Integrape
How Integrape built an application powered by geospatial data
"Using Koordinates allowed us to build our app with geospatial data — without needing to build or support a full GIS stack. There really is no other platform like it"
Joris Besamusca
Development ManagerIntegrape allows vineyard managers to compare data from all stages of crop production — for the first time.
Integrape brings together all the data that vineyard managers and other stakeholders need to understand what’s happening in their vineyards — including satellite imagery, lab results, data from government agencies, multi-spectral imagery, and more.
“The Story of a Vineyard.”
Joris Besamusca, the Development Manager at Integrape, describes it as “the story of a vineyard.”
As Joris explains, “Integrape combines geospatial with historical data, enabling growers to see how the health and production of their vines change over time in response to whatever actions they’re taking. Users can switch between the macro vineyard view or drill down to specific sub-block — and in some cases down to the individual vines.”
“In many cases they are already collecting the data, but Integrape allows them to leverage this data to identify correlations and trends (both good and bad) then act accordingly.”
Joris says that their app is particularly important for presenting a single, canonical view of data for all relevant stakeholders. “Many of our clients have multiple vineyards so it’s really useful for the viticulturists, vineyard managers and agronomists/consultants to all be looking at the same information.”
We needed a way to store and manage many types of data — and not only manage it, but serve it into our application with cartographic styles. This is where Koordinates was essential, and I don’t know of any other solution like it.
Building an app — not an entire geospatial stack
According to Joris, Koordinates enabled him to build a geospatial application, without needing to build and maintain a geospatial stack from scratch.
Koordinates’ support for a wide range of geospatial and tabular formats — as well as the platform’s automatic creation of query APIs against every geospatial layer — meant that Integrape had a good chunk of their technology stack immediately available.
“Once we moved to a GPS-based geospatial model, we were suddenly in a position to bring in many more types of data. But we needed a way to store and manage that data — and not only manage it, but serve it into our application with cartographic styles. This is where Koordinates was essential, and I don’t know of any other solution like it.
“We can bring in data from all our providers, in a range of both vector and raster formats, apply our custom cartographic styles, and then serve it up in the Integrape application. It really solved a big problem for us.“
For Integrape, it was also crucial that their application was built on a platform that could reliably scale.
As Joris explains, “The service offered by Koordinates makes it much easier for us to build new products. For example, the mobile sampling app we have been working on, it’s going to be really easy to pull in data from Koordinates that we’re already using in the web application.
“We also feel confident we can host data from several new emerging sensor technologies without the need for custom solutions. Once it’s in Koordinates, presenting it on our platform is seamless — that gives us a lot of confidence.”
Better data collaboration
According to Joris, Koordinates also made it easier to work with his many different data suppliers.
“Koordinates helped us work much more efficiently and effectively with our external data providers, and meant that we could manage and query data from multiple providers in one place. It means we can add value to our application with more kinds of geospatial data, more easily — even though we aren’t trained geospatial or GIS experts ourselves.
“Solutions other than Koordinates in the GIS industry would have been prohibitively expensive, and wouldn’t have done what we wanted, anyway. They would have hugely limited what we wanted to do.”
“Koordinates has that credibility, as well, being an established platform with large government customers. This makes it easier when we’re working with prospective customers, who appreciate that Intergrape is built using a platform with that level of security and reliability. Certain data we are dealing with can be commercially sensitive — so it’s great we can give our customers that confidence.”
Growing with Koordinates
Joris has watched Koordinates evolve over the last year, and is excited to see how it grows. “I also appreciate that it’s a platform with a lot of features that we can utilise as we grow. We can scale with Koordinates, and know that the platform can handle the volume of data we’re continuing to add.
“And we’re confident we’re going to be getting even more value out of it as we explore other components and the new features that Koordinates is rolling out.”