Cartos · Inside the interface
Aging GIS makes you a cartographer before it lets you be an analyst — dozens of dialog boxes, projection errors, a license per seat, and a consultant on retainer. Cartos collapses all of it into one screen: satellite, 3D, live operations, and an AI analyst that does the work with you. No GIS experience required.
One screen
Live data, a layer catalog, the map, and the Cartos agent — side by side in the browser. The whole operating picture, from one URL, in your own deployment.
The delta
These aren't features bolted onto an old core. They're the reason Cartos exists — and the reason a thirty-year-old GIS stack can't follow.
City, port, and emergency operations are slices over one shared data fabric, agent, and shell. Turn a capability on per account — you don't rebuild, re-license, or re-train to add the next one.
Aging GIS: every new use case is a fresh project, a new server, another integrator.An AI analyst is wired in from the first click. Ask a question in plain language; it focuses the map, pulls the layers, and runs the workflow using the platform's own tools — and shows its work.
Aging GIS: a toolbox of 800 tools and a model-builder you have to learn first.Runs in-territory on infrastructure you control, fed by an owned satellite constellation. The same substrate is growing into change detection, 3D reconstruction, and auditable reporting — your deployment gains them without a migration.
Aging GIS: perpetual upgrades, data lock-in, and a roadmap you don't own.01 · The front door
In every other GIS, the first thing you meet is a wall of tools you have to learn. In Cartos, the first thing you meet is a chat box.
Ask "what's happening near the light rail?" or "show me units by jurisdiction" and the Cartos agent drives the platform for you — focusing the map, switching on the right layers, and running the query, then explaining what it did. Answers come back rich — tables, charts, links, and a summary with recommendations — and resize, pop out, and export to PDF/DOCX. It's docked beside the map at all times, with suggested prompts so a brand-new user is productive on the first click.
And because the agent speaks MCP, a parent AI — Claude, Copilot — can call Cartos's geospatial tools directly, folding the sovereign platform into a larger reasoning workflow.
The skill you need isn't GIS. It's knowing what you want to ask.
02 · The decision surface
Operations aren't run from a basemap alone. Every module pairs the map with a live dashboard — units active, incidents open, response times, asset health — so the picture and the numbers never live in two different tools.
KPI rings, incident severity, response-time trends, and a live incident feed — a full operational read-out beside the map, not a separate BI tool to license and stitch in. It updates as the situation does.
The same data, one click away from a holographic theme built for a command-centre wall. Dark for the ops floor, luminous for the briefing — no rebuild, no second dashboard to maintain.
03 · Getting data in
The hardest part of legacy GIS is often just getting the data onto the map: formats, projections, server connections. Cartos turns that into a marketplace and a search box. Browse, search, or paste a URL — and it lands as a styled, persistable layer.
GeoWizard curates national and global catalogs — federal, international, and UAE-specific sources — each one ready to add as a layer. No hunting through portals, no format wrangling: the discovery step that used to take a day becomes a browse.
Type "traffic", "hospitals", "mangroves", "sentinel" and results come back from Esri's Living Cartos ready to drop on the map with one click. Open data discovery, collapsed into a single search field.
04 · Seeing the world
One surface renders every way you need to see the world: your own high-resolution imagery, photoreal 3D, continuous sensor surfaces, and styled vector networks — without ever exporting to a second application.
High-resolution satellite layers stream straight onto the surface — backed by an owned constellation. That owned data position is something competitors can't simply license into, and it's available to every module by default.
Tilt into a photoreal scene — terrain, buildings, infrastructure — in the same workspace. No separate 3D app, no export-and-import dance between tools.
Environmental and sensor surfaces render as smooth gradients — turning raw measurements into something a decision-maker reads in a second, not a spreadsheet.
Road and mobility networks render as living vector layers — corridors, flows, and assets you restyle on the fly to surface exactly the pattern you're chasing.
Zoom from a single incident out to coverage across territorial waters — assets, vessels, and context in one continuous picture, governed by the same team-level access rules throughout.
05 · Reasoning about change
The Analyst Intelligence layer turns the map into something that reasons. Run a real GeoAI model over your area — segmentation, or two-epoch change detection on live satellite imagery — and the result lands as a lineage-tracked layer you can read, tune, compare, and export. Choose where it runs — a sovereign local tier or a full GPU — and every finding traces back to the imagery that produced it.
