-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 6
Governance
GeoPrism Registry (GPR) is an open-source Digital Public Good recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance. It was initially financed through the Digital Solutions for Malaria Elimination (DSME) initiative to serve as the first implementation of the Common Geo-Registry (CGR) concept. A Common Geo-Registry is a governed platform for managing the authoritative identity, classification, relationships, hierarchies, provenance, and temporal evolution of geographic entities. Rather than requiring each information system to define and maintain its own location lists independently, a CGR provides shared geographic references that allow systems to interoperate by location across programmes, sectors, and time.
The need for GeoPrism Registry emerged from a gap in the digital public goods landscape. Health programmes, national spatial data infrastructures, and other public-sector systems increasingly depend on accurate and interoperable geographic information, yet most existing tools were not designed to govern multiple interrelated geographic hierarchies, preserve changes over time, or support authoritative curation by different institutions. In practice, implementers were often forced to manage geographic entities, hierarchies, and identifiers within individual applications, creating fragmentation and limiting interoperability across systems. GeoPrism Registry was developed to address this gap by treating geography not merely as map data, but as governed semantic infrastructure.
TerraFrame was selected by the DSME community to build the first CGR because its existing open-source technology stack, built on the Runway SDK, used a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) architecture well suited to the problem. Through this architecture, significant variation between implementations can be expressed declaratively rather than through custom software development. Classes, attributes, relationships, hierarchies, and other behavior can be configured through metadata, configuration files, or a graphical model builder at runtime. This metamodel-based approach made it possible to support diverse country and institutional requirements while preserving a common software foundation.
At the time GeoPrism Registry was initiated, TerraFrame’s technology stack was uniquely positioned to support the management of multiple, interlinked geospatial hierarchies in an open-source platform. Since then, GeoPrism Registry has evolved beyond the initial CGR implementation to include provenance management, temporal governance of geographic entities and relationships, and support for generating interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs. These capabilities now support emerging GeoAI use cases, including Geo-GraphRAG architectures that bring governed geospatial awareness to Large Language Models while preserving integrity, provenance, and trust.
As TerraFrame’s work has expanded from public health into broader National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) modernization, GeoPrism Registry has also evolved toward a federated architecture based on the Spatial Knowledge Mesh pattern. This pattern enables institutions to govern their own authoritative spatial knowledge while publishing interoperable knowledge assets that can be discovered, validated, and reused across sectors. Its objective is to make spatial data infrastructures a force multiplier for public and private innovation by helping automate semantic interoperability, dependency tracking, and temporal change management. In this way, GeoPrism Registry supports governments and their partners in creating the trusted data foundations required for future GeoAI applications.
This governance document describes how GeoPrism Registry is stewarded as open-source software and how its architecture enables the governance of interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs. Because GeoPrism Registry is addressing a specialized gap in the digital public goods landscape and helping establish a new architectural pattern for federated geospatial interoperability, its governance model is intentionally steward-led and architecture-governed. The project is not managed as a generic application in which all requested features are appropriate for inclusion in the core. Instead, roadmap decisions are evaluated according to whether proposed functionality strengthens the domain-agnostic platform, advances the principles of the Common Geo-Registry, supports federated spatial interoperability, and contributes to trustworthy GeoAI.
TerraFrame currently serves as the primary steward of the GeoPrism Registry roadmap. This stewardship role reflects both TerraFrame’s responsibility for maintaining the architectural coherence of the platform and the technical complexity of the problem space. GeoPrism Registry development is highly architecture- and computer-science-oriented, involving metamodeling, temporal data management, semantic interoperability, provenance, federated governance, and graph-based publication patterns. As a result, governance must ensure that contributions strengthen the long-term integrity and reusability of the platform rather than introducing implementation-specific behavior into the core.
At the same time, GeoPrism Registry governance is informed by real-world implementation partners and users. Contributors to the project’s direction have included partners in the social impact and public health space, as well as government customers working to strengthen national spatial data infrastructures. Their requirements help identify common infrastructure needs that should be incorporated into the core platform. Requirements that are specific to a single customer, domain, or deployment context are intentionally implemented outside the core product, through extensions, configurations, or customer-specific solutions. This approach protects GeoPrism Registry’s role as a reusable Digital Public Good while allowing it to support diverse operational contexts.
