Open Geographies — platform-side design draft

Working design documents and the canonical schema for Open Geographies (OG), a no-code, multi-tenant geospatial publishing platform built on Core Data / FairData for Emory's ECDS. This is the platform/renderer side of the project (provisioning, multi-tenancy, the shared SSR renderer, the schema as consumed by clients), shared here as a draft so it can be read alongside the lower-layer engine, ecds/core-data-connector-open-geographies (branch v1).

The platform-side code lives in its own repositories in this organization:

• ecds/open-geographies-engine — the open_geographies Rails engine (the upper layer: wizard backend, provisioning, Site config/branding/navigation, authority imports, the by-slug public atlas API). Mounts on Core Data / FairData and depends on the lower-layer engine above.
• ecds/core-data-places — the shared multi-tenant SSR renderer, a fork of Performant Software's core-data-places (Astro + Node) with full upstream history. Renders any atlas by slug at request time; the Elasticsearch/ Searchkit search path is in progress.

This repository holds the design documents, the schema mirror, and the connector patches.

Start here

• og_schema/ — the canonical schema artifacts: canonical_template.json (authoring layer), es_mapping.json (index layer), and a README with a worked example. The engine carries the authoritative copy at lib/core_data_connector_open_geographies/v1/; this copy is the platform side's working version (v0.2.1-draft) — it carries proposals not yet applied to the engine's copy (notably the preview → preview_media promote rename) and is reconciled with the engine's copy at each template convergence, never merged independently.
• OG_CANONICAL_SCHEMA_updated.md — the prose schema spec (envelope, per-atlas fields, Place / Media / Work / Map Layer, open questions).
• OG_SCHEMA_FIELD_METHOD.md — how a model's fields are derived (GCA ∩ schema.org, validated against HRCGA).
• OG_SCHEMA_ANALYSISV2.md — de-bespoking the Georgia Coast Atlas schema into the OG core.

Also here

• OG_SCHEMA_ANALYSISV2.md — the model-by-model analysis of what in the Georgia Coast Atlas schema is universal, per-atlas, or bespoke.
• ENGINE_EXTRACTION_RESULT.md — how the platform's additions were extracted into an additive Rails engine installed on unmodified upstream Core Data.
• ATLAS_CREATION_WALKTHROUGH.md — the atlas provisioning flow, end to end.
• Georgia Coast Atlas architecture.png — the reference architecture the platform generalizes.

These are working documents from an evolving design; the schema artifacts in og_schema/ are the normative part.