Boson¶
Geospatial data is extremely diverse and fragmented. SeerAI tackled this problem by developing Boson. Boson is a horizontally scalable geospatial service proxy and data mesh. That is, Boson allows a user to easily connect to various data services and to retrieve those data in whichever form the user likes. The way this works is that a client talks to Boson, which requests data from a downstream service, and then Boson translates those results into the requester’s requested format. In the end, the client doesn’t care where the data comes from as long as it looks like what it requested. Boson handles this negotiation for Features/STAC Items, tabular and Raster Data, with more types to come.
Ultimately, this means that you do not need to know where the data come from, only how you want to receive it. You make a request for data through one of several Servicer Endpoints (e.g. STAC APIs, ESRI GeoServices REST APIs, etc.), and the Servicer translates your request into one or more Boson requests. These requests go to the Dataset’s Provider plugin, which performs the actual request for data against the remote endpoint, and returns a response to Boson. Finally, the Servicer translates this back to the requested format and the request is complete. As a result of Boson’s architecture described above, Boson can deliver data using ANY PAIR of Servicer and Provider. This means that you can request Google Earth Engine through an ESRI GeoServices Image Service, query for ESRI Features through a OGC Features API, and much, much more. Additionally, since Boson is horizontally scalable, it can serve a massive number of requests (though it will always be bottlenecked by the downstream service’s limitations). Furthermore, Boson can operate as a service mesh. Anything in Geodesic that needs to make scalable requests can run its own Boson. Rather than talking to some centralized host, it can speak to Boson, which then sends the appropriate requests to the downstream service, which itself could be another Boson. All in all, Boson is an extremely powerful tool. So while geospatial data is extremely diverse and fragmented, in the Geodesic view of the world, it doesn’t have to be.
For general information about Boson, see the How We Think About Data and Boson Overview.