The governance model for GeoPrism Registry therefore balances openness with stewardship. The software is open source and intended for public benefit, but the core roadmap is curated to preserve architectural integrity, interoperability, sustainability, and alignment with the project’s mission. This model ensures that GeoPrism Registry remains a stable and reusable foundation for countries and organizations seeking to govern geographic knowledge, publish interoperable spatial knowledge assets, and build future GeoAI capabilities on trusted public infrastructure.
GeoPrism Registry is governed according to principles that preserve its role as reusable digital public infrastructure rather than a customer-specific application. These principles guide roadmap decisions, feature acceptance, architectural design, community engagement, and long-term stewardship. They also help determine which requirements belong in the core platform, which should be supported through configuration or extension, and which should remain outside the project scope. Public Benefit and Digital Public Good Alignment
GeoPrism Registry is developed as open-source software for public benefit. Its governance seeks to ensure that the platform remains accessible, reusable, and sustainable for governments, public-sector institutions, development partners, and implementers seeking to strengthen geospatial data governance and interoperability. Roadmap decisions are therefore evaluated not only according to immediate project needs, but also according to their potential to serve broader public infrastructure objectives. Domain-Agnostic Core
The core platform is governed to remain domain agnostic. GeoPrism Registry may be applied in public health, climate resilience, disaster response, infrastructure planning, natural resource management, and other sectors, but its core functionality should not become specific to any one domain. Domain-specific requirements are supported through configuration, extensions, integrations, or deployment-specific solutions rather than being embedded into the core platform. This protects the long-term reusability of GeoPrism Registry as a Digital Public Good.
GeoPrism Registry implements and advances the principles of the Common Geo-Registry concept. The platform is designed to manage the semantic identity, classification, relationships, hierarchies, provenance, and temporal evolution of geographic entities. Governance decisions should strengthen the ability of institutions to maintain authoritative geographic knowledge, manage multiple interrelated hierarchies, and support interoperability by location across systems and sectors. Metamodel-Driven Architecture
GeoPrism Registry is governed around a metamodel-driven architecture. Rather than hard-coding each implementation’s data model or workflow into the software, the platform uses abstractions that allow classes, attributes, relationships, hierarchies, and behaviors to be configured declaratively. This principle allows GeoPrism Registry to support significant variation across country and institutional contexts while preserving a coherent common platform. Features that undermine the metamodel abstraction or introduce avoidable implementation-specific logic into the core are therefore discouraged.
GeoPrism Registry is governed to remain functionally cohesive. The platform is not intended to absorb every feature requested by every implementation. New functionality should reinforce the project’s core purpose: governing interoperable spatial knowledge and enabling its publication and reuse. Features are evaluated according to whether they strengthen the CGR model, support interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs, improve temporal or provenance management, or advance the Spatial Knowledge Mesh architecture. This principle helps prevent architectural drift and protects the long-term sustainability of the platform.
GeoPrism Registry prioritizes interoperability at the point of data governance and publication. The platform is designed to reduce the need for repeated point-to-point integrations by enabling data to be published with shared semantic identity, authoritative provenance, temporal validity, and machine-readable relationships. Where possible, GeoPrism Registry aligns with open standards and emerging best practices from relevant standards communities, including geospatial, semantic web, and digital public infrastructure communities.
GeoPrism Registry is evolving toward a federated Spatial Knowledge Mesh architecture. This principle recognizes that no single institution should be expected to govern all geographic knowledge. Instead, different organizations should be able to curate the spatial knowledge for which they hold authority, while publishing interoperable knowledge assets that can be discovered, validated, referenced, and reused by others. Governance of the software therefore prioritizes capabilities that support distributed authority, dependency tracking, publication workflows, and temporal change propagation across independently governed spatial knowledge assets. Integrity, Provenance, and Trust
GeoPrism Registry governance emphasizes integrity, provenance, and trust. Geographic knowledge used for public decision-making must be traceable to authoritative sources, understandable in context, and valid for the period in which it is applied. The platform should therefore preserve information about where data came from, who maintains it, when it is valid, and how it relates to other data. This principle is especially important as GeoPrism Registry increasingly supports Spatial Knowledge Graphs and GeoAI workflows, where trustworthy outputs depend on governed and traceable inputs.
When requirements are specific to a country, institution, sector, donor programme, or deployment context, the preferred governance approach is to support them through configuration, extension, integration, or companion applications rather than modifying the core platform. This allows GeoPrism Registry to meet real-world implementation needs without weakening the general-purpose foundation. The core should contain capabilities that are broadly reusable and architecturally aligned with the project mission.
