open-gis

A Claude Code skill for production-grade geospatial work with an open-first stack and pragmatic hosted/SaaS choices when global scale, latency, SLA, or data quality makes local processing a poor fit.

When loaded, it gives Claude opinionated defaults and reference material for the modern open GIS stack — STAC for discovery, GeoParquet + COG + PMTiles for storage, DuckDB and PostGIS for compute, MapLibre and Martin for delivery — plus QGIS, GDAL/OGR, GeoPandas, xarray/rioxarray, PDAL, OSRM/Valhalla, tippecanoe, and scale-aware hosted service guidance.

What's in this repo

• SKILL.md — the skill entry point: triggers, global defaults, format and compute decision matrices, anti-patterns, and a quick triage guide.
• references/data-sources.md — OSM, Overture, Sentinel/Landsat, regional portals, STAC catalogs.
• references/services-and-scale.md — local vs hosted/SaaS services for global-scale basemaps, elevation, routing, geocoding, place search, and postcodes.
• references/formats-and-crs.md — choosing formats, conversions, projections, EPSG codes.
• references/processing.md — GDAL/OGR, GeoPandas, xarray, DuckDB, PostGIS, PDAL.
• references/analytics.md — vector/raster analytics, terrain, hydrology, network, point clouds.
• references/web-delivery.md — PMTiles, MVT, Martin, TiTiler, MapLibre, deck.gl.
• references/qgis.md — QGIS desktop, plugins, PyQGIS, Processing, QGIS MCP.
• references/validation-and-ops.md — validation, manifests, attribution, and deployment checks.

Estonia-specific guidance (Maa- ja Ruumiamet, ETAK, EPSG:3301 / L-EST97) is included throughout.

Install

The recommended way is the skills CLI, which works for Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, Codex, and 50+ other agents.

Recommended: skills CLI

Install globally (available in every project):

npx skills add jaakla/open-gis -g

Or install into the current project only (committed alongside your code):

npx skills add jaakla/open-gis

Useful flags:

# Preview what's in the repo without installing
npx skills add jaakla/open-gis --list

# Target a specific agent
npx skills add jaakla/open-gis -g -a claude-code

# Non-interactive (CI-friendly)
npx skills add jaakla/open-gis -g -y

Update later with npx skills update open-gis. Remove with npx skills remove open-gis.

Manual install (fallback)

If you'd rather not use the CLI, clone directly into your agent's skills directory. For Claude Code:

# User-level (every project)
git clone https://github.com/jaakla/open-gis.git ~/.claude/skills/open-gis

# Project-level (one repo)
git clone https://github.com/jaakla/open-gis.git .claude/skills/open-gis

Verify

Start Claude Code and run /skills — open-gis should appear in the list. The expected layout is:

<skills-dir>/open-gis/
├── SKILL.md
└── references/
    ├── analytics.md
    ├── data-sources.md
    ├── services-and-scale.md
    ├── formats-and-crs.md
    ├── processing.md
    ├── qgis.md
    ├── validation-and-ops.md
    └── web-delivery.md

Use

The skill auto-activates when you ask Claude about geospatial work — terms like GIS, OpenStreetMap, Overture, Sentinel, Landsat, LiDAR, GeoTIFF, shapefile, GeoPackage, raster/vector tiles, isochrones, spatial joins, EPSG codes, and projections will all trigger it. You don't need to invoke it manually.

Example prompts that engage the skill:

• "Pull all buildings in Tartu from Overture and publish them as a PMTiles layer."
• "Compute average NDVI for these polygons from Sentinel-2 over the last 12 months."
• "Reproject this GeoTIFF from EPSG:3301 to EPSG:3857 as a COG."
• "Set up an OSRM routing server from a Estonia OSM extract."
• "Build an isochrone API around these points."

If you want to force the skill to load, you can reference it explicitly:

Use the open-gis skill to convert this shapefile to GeoParquet.

What this skill will and won't do

Will:

• Recommend modern, cloud-native formats (GeoParquet, COG, PMTiles) and flag legacy patterns (Shapefile output, MBTiles for new deployments).
• Push spatial joins to DuckDB / PostGIS instead of Python loops.
• Discover data via STAC before downloading.
• Preserve license metadata (OSM ODbL, Overture per-source, Sentinel attribution).
• Pin dataset versions for reproducibility (Overture releases, STAC item IDs, OSM extract dates).

Won't:

• Trigger on simple location lookups ("what city is this?") or casual map references with no analytical work.
• Default to proprietary services when an open/self-hosted option fits the scale, quality, privacy, and budget.

License

See repository for license terms.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome at github.com/jaakla/open-gis. When adding a new tool or workflow, place it in the matching reference file and add a one-row entry to the relevant decision matrix in SKILL.md.