About Spatial-Sandbox
The fastest, lightweight developer toolkit for inspecting and validating spatial geometry data.
Our Mission
Working with geospatial databases (such as PostGIS, MySQL Spatial, Oracle Spatial, and SpatiaLite) often involves debugging long, unwieldy text strings like POLYGON(...) or raw GeoJSON payloads.
Opening heavy desktop GIS software like QGIS or ArcGIS just to inspect a single coordinate sequence or troubleshoot a polygon winding error is slow and cumbersome. Spatial-Sandbox was built to solve this exact problem: a zero-install, instant, client-side sandbox where developers can paste spatial data, inspect coordinates, reproject projections, style layers, and export data in seconds.
Core Features
- Universal Format Parsing: Seamlessly detects and visualizes both Well-Known Text (WKT) and GeoJSON formats.
- Full Geometry Support: Supports POINT, MULTIPOINT, LINESTRING, MULTILINESTRING, POLYGON (including inner rings/holes), MULTIPOLYGON, and GEOMETRYCOLLECTION.
- Dynamic CRS Reprojection: Integrates Proj4js to convert coordinates on the fly from any standard EPSG projection (e.g. Web Mercator EPSG:3857, British National Grid EPSG:27700, State Plane) into WGS84 for map rendering.
- PostGIS Multi-Format Export: Copy or export geometries as GeoJSON, standard WKT, PostGIS WKB hex, EWKB (with SRID), or Bounding Box coordinates.
- Interactive Drawing & Measurement: Draw points, lines, polygons, and rectangles directly on satellite or street maps with instant geodesic length and area measurements powered by Turf.js.
- 100% Privacy & Offline Ready: All parsing and coordinate calculations execute locally in your web browser. No geometry data ever touches a remote server.
Editorial Team & Geospatial Expertise
Spatial-Sandbox is researched, authored, and maintained by a team of senior geospatial software engineers, GIS analysts, and cartographic developers. Our technical contributors have extensive production experience designing and deploying distributed spatial databases (PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Snowflake Spatial, Google BigQuery GIS), building WebGL and Leaflet web mapping interfaces, and configuring spatial pipelines with GDAL, OGR, and GEOS.
Every technical guide, code snippet, and mathematical formula published on Spatial-Sandbox is rigorously vetted against official Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, IETF RFC 7946 standards, and the EPSG Geodetic Parameter Dataset to ensure absolute precision and reliability.
Our Engineering Standards
- Privacy by Architecture: All geometry parsing, coordinate transformations, and validations execute client-side in your browser session. Spatial coordinates are never transmitted across a network to our servers.
- Standards Compliance: We adhere strictly to OGC Simple Features Access specifications and IETF RFC 7946 GeoJSON guidelines.
- Performance: Lightweight, dependency-conscious client architecture designed to parse geometries with tens of thousands of vertices smoothly at 60 FPS.
Educational Technical Guides
We believe in sharing deep geospatial knowledge freely. Explore our in-depth developer guides:
- The Definitive Guide to Well-Known Text (WKT) Geometry — Master all 18 OGC types, 2D/3D/4D coordinate dimensions, and PostGIS queries.
- GeoJSON Specification Guide (RFC 7946) — Learn FeatureCollection structures, coordinate ordering, right-hand rule winding, and precision tips.
- Understanding Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS: 4326 vs 3857) — Geographic vs projected coordinate systems, datums, and Proj4 reprojection.
- PostGIS Spatial SQL Guide & Performance Cheat Sheet — Indexing with GiST, spatial joins, ST_Intersects, and ST_DWithin.
- Geospatial Data Formats Guide: Shapefile vs GeoJSON vs KML vs GPX — Master GIS vector file formats and their architectural tradeoffs.
Built With Open Source
Spatial-Sandbox is made possible thanks to incredible open-source mapping and geospatial libraries:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is Well-Known Text (WKT)?
WKT is an OGC standard text markup language for representing spatial vector geometry objects. It is the primary format returned by spatial database queries like PostGIS ST_AsText(geom).
What is GeoJSON?
GeoJSON (RFC 7946) is a JSON format for encoding geographic data structures. It supports geometry types as well as Feature and FeatureCollection wrappers with arbitrary key-value properties.
Why is my polygon rendering in the ocean?
This is usually caused by inverted coordinate order. In standard GIS WKT and GeoJSON, coordinates are ordered as Longitude (X), Latitude (Y). If your data is in Latitude, Longitude, coordinates will be swapped.
Does Spatial-Sandbox upload my data to any servers?
No. All geometry parsing, reprojection, and rendering take place 100% locally inside your browser session. Your data never leaves your machine.
How do I reproject coordinates from a local grid (e.g., EPSG:3857)?
Enter your source EPSG code in the CRS input box located in the sidebar footer (e.g. EPSG:3857 or EPSG:27700) and click "Set". Spatial-Sandbox will fetch the projection definition from epsg.io and reproject your coordinates automatically.