GeoPrism Registry is open-source software, but its core roadmap is steward-led to preserve architectural coherence and mission alignment. TerraFrame currently serves as the primary steward of the platform and is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the core architecture. Community input, partner requirements, and implementation experience inform the roadmap, but inclusion in the core platform depends on alignment with the governing principles described above.
GeoPrism Registry governance applies to the stewardship, evolution, and maintenance of the open-source software platform. It defines how decisions are made regarding the core roadmap, architecture, feature inclusion, releases, contributions, security practices, and alignment with the project’s mission as a Digital Public Good.
GeoPrism Registry is both governed software and software that enables governance. This document governs the GeoPrism Registry platform itself, including its metamodel architecture, reusable services, APIs, interoperability capabilities, temporal management, provenance support, and publication mechanisms for interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs. It does not govern the authoritative data managed within any specific deployment.
Institutions using GeoPrism Registry remain responsible for governing their own geographic entities, hierarchies, relationships, classifications, provenance, temporal validity, and published spatial knowledge assets. TerraFrame does not determine the authoritative status of country-specific data, adjudicate institutional mandates, approve local data changes, or define the operational policies of individual deployments.
The scope of GeoPrism Registry governance therefore includes the reusable software foundation and the architectural capabilities that enable geospatial data governance. It excludes the governance of deployment-specific content, which remains the responsibility of the appropriate national, subnational, sectoral, or organizational authorities.
This separation allows GeoPrism Registry to remain domain agnostic, architecturally cohesive, and broadly reusable while supporting diverse governance models across countries, sectors, and institutions.
TerraFrame currently serves as the primary steward of the GeoPrism Registry core platform. This includes responsibility for maintaining the software architecture, managing the roadmap, reviewing contributions, planning releases, addressing defects and security concerns, and ensuring that new functionality aligns with the project’s governing principles.
GeoPrism Registry stewardship is architecture-led. Because the platform implements a domain-agnostic, metamodel-driven approach to Common Geo-Registry, interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graph, and Spatial Knowledge Mesh capabilities, proposed changes are evaluated according to their impact on architectural coherence, interoperability, maintainability, and long-term reuse.
TerraFrame protects the boundary between the reusable core platform and deployment-specific functionality. Requirements that are specific to a country, sector, organization, workflow, or funding engagement are generally implemented through configuration, extension mechanisms, integrations, or companion applications rather than incorporated into the core.
Stewardship is informed by implementation experience, partner feedback, standards engagement, and the needs of governments and organizations using GeoPrism Registry. However, inclusion in the core platform remains curated to preserve the integrity and sustainability of the Digital Public Good.
TerraFrame’s stewardship applies to the software platform, not to the authoritative status of data managed within any deployment. Institutions using GeoPrism Registry retain responsibility for governing their own geographic entities, hierarchies, relationships, provenance, temporal validity, and published spatial knowledge assets.
GeoPrism Registry is developed as an open-source Digital Public Good intended to support a community of governments, implementers, development partners, standards organizations, researchers, and technology providers. Community governance defines how these stakeholders can engage with the project, provide feedback, identify needs, propose improvements, and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the platform.
Community input is welcomed through implementation partnerships, issue reporting, feature requests, documentation improvements, technical discussions, standards engagement, and direct collaboration with deployment teams. This input helps identify common requirements that may benefit the broader GeoPrism Registry ecosystem.
The community informs and contributes; stewardship curates and integrates. Because GeoPrism Registry is stewarded as a reusable infrastructure platform, community participation does not mean that all requested functionality will be incorporated into the core product. Proposed changes are reviewed according to the project’s governing principles, including architectural coherence, domain neutrality, interoperability, maintainability, and relevance across multiple implementations.
Contributors are expected to participate in a respectful, constructive, and mission-aligned manner. Contributions may include code, documentation, testing, bug reports, use cases, standards feedback, implementation experience, and architectural recommendations. TerraFrame reviews contributions for technical quality, security, maintainability, licensing compatibility, and alignment with the project roadmap. Community governance is intended to ensure that GeoPrism Registry remains responsive to real-world implementation needs while preserving its role as a stable, reusable, and sustainable Digital Public Good.
