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Your data, in the tools you already use

· 3 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

A platform that can only be read by its own app is a trap, however nice the app is. This week FastGIS learned to speak the standards, and to let riders see each other move.

OGC, properly​

Not a checkbox — the real thing, over your own GRASS data:

  • OGC API — Features for your catalogue and saved routes
  • OGC API — Processes, exposing allowed GRASS modules as async jobs, with the callback conformance class so a job can push to a subscriber
  • OGC API — Records and Maps over per-user datasets
  • pygeoapi and STAC sidecars over PostGIS, behind a forward-auth gate

Which means: open QGIS, add a connection, and your analysis is there. No export step, no format conversion, no "can you send me a shapefile".

Processes is the one we think is underrated. Your allowed GRASS modules are exposed as OGC jobs — you POST an execution, poll the job, collect the results — and with the callback class the job pushes to you instead. A slope analysis over a big raster stops being something you sit and watch.

We also fixed the small things that decide whether a standards client actually works — advertising the service-desc link so QGIS accepts the landing page, emitting https hrefs from behind the proxy, and parsing GRASS's binary floating-point range so raster metadata is right.

Riders on the map, live​

Realtime location sharing shipped: a WebSocket fan-out over Redis pub/sub, friends, and named groups. Share to the people you choose, for as long as you choose — it is a session you start, not a setting you leave on and forget.

Friendship is two-sided; you request, they accept. Nobody appears in your audience because someone typed your name. The desktop viewer grew a "Live Riders" panel, and the phone shows peer markers moving in something very close to real time, because Redis pub/sub means a position update fans out to twelve people without twelve database round trips.

Per-client API tokens landed at the same time, so a phone and a desktop browser can hold separate concurrent credentials for the same account. Revoking your laptop should not log out your motorcycle, and losing your phone should not mean re-authenticating everything you own from the side of a road.

Surveys, logbooks and Android​

A spec-driven survey renderer on the phone, a designer on the desktop, and a schema contract between them — so a form you design in a browser renders natively on a phone in a field with no signal, without anyone shipping an app update.

Turn-by-turn trips now record themselves into a ride logbook automatically. No "start recording" to forget; if you navigated it, it is in the book.

And Android got its first two phases in quick succession: an online-only build, then on-device Valhalla routing — the same offline engine iOS runs.

The pattern​

Everything here is the same instinct. Your rides, your data, your tools — reachable from whatever you already use, and shareable exactly as far as you decide.

Dig deeper: riding together covers sharing end to end, and the developer docs have the OGC recipes.