GeoFeeds - Your window into the world
of geospatial news

Join us at this year's Esri User Conference to learn about ArcGIS Knowledge and Knowledge Studio. We've got the inside scoop on all things graph!

Discover a few ways in which Overture Maps open data will soon be available to ArcGIS users following its general availability release.

GIS Specialist - City of Chesapeake, Chesapeake, VA USA posted on 2025-06-30

Explore the new features and enhancements to Map Viewer in the June 2025 update.

The Leventhal Center has posted a statement on the future of the Allmaps project—Allmaps is a georeferencing tool for digital images—now that its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH has been terminated, like so… More

Citing cybersecurity concerns, the U.S. Department of Defense is cutting off NOAA and NASA access to data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), throwing a wrench into the NOAA’s ability to forecast hurricanes, CNN… More

London Zoo is the world’s oldest scientific zoo. In 2028, it will celebrate its 200th anniversary - a milestone in a long and storied history that visitors can now explore through the Zoo’s Time Traveller’s Guide to London Zoo, a collection of vintage maps that even includes the original 1826 "Design for the Garden."The Time Traveller’s Guide to London Zoo offers a fascinating journey

Gareth Fuller’s latest creation is “The DMV,” a pictorial map of Washington, D.C., and the neighbouring bits of Maryland and Virginia (hence “DMV”). Created over twelve months, including three months of on-the-ground exploration in 2023… More

Learn how to easily bring satellite imagery into your mobile app development using an image service and ArcGIS Maps SDK for Flutter.

Mark spotted this World’s Fair globe (1964?) on the Queens 10k run today

In this edition of our interview series with OpenStreetMap community members around the world, I chat with Jochen Topf. Jochen is a very long-time member fo the OpenStreetMap community. He has been very active as a mapper, but also an organizer within the community, particularly in Germany. He is co-author of a book about OpenStreetMap (published in English as “OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World”), has spoken at many OpenStreetMap events over the years, and is a developer of some of the core OpenStreetMap software. He now works part-time for FOSSGIS e.V, the non-profit that serves as the local chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation in Germany (as an aside, we at OpenCage are proud to be corporate members of FOSSGIS and the OpenStreetMap Foundation). Amongst much else Jochen is currently working on a project to broaden the level of financial support for OpenStreetMap in Germany, and I wanted to explore this topic as it has relevance for many OSM...

In this keynote from Geospatial World Forum 2025 in Madrid, Spain, Seng Chuan Tan, President of WFEO, emphasizes the urgent need for resilient and sustainable infrastructure. He highlights how geospatial […] The post Building Resilient & Sustainable Infrastructure with Geospatial Technology | GWF 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

Centro comercial

It was amazing attending the Living Planet Symposium last week (23–27 June 2025) in Vienna.

so i’m nearing my 10,000th edit on openstreetmap. wild. i’ve been thinking a lot about what that actually means. what started as a hobby - or maybe an obsession - has slowly become a record of care. a way to see. a way to let others see. mapping Bangkok, piece by piece. making it just a little more visible. a little more precise. a little more known - to others, and to myself. i’ve been thinking a lot about maps. about what this whole thing has meant - not just as a mapper, but as a local voice, a small thread in a bigger web, by others. by myself. by the place itself. piece by piece. making it just a little more visible. a little more precise. a little more known - to others, and to myself. - i’ve always loved maps. even when i didn’t know the word for what i was feeling. as a kid, i was drawn to them like magnets. atlases in bookshops. globes with soft pastel oceans. the tiny maps printed on the backs of business cards. spatial things made me feel calm. made me feel like the...

19/06/2025-25/06/2025 [1] | © jaz-michaelking | Map tiles by CartoDB – Powered by uMap | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors. Community Pascal Neis recently conducted a GNSS accuracy comparison involving drones, an action camera, and a smartwatch. In the experiment, both the DJI Avata and the NEO drones successfully recorded GNSS tracks, but commonly deviated several metres from the reference route. The GoPro action camera yielded similar or slightly worse accuracy, with GNSS tracks occasionally straying even farther than the drones. In contrast, the Garmin smartwatch delivered the most consistent and accurate results. Martijn van Exel published his slides and cleaned-up speaker notes from his talk about MapRoulette and his lightning talk about the Meet Your Mappers tool given at State of the Map US in Boston. Graham Park provided an explanation on how to utilise Strava traces for mapping paths in OpenStreetMap, noting that contributors are permitted to use Strava...