GeoPrism Registry is governed to align with open standards and to support interoperability across geospatial, health, semantic web, and digital public infrastructure ecosystems. The project prioritizes standards-based approaches where mature and relevant standards exist, and it avoids architectural decisions that would prevent integration with widely adopted standards or specifications.
GeoPrism Registry aligns with relevant standards and interoperability patterns from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), including approaches for publishing, querying, and integrating geospatial information. As the platform evolves toward interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs and federated Spatial Knowledge Mesh architectures, TerraFrame continues to track and participate in standards work related to geospatial APIs, semantic interoperability, DGGS, GeoAI, and spatial data infrastructure modernization.
GeoPrism Registry is also designed to remain compatible with health-sector interoperability needs, including integration patterns based on HL7 FHIR. While GeoPrism Registry is not itself a health information system, its representation of geographic entities, identifiers, hierarchies, relationships, provenance, and temporal validity is governed to support mapping and integration with health data exchange standards where appropriate. The platform includes a beta FHIR adapter to support emerging health interoperability use cases.
In some areas, existing standards do not yet fully address the requirements that GeoPrism Registry is designed to support, particularly around federated governance of spatial knowledge, temporal change management, interdependent hierarchies, and GeoAI-ready publication patterns. Where standards gaps exist, TerraFrame develops functionality using a standards-informed approach. This includes consulting with members of relevant standards communities, participating in research and pilot projects, presenting implementation experience at conferences (e.g., OGC, FOSS4G, HL7), and contributing to academic apublications.
This approach allows GeoPrism Registry to meet urgent implementation needs without waiting for every required standard to mature, while still preserving a pathway toward future alignment. When relevant standards evolve, GeoPrism Registry governance should evaluate whether existing functionality should be adapted, extended, or mapped to maintain interoperability and reduce divergence from the broader standards ecosystem.
Standards and interoperability governance therefore follows a practical principle: use existing standards where possible, design compatibly where standards are emerging, and contribute implementation experience back to the communities developing the standards needed for interoperable geospatial public infrastructure.
GeoPrism Registry is designed to help institutions govern geographic information as semantic infrastructure. In this context, governance extends beyond storing geographic features or displaying them on a map. It includes managing the identity, classification, relationships, hierarchies, provenance, temporal validity, and publication status of geographic entities so they can be reused reliably across systems, sectors, and time.
Data governance within a GeoPrism Registry deployment remains the responsibility of the institutions with the appropriate mandate and authority. These institutions determine which geographic entities are authoritative, who may create or modify them, which classifications and hierarchies apply, what approval workflows are required, and when changes become valid. GeoPrism Registry provides the software capabilities to support these governance processes, but it does not itself determine the authoritative status of deployment-specific data. Semantic governance concerns how geographic entities are represented so they can be consistently interpreted by other systems. GeoPrism Registry supports this by assigning stable identities to geographic objects, managing their classifications and relationships, preserving changes over time, and recording provenance. This allows systems to reference the same geographic entities consistently even when names, boundaries, parent relationships, or classifications change.
The platform also supports the governance of multiple interrelated hierarchies. Different institutions may need to maintain different views of geographic reality, such as administrative hierarchies, operational hierarchies, service areas, or other domain-specific structures. GeoPrism Registry allows these structures to be represented explicitly while preserving their relationships and dependencies. This reduces the need for each system to create isolated location lists and supports interoperability through governed geographic references.
Temporal governance is a core part of data and semantic governance. Geographic entities and relationships may change through events such as splits, merges, reclassification, boundary revisions, or organizational restructuring. GeoPrism Registry supports the management of these changes with validity periods so that data can be interpreted according to the geographic context that was valid at the time. This is essential for longitudinal analysis, reporting, decision support, and the publication of trusted spatial knowledge.
GeoPrism Registry also enables institutions to publish interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs. These published knowledge assets can expose governed geographic entities, relationships, provenance, and temporal context in machine-readable forms suitable for reuse by other systems. In a federated Spatial Knowledge Mesh architecture, each institution remains responsible for the knowledge it publishes, while GeoPrism Registry provides the common mechanisms that support interoperability, validation, and reuse.
Data and semantic governance therefore operates at two levels. At the deployment level, institutions govern their own authoritative geographic knowledge. At the platform level, GeoPrism Registry governance ensures that the software continues to provide the abstractions, validation mechanisms, provenance capabilities, temporal model, and publication patterns needed for that knowledge to become interoperable.
