Open-Source Geospatial Infrastructure

1. Overview

This document describes a fully self-hosted geospatial infrastructure built on open-source software, deployed on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n server. The system eliminates dependency on Esri-hosted services, enables unrestricted public publishing, supports concurrent multi-user editing, and serves as a spatial backend for LLM grounding workflows.

The stack is intentionally lean, reproducible, and portable. All outputs — map tiles, APIs, web maps, and research publications — are exportable and deployable to external hosting platforms without licensing restrictions.

2. Hardware

2.1 Server

Model	Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n-1 (Type 11AD)
Processor	Intel Core i7-8665U vPro (4-core / 8-thread)
Memory	16 GB DDR4-2666
Storage	512 GB NVMe PCIe SSD
Network	Wired Gigabit Ethernet
Operating System	Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS

2.2 Network

TP-Link TL-SG105 (Gigabit switch)
Campus LAN → Switch → Server + Workstation
Static IP recommended

3. Software Stack

Data Layer	PostgreSQL + PostGIS
Tile Serving	pg_tileserv
API Layer	FastAPI
Web Server	Caddy
Frontend	MapLibre / Leaflet

4. Objectives

Eliminate proprietary dependencies
Enable unrestricted publishing
Centralize spatial data
Support multi-user workflows
Expose spatial APIs
Ensure portability

5. Capabilities

Data & GIS

Concurrent editing via PostGIS MVCC
Spatial indexing (GiST)
Scales to large datasets

Web & Publishing

Static + interactive maps
Vector tile serving
Storymap-style publishing

LLM Integration

Nearest feature queries
Radius queries
Bounding box queries
Containment queries

6. Architecture

PostGIS → FastAPI / pg_tileserv → Caddy → Browser (MapLibre / Leaflet)

7. Implementation Plan

Phase 1: Infrastructure
Phase 2: Multi-user GIS
Phase 3: Web & tiles
Phase 4: API
Phase 5: Basemap
Phase 6: Export
Phase 7: Public access

8. Key Properties

Self-hosted
Multi-user
License-independent
API-first
LLM-integrated
Portable
Reproducible

OPEN-SOURCE GEOSPATIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Project Architecture & Implementation Plan