“Without Geography you’re Nowhere”, seen at Trinity College in Dublin by Catherine.

مدينة أبوقير الجديدة

🚶‍♂️ A journey on foot, a project from the heart. This project began with my own steps — capturing street-level imagery from Daffodil International University to Eastern University, Dhaka, Savar. Using Mapillary, I documented the road to support open mapping. These images aren’t just photos — they’re vital pieces that will directly support and enhance OpenStreetMap. Every frame contributes to a bigger, collaborative mission: building a better, more accurate map for everyone. The journey is still ongoing, day by day. Feel free to share any powerful screenshots — let’s map the future, together. 🌍

are eligible for free unlimited map downloads and live updates. To qualify: Enable the OpenStreetMap Editing plugin. Log in with your OSM username. Maintain at least 30 edits over the last two months. ?_highlight=live#free-for-osm-mappers Alhamdullilahirrabilaalaameen!

The #Overture Maps Foundation (#OMF) is launching its Global Entity Reference System #GERS, assigning unique IDs to billions of geospatial features. Users can use GERS IDs to reference OMF features in their own data and bridge files to connect to the data sources used for OMF’s data.

Hello everyone, I would like to request the addition of a missing village to OpenStreetMap. The village is called Charchall, located in the Akre District, Sawsana Subdistrict, Duhok Governorate, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Basic information: 🏘️ Village name: Charchall 🗺️ District: Akre 🏞️ Subdistrict: Sawsana 🏴 Governorate: Duhok – Kurdistan Region, Iraq 🧾 Postal Code: 24005 🛣️ Main connecting road: Charchall Road 📍 Nearby village: benatah This village is recognized by local government maps, but it is still missing from OpenStreetMap. We kindly ask for it to be added so that the area can be better represented for residents, navigation, and future development.

Saw this Globular clock at the Islamic Arts Museum in Jerusalem. It was made for La Fontaine, Paris, c. 1880. The clock shows the sun’s location at given time on a map of the world

Unless it has happened to you, I guess it is impossible to truly understand what it’s like to have your home destroyed. How, then, can news organizations convey the tragedy of such loss to a public that seems increasingly immune to the horrors of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza?In 2023, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) created an interactive 3D model of an apartment block in

objc. Road networks / Réseaux routiers (esp. ref / spé. ref) zone Gironde + Northern Landes (France) / Gironde + Nord des Landes (France)

The Arcade assistant (beta) uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate ArcGIS Arcade expressions from instructions typed in natural language.

GIS Systems Architect - geocgi, Alexandria, Virginia posted on 2025-06-27

Mapping mangrove dynamics assessing loss gain and stable areas in Map Viewer using a raster function template available in Living Atlas.

none

Another one from Jens’ visit to Tunisia

Today is my introduction to OSM through an internship process by Mr Samson who take as through an online intern, we are getting into it before you know it and this will mark the start of one of the greatest open street mappers who has ver been born, am actually learning a lot from this process and looking forward to contributing so much to the members of the community, we wanna make Uganda great and make my village the best in the world

If Your Year of Birth Starts with "21"In a desperate attempt to cash in on a popular meme, I present to you: The Italian Brainrot Map.Yesterday, I asked ChatGPT to generate a list of country names in the style of Italian Brainrot characters. A few minutes later, I had those names injected into an interactive map.Trying to Justify Posting This: Overall I'd say that ChatGPT's Italian Brainrot

At Geospatial World Forum 2025, Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) was awarded the Geospatial World Leadership Award in the Enabling Public Policy […] The post Singapore Honored for Pioneering Geospatial Public Policy | Geospatial World Leadership Award 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

Leveraging ArcGIS Living Atlas imagery layers to improve accessibility and scale up your analysis.

Interview with Zach Jaffe of Map I.T.

