Vom Desktop ins Web – der neue Atlas der Schweiz
How we are moving the Atlas of Switzerland from a desktop application to the web, with a demo of the public beta. In German.
FOSSGIS is the German-language conference for free and open source GIS software and OpenStreetMap, held every year by the FOSSGIS association and attended by around a thousand people from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In 2026 it took place at the University of Göttingen.
The Atlas of Switzerland is the national atlas, published by ETH Zurich since 1961. Its desktop version, released in 2016, has an interactive 3D globe and more than 400 thematic maps. In this talk I showed how we went about migrating it to the web: the concept and the UX design, the architecture, why we chose MapLibre with deck.gl for rendering, and Astro, Vue.js and Tailwind CSS for the application. I also covered moving the content, gave a demo of the public beta, and looked ahead to new topics, performance work and 3D.
The talk on the conference programme (opens in a new tab).