About TechnicalGIS
Who runs TechnicalGIS, what it publishes and how its tutorials, code and data sources catalogue are produced and checked.
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TechnicalGIS publishes practical, hands-on guides for GIS professionals and Python developers who work with spatial data, together with a country-by-country catalogue of where to find GIS data.
What is the site for?
We help developing communities to access GIS and remote sensing data, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. Satellites record rain, crop growth, floods and where people live, all over the world, and much of that data is free. We turn it into simple tools anyone can use from a phone: Farm check tells a farmer whether the rains have started and what the next 10 days look like, and the community tools answer questions about a whole district. The tutorials are for people who want to do the work themselves. Read our mission.
Who runs TechnicalGIS?
TechnicalGIS is run by Sean Blaney. Articles are published under the byline “TechnicalGIS Team”. Questions, corrections and suggestions go to the team through the contact page.
What does the site publish?
- Python geospatial tutorials: complete workflows with GeoPandas, Shapely, rasterio, rioxarray, STAC, OSMnx and Folium, from reading data to a finished map, model or statistic.
- Articles: shorter guides for desktop GIS such as QGIS and ArcGIS Pro, first published in 2022.
- GIS data sources: national mapping agencies, statistics offices, open data portals and global datasets for every country and territory, with licences and formats.
- Farm check: a free phone-friendly check for any farm: have the rains started, when do they usually start, rain and heat in the next 10 days, and how green the crops are compared with other years.
- Community tools: free tools for any district: is this season better or worse than usual, and where did it flood and how many people live there.
How are the tutorials made?
- Every number and figure comes from running the code. Each tutorial is written around a script that is published in full on its source code page, with its requirements and the console output it produced.
- Versions are stated. Each tutorial lists the Python and library versions it was tested with.
- Data and licences are explicit. Each tutorial ends with a “Data and licences” section naming every dataset, its publisher and its licence or attribution.
- Real-world problems are left in. Where a dataset or API behaved unexpectedly, such as duplicate catalogue entries or tiles that need an API key, the tutorial explains the problem and the fix.
How is the data sources catalogue maintained?
Every country page is curated by hand: national mapping agencies, statistics offices, environment and geology agencies, open data portals and Geofabrik OpenStreetMap extracts, grouped by theme. An automated link checker visits every URL (Humanitarian Data Exchange pages are confirmed through the HDX API); moved links are updated, and links that fail are fixed or removed.
Re-using material
See the press page for re-use of images and map layouts, and the privacy and cookie policy for how the site handles your data.