GeoPrism Registry release and security governance is intended to ensure that the open-source platform remains stable, maintainable, and suitable for use as digital public infrastructure. Releases are managed by TerraFrame as the current steward of the core platform, with attention to software quality, architectural coherence, backward compatibility, documentation, and implementation needs.
Release planning is informed by roadmap priorities, implementation experience, partner requirements, defect reports, security considerations, and alignment with the project’s governing principles. New functionality is reviewed before inclusion in a release to ensure that it strengthens the reusable core platform and does not introduce unnecessary deployment-specific behavior into the software.
GeoPrism Registry uses versioned releases to support predictable adoption and maintenance. Release decisions consider the impact of changes on existing deployments, configuration models, APIs, data models, interoperability mechanisms, and upgrade paths. Where changes may affect compatibility, TerraFrame seeks to document the impact and provide guidance for implementers.
Security governance includes monitoring and addressing software defects, dependency risks, and vulnerabilities that may affect the platform. TerraFrame is responsible for reviewing reported security concerns, prioritizing remediation, applying dependency updates where appropriate, and communicating relevant security-related changes through release notes or other project communication channels.
Because GeoPrism Registry is deployed in varied national, institutional, and cloud environments, operational security remains a shared responsibility. TerraFrame governs the security of the core software to the extent possible within the open-source project, while deploying organizations remain responsible for securing their own infrastructure, access controls, hosting environments, data governance policies, backups, monitoring, and operational procedures.
Release and security governance therefore balances platform stewardship with deployment responsibility. TerraFrame maintains the integrity and security posture of the reusable software foundation, while implementing institutions remain accountable for the secure operation of their own deployments.
GeoPrism Registry is sustained through a stewardship model that combines open-source public benefit with real-world implementation demand. Unlike many Digital Public Goods that depend primarily on donor funding, GeoPrism Registry receives a significant portion of its ongoing investment through TerraFrame customer engagements. This reflects an important sustainability principle: a Digital Public Good is more likely to remain viable when it solves a durable market and government need, rather than relying exclusively on time-limited grants or donor-funded projects.
GeoPrism Registry addresses a geospatial interoperability problem that is relevant across both developed and developing countries. Governments, public-sector institutions, and their partners increasingly need to manage authoritative spatial data, temporal change, provenance, semantic interoperability, and publication of Spatial Knowledge Graphs for advanced analytics and GeoAI. These needs are not limited to a single income context or sector. By solving a shared infrastructure problem, GeoPrism Registry can attract sustainable investment from high-resource settings while continuing to deliver value to lower-resource environments.
TerraFrame is seeing increased demand for GeoPrism Registry as governments and organizations seek to build interoperable Spatial Knowledge Graphs and Geo-GraphRAG capabilities from trusted geospatial data. This demand supports continued investment in the core platform, including improvements to temporal governance, provenance, federated publication, standards alignment, and GeoAI-readiness. As demand for trustworthy geospatial infrastructure grows, GeoPrism Registry’s sustainability is strengthened by its role as a reusable foundation for multiple domains and implementation contexts.
This sustainability model benefits both developed and developing countries. Customer-funded implementation work helps finance improvements to the open-source core, while the project’s Digital Public Good commitments ensure that those improvements remain reusable beyond a single customer or engagement. Lower-resource countries can benefit from capabilities developed through commercially or government-funded projects, while higher-resource countries benefit from a lower-cost, open-source, standards-aligned alternative to proprietary infrastructure.
Long-term stewardship therefore depends on maintaining the balance between market relevance and public-good alignment. GeoPrism Registry must continue solving real operational problems for governments and institutions while ensuring that the reusable core remains open, domain agnostic, interoperable, and suitable for public benefit. TerraFrame’s stewardship model is intended to preserve this balance by aligning customer-funded development with the broader roadmap of the Digital Public Good.
Future governance evolution may include clearer contributor roles, expanded maintainer responsibilities, advisory input from implementation partners or standards communities, or additional processes for roadmap review and community participation. Any such evolution should preserve the distinction between governance of the open-source software platform and governance of deployment-specific data, which remains the responsibility of implementing institutions.
Governance amendments should be documented in a manner that allows users, contributors, and adopters to understand how the stewardship model has changed over time. This ensures that GeoPrism Registry governance remains transparent, adaptable, and aligned with its role as reusable digital public infrastructure.