Ricardo's Blog

by Ricardo Morin

Provita Bioportal: A gateway to Venezuelan biodiversity data

I am pleased to share the outcome of my recent collaboration with Provita: a portal for biodiversity data in Venezuela.

The portal was created to make it easier to access data records of Venezuelan species on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform, as well as data generated by Provita’s own projects. The goal is to make this information more widely available to researchers, students, and the general public.


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Provita Geoportal: generating map preview tiles

On this post, I describe the approach used by the Provita Geoportal to pre-generate map preview tiles using a serverless approach.

Why pre-generate tiles?

Traditionally, map tiles are generated dynamically (and cached) using a GIS server. This requires installation, monitoring and maintenance of some server capability, whether it is a physical server somewhere, a hosted virtual machine, or perhaps a container image hosted in some cloud service provider. A solution like this would most likely require hosting database management system as well. And we don’t want any of that!


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It is here! The Provita Geoportal

I am pleased to announce the beta release of my latest volunteer project: the Provita Geoportal. In previous posts I discussed some of the design and implementation details of the project, but I was waiting for the public release of the product to share the end-user and admin functionality of the site.

The purpose of the Geoportal is to enable professionals, researchers, academics and the general public to find, pre-view and download geospatial data sets about Venezuela. These data sets are published by the Provita team and are associated with the organization’s mission and projects.


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Serverless Geoportal: Admin authorization

Here, I continue discussing implementation details of the Provita Geoportal. In my first post on the topic, I discussed the overall design of the Geoportal. I followed with a more detailed description focused on data organization and storage.

In this post (Updated Feb 17, 2021), I describe the approach used to provide an access control mechanism for Admin users to populate and maintain the content of the Geoportal.


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Serverless Geoportal: where is the data?

This is a follow up to my earlier post discussing the design of a Geoportal for Provita. In that post, I mentioned that we use the serverless JAMStack approach, with no servers and no databases to monitor and maintain.

So, “without” servers or databases, how are we organizing and managing the data of the site?

In this post, I answer the question by describing the data organization and the storage aspects of the Geoportal.


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Developing a serverless Geoportal using the JAMStack

Over the past few months, I have been working on a cool new project for the Provita folks.

Provita wants to maintain and publish a collection of geospatial data sets to enable researchers, 3rd party organizations, and casual users to have access to up-to-date Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data for supporting ecology, biodiversity, and environmental protection applications, studies and analyses.

In this post, I introduce key project requirements and the overall design of the app.


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