It’s been more than 18 years since Steve Jobs demonstrated Google Maps on the then-prototype iPhone, and it’s hard to wrap one’s head around how transformational the fact that every mobile phone comes with a… More

Discovering #OGC and other geoservices endpoints in web maps is now effortless with the Chromium-based #GeoHound extension. It identifies and collects geoservices – along with geospatial files – into a handy list for your convenience.

Designed to enhance ArcGIS integration with Autodesk Construction Cloud, new widgets extend the ArcGIS GeoBIM experience for custom web apps.

Resaltar áreas transitables en Python En las ciencias geoespaciales y la inteligencia de ubicación, las isócronas representan áreas geográficas accesibles en un tiempo determinado desde un punto específico. Por ejemplo, en el contexto de las distancias a pie, las isócronas son herramientas útiles para profesionales como los urbanistas que buscan comprender la accesibilidad y la conectividad dentro de un área determinada. Al visualizar las isócronas, la ciencia de datos puede proporcionar una herramienta rápida y fácil de usar para ayudar a obtener información sobre el nivel de conectividad y accesibilidad a pie de los vecindarios, ayudar a identificar áreas que están bien conectadas y señalar áreas potenciales de mejoras de infraestructura. En este artículo, explico cómo generar isócronas de distancia a pie mediante los paquetes de Python NetworkX (diseñado para análisis de grafos) y OSMNnx (que combina OpenStreetMap y NetworkX). Tomamos como ejemplo Perímetro urbano de la...

The June 2025 ArcGIS Online contains a small, but mighty, enhancement to the Sketch experience in Map Viewer: support for drawing curved lines. 

Esri is working with partners (Maxar, TomTom) to enhance our 3D basemaps with high-quality commercial data for elevation and buildings layers.

URL: https://osmapp.org Full changelog: https://github.com/zbycz/osmapp/releases/tag/v1.7.0 OsmAPP is the one integrated app for OpenStreetMap ecosystem for both web and mobile. It should be as easy to use as Google Maps, but fully open-source using all the great services around. It was first aimed at broad public, but now it becomes apparent, that it works best for the OpenStreetMap contributors, who want better UX or share OSM around. Special thanks to all our 6 contributors in this release. 🎉 The new Relation editor The main feature of this release is the reworked Edit dialog with the new Relation editor. That took a lot of work and refactoring. Now if you click (or create) a relation, you can browser through its members and its parents and easily edit metadata accross whole hierarchies. It is the most useful on hierarchies like the climbing=area, climbing=crag and routes (example here), but it is written in general manner and can help OSM contributors in...

The goal of https://openclimbing.org is to offer a non-commercial alternative to traditional climbing apps. Instead of filling private databases, we decided to design a structure for mapping climbing routes directly into OpenStreetMap. This way, all data in the app is fully open and can be freely used or edited by anyone. Image: Crag with marked climbing routes in Hlubočepy, Czechia Key Features of openclimbing.org Both the database and the code are completely open, so anyone can contribute with content or code. Thanks to the open data approach, anyone can create new ways to use or visualize the data. Each climbing route has defined GPS coordinates, making it easier to find in the terrain. This is big advantage but also a limitation – you cannot add routes without it. Image: Climbing routes on the map Optimized for mobile devices, so it can be used directly in the field. Integration of the map with photo EXIF data – you can see on the map where a...

Savannah, GA, USA The MPC Category: Geospatial

Geofabrik is pleased to support the OpenStreetMap community as a bronze sponsor of two upcoming conferences in 2025: State of the Map Global – Manila, Philippines State of the Map Europe – Dundee, Scotland, UK We have been regular sponsors of SotM events for many years, including regional conferences such as FOSSGIS. Our staff have also contributed by speaking at various sessions over time. Events like SotM offer a useful opportunity for exchange within the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. While much of the work in the OSM world happens remotely, occasional in-person meetings remain valuable for maintaining collaboration and perspective. Sponsorship opportunities are still available for both events for those interested in supporting the community.

The time since I’ve last posted has been quite busy. I’ve completely recovered from my previous eye issues and have been able to start traveling again. In fact, I’m writing this post from a hotel room. In addition to my consulting work at Cercana, I took on a role as the CTO of Photometrics AI, … Continue reading Geospatial, AI/ML, and Infrastructure →

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Jami said “Took our latest visitor on a tour of Whitewater Canyon, New Mexico and hiked the Catwalk. Love the maps carved into the sign. You can’t get too lost in a narrow canyon, though, except where the trail is washed out.”

