GeoGig
GeoGIG is version control for spatial data. It's FOSS.
See its home at http://geogig.org/
Overview
The GeoGig documentation is good; see the introduction: http://geogig.org/docs/start/introduction.html I like this description from TannerGeo, too: http://tannergeo.com/2015/09/04/Spatial-Version-Control-with-GeoGig.html
In brief, GeoGig is like git for spatial. If you don't know what git is, go learn, it's really useful. Git is not a good choice for spatial because it's optimized for text. Like source code.
I feel like GeoGig is actually a better match for the traditional approach to GIS than the centralized GIS Server approach (e.g. ArcGIS Enterprise or PostGIS). For many GIS shops step 1 is "make a copy". I have seen so many places where the biggest problem was the fact that there were 47 copies of crucial files stashed on a server, all slightly different. Sites like national parks where they lack the resources to have a data manager, so each scientist and each intern starts a project by making a private copy of the data instead of taking ownership of the "official version".
GeoGig also facilitates sites that have no high speed access to a central server or where data has to be managed detached, for example from a laptop in the field.
With GeoGig your normal would flow could be
- check out data from server to laptop
- edit in the field (or wherever)
- upload changes to server
"Server" in this case can be any shared file space, including cloud storage or a NAS or even just a USB hard drive. You do not need SQL Server or ArcGIS Enterprise or even PostGIS.
