8. Sharing Maps and Reproducible Projects¶

Learning goals¶

• Build a story map that walks a reader through your findings.
• Share a project as a public link, embed it in a web page, or export it as a standalone HTML file.
• Reproduce a map from Python with the geolibre package.
• Leave with a plan for using GeoLibre in your own work.

Lecture (15 min)¶

What makes a map reproducible?¶

A reproducible map is one that someone else can open, inspect, and rebuild without you. GeoLibre projects get there by design:

• A .geolibre.json project records where every layer comes from (a URL, service, or query), how it is styled, the camera, and plugin state. It is plain JSON, so it diffs cleanly in Git.
• Cloud-hosted data means the project points at the same source for everyone, not at a copy on one person's laptop. Static files (COG, GeoParquet, PMTiles) give everyone identical bytes as long as the file is not replaced; live services (WMS, WFS, OGC API, STAC searches) can return different results over time, so record the date you used them.
• Layers computed in the browser (a hillshade, a SQL result) are either embedded in the project (small vector results) or flagged as not saved (rasters), so you know what a recipient will see.

Ways to share¶

Before sharing, the Share dialog runs a share-readiness check: it lists layers a recipient will not be able to load (local files, hosts without CORS, expired URLs) and strips credentials such as API keys from the upload.

Hands-on (25 min)¶

Open the Section 7 project, or your own, and rename it NGIS 2026 - 8 Story map and sharing. If the Time slider is still bound, deactivate it with Plugins → Time slider so all earthquakes show.

Exercise 8.1: Build a three-chapter story map (12 min)¶

1. Choose Project → Story map....
2. Fill in Title Ten Years of Nevada Earthquakes, Subtitle M2.5+ events, 2016-2025 (USGS ComCat), and Byline with your name.
3. Zoom the map to all of Nevada and click Add chapter. Each chapter captures the current camera. Title it A restless state and add a one-sentence description.
4. Use View → Set view... to move to the Monte Cristo Range (longitude -117.87, latitude 38.17, zoom 9.2, pitch 45). Click Add chapter, title it Monte Cristo Range, May 2020, and describe the M6.5 event and its aftershocks.
5. Move to Reno and Lake Tahoe (longitude -119.85, latitude 39.35, zoom 8.8, pitch 30). Add a third chapter, Close to home: Reno and Lake Tahoe.
6. If you moved the map after adding a chapter, open the chapter and click Set to current view to re-capture it.
7. Click Present. Step through the chapters with the arrows, or click Play automatically. Click Exit when done.

Exercise 8.2: Share it (8 min)¶

Pick at least one:

• A file plus a link. Save the project, put the file on any public web host (for example a GitHub repository with Pages turned on), and open it with:

  https://web.geolibre.app/?url=https://YOUR-HOST/your-map.geolibre.json
  

  The host must send CORS headers that allow https://web.geolibre.app (GitHub Pages does). If the project URL itself contains ? or &, encode it first, for example with JavaScript's encodeURIComponent.

• share.geolibre.app. Choose Project → Share..., click Sign in, approve the popup, review the readiness list, and share. You get a public URL like https://share.geolibre.app/you/my-map.geolibre.json.

• Embed. Paste this into any HTML page (here using the finished project):

  <iframe
    title="Ten Years of Nevada Earthquakes story map"
    src="https://web.geolibre.app/?url=https://assets.geolibre.app/projects/workshops/ngis-2026/08-story-map.geolibre.json&layout=viewer"
    width="100%" height="600" style="border:0" allowfullscreen>
  </iframe>
  

• Standalone HTML. Project → Export → Export as HTML... writes one file you can email or open from disk. The story map builder also has Export HTML for a scroll-driven story page and Handout (PDF).

Exercise 8.3: The same map from Python (5 min, optional)¶

In any Jupyter environment (a local notebook, JupyterLab, VS Code, or Google Colab):

%pip install geolibre

from geolibre import Map

base = "https://assets.geolibre.app/data/workshops/ngis-2026/"
m = Map(center=(-119.8, 39.4), zoom=8)
m.add_basemap("positron")
m.add_cog(base + "reno_tahoe_dem.tif", name="Reno-Tahoe DEM", colormap="terrain")
m.add_geojson(base + "nv_counties.geojson", name="Nevada counties")
m.add_csv(base + "nv_earthquakes.csv", name="Nevada earthquakes")
m.save_project("my-workshop.geolibre.json")
m

The full GeoLibre app renders inside the cell. This is a partial map (the layers, without the story chapters), but the saved my-workshop.geolibre.json opens in the web and desktop apps, so a notebook and a point-and-click session produce the same kind of artifact. To reopen a saved project in a notebook, including one you saved from the web app with its story map, use m.load_project("my-workshop.geolibre.json") with that file's path.

Wrap-up (10 min)¶

Today you:

1. Read data where it lives: GeoJSON, CSV, FlatGeobuf, GeoParquet, COG, PMTiles, Zarr, and EPT, all over HTTP.
2. Found imagery through a STAC catalog and combined it with OGC map and feature services.
3. Ran spatial SQL, buffers, and terrain analysis without a server.
4. Streamed a billions-of-points LiDAR survey of Reno in 3D.
5. Extended the app with plugins and an AI assistant.
6. Packaged everything as projects that open from a single link.

Take two minutes to write down one dataset or workflow from your own job that you could move to this model, and what is blocking it today (data format, hosting, CORS, credentials, or habits).

Keep learning

• GeoLibre documentation, Tutorials, and Video Tutorials
• Gallery of shared projects to open and fork
• Source code and issue tracker: github.com/opengeos/GeoLibre
• Questions, bugs, and feature requests: open an issue or a discussion on GitHub

Check your work¶

Open the finished project

The finished project opens straight into the story map presentation.

End of workshop, 5:00 p.m. Thank you for attending! Return to the workshop overview.