UM980 is relatively affordable chip allowing multi-constellation multi-frequency GNSS with capability to provide raw phase measurements and hence potentially suitable for use in OpenStreetMap environment for precise mapping susing RTK. In this post (or potentially series of posts), I will document my experiences with using UM980 with RTKLIB and other open-source or free tools. Hardware UM980 RTK GNSS USB Dongle with SMA antenna - ELT0222 (from gnss.store) EM-FD700 antenna (form AliExpress) The module can easily be configured using UPrecise tool coming with UM980. It is advisable to have faster than default COM port rate ~~~ CONFIG COM1 230400 ~~~ and use the signal group 2 (note that this leads to reset of the UM980 module ~~~ CONFIG SIGNALGROUP 2 ~~~ If you need to stop the stream of measured data, you can use ~~~ UNLOG ~~~ You can also UNLOG just specific messages. If you want to store your config of the module so that it survives unplugging and restarting the...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a new educational platform designed to explain the vital role that satellites and Earth observation play in advancing Earth science, combating climate change, and driving scientific research and technological innovation.Edukeo uses Lobelia’s Globe Story Engine and TeroMaps framework to create immersive, interactive stories. These stories are

At Geospatial World Forum 2025, General Authority for Survey and Geospatial Information (GEOSA), Saudi Arabia has been honored with the prestigious National Geospatial Agency of the Year award. This recognition […] The post GEOSA Honored as National Geospatial Agency of the Year | Geospatial World Leadership Awards 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

The new Android update is here! We've improved the interface, made settings easier to manage, and added new features to make your everyday navigation with OsmAnd even more smooth and enjoyable. 🔄 Update Now! Thanks for using OsmAnd — safe travels! What's new​ • Added support for web and cross-platform purchases. • Moved Temperature units to General settings for easier access. • Added battery level indicator for BLE sensors. • New, more intuitive UI for point selection in Navigation. • Improved widget visibility with a new outline. • Added Uphills/Downhills analyzer. • Expanded Wikipedia & Wikivoyage integration for more POIs. • Bug fixes. Cross-Platform Purchases​ Maps+ and OsmAnd Pro purchases can now be used across different platforms, including Android, iOS, and the OsmAnd website. This means you can buy a subscription on one platform and use it on another without any additional cost. Now, you can buy OsmAnd products on the OsmAnd website and use them on your Android or iOS...

OsmAnd 5.1 for iOS is out now! We’re excited to bring you the latest update — OsmAnd 5.1 is now available on the App Store. This version includes interface improvements, easier widget configuration, and new features to make exploring even more intuitive. 🔄 Update Now Download the update and enjoy a better, smoother OsmAnd experience. Thanks for being with us — safe travels! What's new​ • Added support for web and cross-platform purchases • New Route information widget • Widgets on the Left & Right panels now include a height option • Added a rename action for Favorite groups. • Added "Unit of Volume" and "Fuel Tank Capacity" options. • Added a "Coordinates Grid" overlay. • Added the ability to assign activities to tracks • Improved the appearance menu of Favorites • Bug fixes Cross-Platform Purchases​ Maps+ and OsmAnd Pro purchases can now be used across different platforms, including Android, iOS, and the OsmAnd website. This means you can buy a subscription on one platform and...

Hi everyone, Today is a special day — OsmAnd is turning 15. An incredible number! It feels like we were just writing posts about our 5th anniversary and 10th anniversary, and now, it's already been fifteen years. Time flies when you're passionate about what you do. Looking back, I realize that the magic of OsmAnd isn't just about code or maps. Above all, it's about people. And today, I want to give a huge, sincere thank you to the three main communities without whom none of this would be possible. Thank You for Being with Us!​ To our OsmAnd Team​ To the people who create, improve, and support the project every single day. Your dedication, talent, and persistence are the fuel for our shared journey. Thank you for the thousands of hours of work and for pouring your hearts into every detail. To our GitHub Community​ To everyone who sends us code, reports bugs, suggests ideas, and participates in discussions. You are our external brain and our strictest, yet fairest, critics. Your...

