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July 2025 Program Status Update

Introducing Our New Strategic Technology Plan

Overview diagram of proposed BTAA-GIN technology stack

As the BTAA Geoportal continues to grow, so do the demands on our technology. With the recent expansion of the Big Ten and the addition of new geospatial resources from the West Coast, we saw an opportunity to explore more modern and flexible ways to manage our collections. The result is a new Strategic Technology Plan: a roadmap for building a technology stack that is modular, resilient, and future-ready.

The most exciting feature of this new approach is a central metadata API. This feature will make it easier than ever to access and reuse our geospatial records. The API will support multiple discovery portals and access points, and we are even using it to develop a QGIS data discovery plugin!

As part of this shift, we are moving away from a large, all-in-one geoportal application toward a more flexible, modular framework built on open-source Python tools. This new structure makes it easier to update individual components and empowers us to think bigger: to prioritize data over tools, to collaborate better across institutions, and to build infrastructure that can adapt and grow over time.

Our 2025-26 roadmap encompasses four projects that will put this plan into action. Development is already underway, with full rollout planned by mid-2026. Stay tuned as we share updates!

Program Activities

Committees

  • Did not meet as all committee work was wrapped in June.
  • Held a working meeting to review and note updates to the Geoportal tutorials.
  • Did not meet as all committee work was wrapped in June.
  • The July Coordinating Committee and Program Team meeting were canceled due to vacations.

Workgroups

  • Aligned on the Urban Base Layers initiative, identifying seven foundational city-scale datasets shared across major metro areas in Big Ten states—a focused strategy that supports both high-quality curation and regional scalability.
  • Confirmed Minneapolis as the first data provider partner to approach, paving the way for partnership-based data collection and future collaboration with additional cities.
  • Work on the final report continued asynchronously with the plan of finalizing the report in time to share at the August program team meeting.
  • Did not meet

BTAA Geoportal

Analytics Statistics

This month by the numbers

  • Visitors: 10,164
  • Visits: 10,995
  • Downloads: 10,758
  • Visits with download: 5.5%
  • Outlinks: 1,975
  • Visits with outlink: 17.96%
  • Num. searches: 1,724
  • Search keywords: 470

Unique visitors by month

More stats

See full statistics on our Analytics Dashboard

What Users are Looking for

  • Top Google searches leading to the Geoportal

    1. kuwait sex
    2. btaa geoportal
    3. sanborn maps
    4. oakland county mi parcel search
    5. franklin county ohio school district map
    6. franklin county line map
    7. fire insurance maps california
    8. geoportal
    9. purdue campus map
    10. oakland county parcel viewer
    11. nj wetlands map

  • Top internal keyword searches

    1. PLSS
    2. Geology
    3. Sanborn
    4. ArcGIS hubs
    5. Address
    6. Parks
    7. Parcel
    8. La habra
    9. Turkey
    10. Puerto Rico


Collections

Total records as of August 1, 2025: 107,805

Harvesting Activities

Title Records added Records retired
2025-07-01 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 92 108
2025-07-22 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 53 109
edu.wisc new WI DOT scanned maps 42 0
PASDA 08a-01 Q3 2025 10 0
Add multiple ArcGIS Hubs for cities 8 0
Harvest records for new city ArcGIS Hubs 967 0
MN GeoCommons 05a-01 July 2025 2 0
CKAN scan Q3 2025 0 0
Socrata Harvest Q3 2025 0 0
Total 1174 217

Web Development

New Features or Enhancements

  • Strengthened Geoportal Stability & Performance Implemented a bot mitigation solution using Cloudflare Turnstile and Samvera tools, dramatically improving site reliability and reducing server load following disruptive bot traffic spikes.
  • Advanced OpenGeoMetadata API Development Published a comprehensive draft specification for a new geospatial API designed to support BTAA and broader discovery efforts, laying the groundwork for future adoption across the OpenGeoMetadata community.
  • Explored Budget-Friendly Hosting Solutions Successfully tested Kamal deployment on a low-cost physical server, offering a promising option for hosting BTAA’s GeoData API with minimal infrastructure overhead.

More development details

Read the most recent development report for more details

Priority Projects Update

Refer to our Priority Projects board.