Core concepts

OrionGIS has a small number of building blocks. Once you know them, the rest of the platform follows.

#Project

A project is the container for one piece of work — "Water points survey", "County spatial plan", "Facility assessment". It holds everything that belongs to that work: its maps, its data, its forms and its dashboards. Each project has a name, a description and a cover image, and it is owned by the person who created it.

#Map

A map is a document you build in Map Studio: a basemap, a stack of layers, styling, labels and a print layout. A map lives inside a project (you can also start a quick scratch map with no project and file it into one later). A map is either a draft, which only you see, or published, which gives it a share link.

#Data

Data is what maps are drawn from. In a project's Data tab you can have:

• Catalogue datasets — the public curated datasets.
• Your own uploads — GeoJSON, GeoPackage, GeoTIFF or a zipped Shapefile. They are private to you until you make them public.
• Form layers — the submissions of a form linked to the project, drawn as points on a map.

#The catalogue

The catalogue (the Spatial Data Hub) is the shared index of datasets. Every dataset carries its source, licence and version, and standard web services (OGC WMS, WFS, WCS) and an API expose it to other tools. Files you upload are published to the catalogue. See Access and sharing.

#Form

A form is a survey you design in Collect and fill in on a phone or in a browser. Submissions are stored centrally. Link a form to a project and its submissions become a data layer.

#Dashboard

A dashboard is a page of charts, numbers and tables (called widgets) built on your catalogue and field data, with filters, that you can present to stakeholders.

#How they fit together

Project
 ├── Data      (catalogue datasets, uploads, form layers)
 ├── Maps      (built from the project's data)
 ├── Forms     (collect new data)
 └── Dashboards (report on the data)

Data flows one way through the picture: forms and uploads produce data, maps and dashboards present it. Because everything is in one project, you can go from a submitted survey answer to a point on a published map without exporting or re-uploading anything.