Seasonal planning helps environmental survey crews collect accurate data while reducing delays, rework, and safety risks. Aligning field survey schedules with environmental conditions like bloom cycles, migration patterns, and dry periods keeps crews efficient and on track with regulatory requirements. The right planning approach, supported by historical data, GIS layers, and clear field workflows, turns short windows into reliable opportunities. La entrada Seasonal planning for environmental survey crews se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

This blog post outlines the process of creating multi-color 3D prints using the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon printer and the Topoprint software. I explain how to prepare multiple STL files for distinct landscape features, using OrcaSlicer for effective slicing. The final print, requiring extensive filament changes, showcases the Landwasserviadukt.

The QGISUC2025 team has done an awesome job recording and editing the conference presentations. All “presentation” type talks where the presenter has accepted to be published are now available in a dedicated list on the QGIS Youtube channel. I also had the pleasure of presenting our Trajectools plugin and you can see this talk here: …Read More

 If your concerned about sharing QGIS projects on the web there are many options apart from the 'qgis2web' plugin. This just utilises a docker image containing a demo project.Share your QGIS projects with QGIS Server • Gispo

Jason Fry reports: “Very happy to share that we’ve restored the cartography page on starwars.com that was originally developed for The Essential Atlas. You’ll find a revised galaxy map (based on the wonderful 2021 Star… More

Jens share this tiled map – Kairouan is in the east of Tunisia

The progressive Zohran Mamdani appears to have defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City Mayor. The result may send shockwaves through the Democratic establishment, and other progressive candidates running in elections across the country will be keen to learn from Mamdani’s victory.Many potential Democratic nominees will no doubt be poring over The New York Times’ Most

At Geospatial World Forum 2025 in Madrid, e-GEOS has been awarded the prestigious Geospatial World Leadership Award – Solution Company of the Year. This recognition celebrates e-GEOS’s outstanding contributions in […] The post e-GEOS Wins Solution Company of the Year | Geospatial World Leadership Awards 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

Lake Chapala was formed at the intersection of three grabens. The post Lake Chapala: a Tectonic Lake at Mexico’s Triple-graben Intersection appeared first on Geography Realm.

The canton of Basel-Stadt presents its new #3D #geoportal, MapBS 3D, offering interactive 3D maps with detailed building models, construction projects, and several analytical tools. The new portal is introduced in a “lunch & learn” style webinar this Thursday.

When someone proposes an idea to you, smile and assure them that you understand (yes ...). Express your enthusiasm about it (... yes ...) with an even bigger smile. Then, offer to enhance and extend their great idea (... and ...). You can compare this creativity technique to rubber duck debugging, but always remember that you should not replace a human with an LLM.

The Seabed 2030 project announced on Saturday that “27.3% of the world’s ocean floor has now been mapped to modern standards. The increase in data represents more than four million square kilometres of newly mapped… More

Tucson, AZ, USA Bat Conservation International, Inc. Category: Geospatial

I recently updated this map: and this one: to show different types of restaurants (the most common cuisine types cause the top part of the icon to be modified), just like that map has shown fast food for some time now. However, it’s not technically difficult to also show what wheelchair access is available - this one: is an Italian restaurant with limited wheelchair access. The yellow flash for that is deliberately small so as to not dominate the view, but visible if you are looking for it. Shouldn’t showing that information be “table stakes” for maps showing OSM data?

GIS Analyst - Bat Conservation International Inc., Tucson, AZ, 85701 US posted on 2025-06-24

I had a fantastic time at SOTM US. Thanks to all at OSM US for their work putting the event together. I gave two presentations, one on MapRoulette and one on the new Meet Your Mappers tool. I posted annotated slides for the MapRoulette talk on my blog.

GIS Planner - City of West Palm Beach , 401 Clematis Street West Palm Beach, FL 33411 posted on 2025-06-24

A third of dialysis clinics in America fail to meet federal standards. This map from CBS News shows you where.The United States spends more on dialysis treatments than nearly any other country in the world. Yet despite this enormous financial outlay, it has the highest dialysis-related death rate among developed nations. A key reason for this disparity is that healthcare in the U.S. operates as

When and where? Geomob Berlin will take place at 18:00 on Thursday the 25th of September, 2025. The location will be announced soon, please let us know if you are interested in hosting. Agenda Our format for the evening will be as it always has been: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We vote - using Feature Upvote - for the best speaker. The winner will receive a SplashMap and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Michael Cruickshank, Anthropocene Analytics: Leveraging geospatial data and complex network models to efficient defend urban areas against the climate crisis. Felix Delattre, eoAPI - Earth Observation data...

