A technical reference for automating license tracking, metadata generation, catalog synchronization, and compliance validation for spatial datasets.

🌐 www.geospatialcompliance.org

Geospatial compliance is an engineering problem long before it is a legal one. Every dataset a GIS team publishes carries obligations that have to survive automation: a license whose share-alike terms propagate through every derived product, metadata that must validate against ISO 19115 or DCAT-AP before ingestion, attribution that has to be generated — not remembered — and an audit trail that can reconstruct exactly how a figure was produced months later. When any of those steps is manual, compliance drifts, licenses conflict silently, and an audit finds gaps no one can explain.

This site is a deep, code-first reference for the GIS data managers, open-source maintainers, Python automation builders, and government and agency technical teams who build those pipelines. Every article leads with runnable Python and anchors each pattern to the specific obligation it satisfies — SPDX license identifiers, ODbL and Creative Commons compatibility rules, ISO 19115 / FGDC / STAC / DCAT-AP metadata schemas, and CI/CD enforcement gates that keep non-compliant data out of production.

The library is organized into four areas, spanning 52 in-depth pages:

• Geospatial Data Licensing & Compliance Fundamentals — license selection and comparison, Creative Commons for GIS datasets, commercial EULA compliance tracking, automated attribution mapping, and geospatial risk scoring frameworks.
• Automated Metadata Generation & Schema Mapping — ISO 19115 template generation, FGDC-to-ISO conversion pipelines, DCAT-AP spatial profile mapping, STAC catalog automation, and metadata schema validation and linting.
• CI/CD Validation & Policy Enforcement for Spatial Data — pre-commit hooks for spatial metadata, schema linting in CI, topology and geometry validation, policy enforcement gates for data pull requests, and broken-reference detection.
• Spatial Data Audit Reporting & Compliance Governance — tamper-evident audit trails and evidence retention, data lineage and provenance tracking, automated compliance report generation, and compliance dashboards for spatial catalogs.

• GIS data managers proving spatial data compliance to auditors and stakeholders.
• Open-source maintainers who need attribution and license propagation to be automatic and correct.
• Python automation builders wiring metadata generation and validation into ETL and CI/CD.
• Government and agency technical teams meeting ISO 19115, FGDC, DCAT-AP, and open-data mandates.

A static site generated with Eleventy, authored in Markdown with hand-built inline SVG diagrams, structured data (JSON-LD), and a strict quality bar — every page is validated for accessibility (WCAG 2 AA), structured-data correctness, internal-link integrity, and mobile performance before it ships. The site is deployed on Cloudflare Workers.

npm install
npm run build     # build to _site/
npm run dev       # local preview

The content is published for the geospatial engineering community as a reference resource. Issues and suggestions are welcome via the repository's issue tracker.

Built and maintained by geospatial-compliance · www.geospatialcompliance.org