Pick an analysis, run it over the current view, and a real segmentation model runs on live satellite imagery for your area — the produced dataset renders on the map with its KPIs. No GIS toolbox, no export to a separate ML pipeline: it runs in the same workspace as an async job, on the sovereign local tier or a full GPU.
Pick two dated Sentinel-2 scenes over your area; the model segments each and diffs them into a confidence-scored change layer — new construction, removals, modifications. Then drag the before/after swipe to inspect it. The output is a first-class, lineage-tracked dataset, not a throwaway render.
Manage active imagery overlays — toggle, set opacity, save — and dial a global Image Boost: contrast, saturation, opacity, and smooth tile boundaries applied across every raster layer at once, so the whole picture reads exactly how you need it.
Any analysis session renders to an auditable HTML/DOCX/PDF report — KPIs, findings, assumptions, and a methodology built automatically from the steps that ran. The work explains itself.
And the map itself exports as a cartographic PDF — scale bar, north arrow, neatline — or a multi-page mapbook that tiles an area into print-ready sheets. A one-click screen capture, too.
06 · Compare, build in 3D, take it to print
The same workspace lets you put two layers head-to-head, drop a real point cloud at its true coordinates and walk the ground, and turn the view into a cartographic deliverable — without leaving the map.
Wipe one layer over another with a swipe divider, or split the screen into two side-by-side panes — both camera-synced, so panning or zooming either side moves both. Each side picks from the full catalog: basemaps, Esri services, NASA GIBS satellite, any WMS/WMTS/Esri-REST URL, or the current map with its live data layers. Perfect for before/after change.
Export the view as a cartographic PDF — title block, scale bar, north arrow, neatline — in templates from operational briefing to field map, at paper sizes up to 42×60 and custom. Or generate a multi-page mapbook that tiles an AOI into sheets, plus a georeferenced GeoPDF that opens in QGIS/ArcGIS.
Serve 3D Tiles from a service, or drop a local LAS/LAZ point cloud that lands at its true geospatial x,y,z (reprojected from its CRS). A density slider keeps multi-million-point clouds smooth, and you can pitch all the way to a 90° ground-level view — GPU-free, in the browser.
07 · Configure & reach the field
The same workspace is configured per client, in-app, across three admin tiers — and now extends to a mobile field app whose captures flow back into the modules above. No vendor ticket to add a module, build a feature, onboard a user, or stand up a field app.
Provider Admins choose modules; Tech Admins turn features on and cross-add advanced ones across modules; User Admins run their own users and per-user access. Keycloak-backed, sovereign, self-service.
Define layers and schema fields in the console; field workers capture offline on a native app; the data syncs back and surfaces inside the assigned module's map, queryable by the agent. Explore Cartos Field
The contrast
The legacy desktop GIS model was built for a cartographer at a workstation. Cartos is built for an operator, an analyst, and an agent working the same picture together.
| Aging desktop GIS | Cartos | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Install, license, train for weeks | Open a URL — no experience required |
| Doing the analysis | Hunt through a toolbox of hundreds of tools | Ask the agent in plain language |
| Adding data | Wrangle formats, projections, connections | Browse or search a marketplace, click add |
| New use case | A new project, server, and integrator | Switch on a module on the same fabric |
| 2D, 3D & dashboards | Separate apps and add-on licenses | One workspace, all included |
| Where it runs | Vendor cloud or aging on-prem | Sovereign, in-territory, on infra you control |
| Where it's going | Upgrade treadmill, data lock-in | Compounds into change detection, 3D & auto-reporting |
If a new analyst can be useful on day one without a course, the tool finally fits the mission — not the other way around.
One interface, every industry
Everything above is the engine. Industries run over it as licensed editions — the same map, agent, catalogue and dashboards, re-skinned and re-catalogued per vertical. Nine editions are live today; five are pictured below — Cartos Africa, Guardian, Sentry and Harvest (the newest four) are covered in full on the editions page.
Cities, coasts and crisis on one screen: 3D buildings, a live catalogue of real data, and the AI analyst wired in from the first click.
Grid Command over a live network — 1,571 features, nine departments, and a KPI dashboard wired to the utility's systems of record.
Airside to landside: the DFW airfield, ten operational departments, one operating picture.
An executive portfolio of every project over a statewide network, then drill to pavement, traffic and winter ops.
A capital-project portfolio across a whole metro, with portfolio and per-project view rights assignable to a team or user.
See it on your geography
Bring a real operational workflow and a sovereignty constraint; we'll stand it up on the platform — your data, your territory, your imagery — under NDA.
