Uploading Data

Use the Flo.w CLI upload command to upload geospatial data files. The uploaded data will be available as a Flo.w Dataset. A Flo.w Tile Source will also be created to allow the data to be accessed as vector map tiles.

Supported Formats

The GDAL library (opens new window) is used to process uploaded files. Many file formats (opens new window) are supported although you will typically work with GeoJSON (opens new window), zipped ESRI Shapefiles (opens new window) and CSV.

Additional options are available. If not specified, suitable defaults will be provided or auto-detected:

Option	Description	Default
--id	ID for created Dataset and Tile Source	data_[random suffix]
--name	Name for created Dataset	none
--description	Description for created Dataset	none
--attribution	Legal attribution text to add to maps using this data	none
--source-srid	Source SRID (opens new window)	Auto-detected from data
--target-srid	Target SRID (opens new window)	Auto-detected from data.

Spatial Reference Systems

The spatial reference system (SRS) of the uploaded data is determined automatically. The imported data will use the same SRS by default. Specify the --target-srid option when uploading to transform the data to a different SRS.

TIP

We recommend choosing a single working SRS for a a Flo.w Application rather than mixing systems. Good choices for the target SRID are:

• 4326 (WGS84) (opens new window): Coordinates are in degrees of longitude and latitude.
• 5326 (Web Mercator) (opens new window): Coordinates are in metres.

Uploading ESRI Shapefiles

ESRI Shapefiles are collections of related files (typically .shp, .dbf, .prj and .shx). All related files should be zipped and uploaded as a single .zip archive.

Uploading CSV

Import of point data from CSV files is supported. The data must contain a longitude and latitude column with coordinates in WGS-84 (SRID 4326). The following column names will be detected and used to extract point geometry: lon, long, lng, longitude, x and lat, latitude, y.