An exciting year is coming to an end - as we enter the holiday season, we want to thank you for being part of our journey and wish you a joyful Christmas and a Happy New Year!
🚀 As the year draws to a close, we’re filled with gratitude for an incredible 12 months of progress, innovation, and community. 2025 was a landmark year for us, driven by further developing our WebGIS platform GOAT. Your support, feedback, and enthusiasm fueled every step of this journey.
Together with partners and customers we also successfully completed many new projects .You can read more about them in this edition of our newsletter.
But it’s not just about milestones and projects. It’s about the people behind them - you. 👨🏼🤝👨🏻
🎄 As we head into the holiday season, we want to take a moment to thank you for being part of our story. From all of us here, we wish you a joyful Christmas and a New Year filled with success, happiness, and new possibilities! ✨
🚀 GOAT releases "Ibex" and "Cashmere" – More control, less friction 🐐
Over the last year we've been constantly evolving our WebGIS GOAT. Our latest GOAT releases—versions 2.1.0 “Ibex” and 2.2.0 "Cashmere"—put powerful mapping tools directly in your hands. Highlights include:
🗺️ Redesigned Data Mode UI – Data Mode has been refreshed with a cleaner, more intuitive interface, making it easier to browse and understand
📊 Custom dashboards – Arrange widgets to match how you analyze and present data
🗃️ Layer Groups – Group layers into logical collections
📍 Your own icons – Upload custom symbols to make maps align with your project’s visual identity
🎨 Simple Style for dashboard layers – Now on public maps, users can make quick, lightweight visual adjustments to layers (e.g opacity).
⚡ Faster data management – Rename or delete datasets directly from the interface
🔝 Performance upgrades – Faster loading, smoother interactions, and expanded regional support
Whether you’re planning 15-minute cities, optimizing transit networks or boosting community resilience, GOAT helps you turn complex data into actionable insights—faster than ever.
Why Europe needs its own geospatial softwares – and why Open Source is part of the answer
Europe’s planning systems rely heavily on foreign, proprietary geospatial tools — creating risks around transparency, control, and long-term digital sovereignty. Open-source European platforms like GOAT offer a different path. The choices planners make today will shape Europe’s digital foundations for decades to come. Read more about our take here.
The Hamburg State Agency for Roads, Bridges and Waterways (LSBG) is tasked with systematically retrofitting approximately 2,400 bus stops for barrier-free access. The automated, standardized multi-criteria analysis required for this is being developed using the WebGIS GOAT.
KVBW is establishing a modern geodata infrastructure using the WebGIS GOAT to tap into the previously unused potential of its existing data. The insights gained will support the individual departments in their planning and decision-making.
Agglo Basel now uses the WebGIS GOAT for cross-border accessibility analyses. To address local requirements, additional data have been integrated into GOAT.
This November, the Plan4Betterteam took on the#30DayMapChallenge—not as solo cartographers, but as a collective. It became an opportunity to experiment, collaborate, and push the boundaries of what we can do with and without GOAT, our open-source planning tool.
From streetlights in Vienna to Saharan dust plumes over Tunisia, from colorblind-friendly subway maps to analog string art, we turned data into stories.
Read in our new blog post how we did it, and what we learned along the way.
How we work with QGIS for Data Analysis and Visualization
Open source isn't just a philosophy for us—it's how we work. QGIS and GOAT together form our spatial analysis powerhouse.
Our work revolves around geodata, spatial analysis, and digital planning tools, helping cities and governments design livable spaces. At the heart of our workflow is QGIS, the open-source GIS platform which we integrate with our open-source tool GOAT, and together they enable us to process, analyze, and visualize complex spatial data efficiently.
In our new blog post, our GIS Analyst Gokul Gopan along with our cartographer Camila Narbaitz, tell the story of how we implement QGIS within P4B. You can read the blog post here.
