GeoGit & GeoGinger: GitHub for Catrographers

At last week’s OpenGov Hack Night, Nick Dorian spoke about GeoGit and GeoGinger and how they can help with the process of making maps.

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One of the issues with GitHub is that it’s not a great tool for tracking changes in maps.

GitHub has a great feature that will show the differences in changes in a repository. For example:

githubdiff

You can see in red what has been deleted and the green text shows what was added for this particular commit. However, when changing arounds map data – the difference looks like this:

geodiff

Image Courtesy Nick Dorian

It doesn’t really show the changes that were made in a way that anyone can understand.

Using GeoGit, you can easily keep track of the differences in geographic data from one commit to another.

Nick explains how it works here:

While GeoGit helped to identify changes in geographic data, there wasn’t an easy way to push this information back into GitHub. So, over the summer Dorian built GeoGinger as a way to bridge GeoGit and GitHub. Here’s Nick explaining GeoGinter:

Both GeoGit and GeoGinger are open source projects that can be found on GitHub.