatial data.
GeoJupyter will consist of a new generation of tools and enhancements to existing libraries supporting exploration of data about our planet. This includes tasks traditionally done with desktop GIS applications, but also analysis pipelines that go beyond typical GIS uses; supporting any dataset about our planet that has spatio-temporal structure, for example climate models or subsurface data acquired with remote sensing instruments.
📝 Process
To achieve our goals, we will:
- Gather information about geospatial data practitioners’ workflows and points of pain or joy.
- Establish new GeoJupyter community spaces and build new partnerships with Earth science and open source communities.
- Develop sacrificial concepts and prototypes to fit our work to community needs.
- Deliver high-quality software solutions, educational materials, and training sessions.
⌚ Where is GeoJupyter now?
We have established a community chat space on Zulip and a community calendar. We are currently scheduling our first series of community meetings, with many more to come.
Sponsored by the European Space Agency, QuantStack is leading development of JupyterGIS (GitHub), a multi-player GIS environment for JupyterLab. We’re imagining new workflows, and we need your creativity, knowledge, and skills!
We have completed over a dozen interviews targeting geospatial data practitioners from diverse backgrounds including education, data user support, Earth science, remote sensing, software engineering, and product development. Some themes we’ve preliminarily identified:
🤩
It feels amazing to explore data, see a completed visualization, and use creativity to answer questions with geospatial data!
😖
It can be time-consuming, finnicky, and frustrating to create visualizations and debug geospatial data, which is notoriously “quirky”.
🧗
Learning geospatial concepts and programming is hard. Many learners benefit from immediate visual feedback.
We will follow up soon with a more comprehensive blog post about community insights.
For early development, we have narrowed our focus on the educational user: teachers and students. We will build partnerships with research education communities and university classrooms as early users who will shape GeoJupyter.
GeoJupyter contributors currently include QuantStack, 2i2c, Development Seed, the Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment, members of the UC Berkeley and other university communities, members of the NASA Earth Science community, and members of the Jupyter community. Thank you all for your amazing contributions! 🙇