When and where? Geomob Edinburgh will be held at 6:30pm (doors open at 6pm) on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025 at the office of Esri UK: Floor 2, Quatermile Three, 10 Nightengale Way, EH3 9EG Edinburgh Google Maps, OpenStreetMap Agenda Our format for the evening will be: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers sponsored by OpenCage, Esri. The speakers: Matthew Akerman, Fort William More speakers coming soon! We are always looking for speakers, volunteer to speak! The organizers: Geomob Edinburgh is organized by Gala Camacho Thanks Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. See the list of past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob event.

When and where? Geomob London will place at 6:00 PM on Wednesday the 22nd of October, 2025. We will announce the exact location shortly. Agenda Our format for the evening will be as it always has been: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We vote - using Feature Upvote - for the best speaker. The winner will receive a SplashMap and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Joe Leach, Unique property reference numbers, a very British love affair Rain Wu, Maps as desires James Cheshire, The Library of Lost Maps Dustin Carlino, How did the mapper cross the road? MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED Would you like to...

Summary thread Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon When and where? Geomob Edinburgh was held at 6:30pm (doors open at 6pm) on Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 at room 1.26 in Paterson’s Land, The University of Edinburgh Holyrood Campus (Google / OSM) Thank you to The Community Access to Rooms project for providing this space for us, free of cost! This event is part of The Data Lab’s Geospatial Month - other events listed here. Agenda Our format for the evening will be: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers sponsored by OpenCage, Esri and on this special occasion also by Avineon Tensing. The speakers: Laura Munoz, Putting Marketing on the Map: My journey as a marketer in the geospatial edtech...

Robert Simmon shared this, El Chaltén is a village within Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina’s Santa Cruz province.

Digital twin in infrastructure is no longer a future concept—it’s shaping how we plan, build, and manage smarter, greener cities today. At Geospatial World Forum 2025, a high-level panel of […] The post Spatial Computing and Digital Twins: Advancing Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure | GWF 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

PLUS: Why satellite forecasting models keep getting it wrong, further problems with foundation models, and more.

World maps tend to be wide (horizontal, landscape), whereas mobile phone screens tend to be tall (vertical, portrait). This makes world maps small and hard to see on phones: a problem when you’re trying to… More

The International Cartographic Association announced the passing of Ferdinand Jan (“Ferjan”) Ormeling Jr., “a pioneering figure in thematic and atlas cartography and a backbone of the development of the International Cartographic Association.” He was 82.… More

Dear Overture Team and OpenStreetMap Community, This diary entry is a follow-up to an in-person conversation I had with some of the Overture team at State of the Map U.S. To their credit, they were quick to admit to and apologize for some of these omissions and verbally committed to making appropriate changes. I am therefore posting this entry for the following reasons: to fully document my concerns, to invite others to (respectfully please!) share their perspectives, to hold the Overture team accountable for making these changes. Clarity on Attribution Page In my opinion, Overture does not take care to spell out the necessity of OpenStreetMap attribution on their Attribution and Licensing page. After an optional citation comes the following language: The Overture Maps Foundation does not require text attribution or an OMF logo on maps, visualizations, and graphics created with our datasets. If you would like to credit Overture, we suggest: © Overture Maps...

In the early days of mapping and cartography experiments, GPS tracks were often the starting point. Contributors to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, especially before 2010, relied heavily on GPS devices. They would walk or cycle routes and later upload their recorded tracks and observations to OSM. Today, GNSS-capable devices are everywhere: smartphones, smartwatches, action cams, and drones. These tools don’t just record where things are, but also what they are, through images, videos, and other sensor inputs. This opens up new possibilities for mobile mapping. I recently tried something new: drone-based tracking in Active Mode—a self-experiment in modern mobile mapping. What did the test setup look like, and which devices were used? For my tests mapping various paths and (MTB) trails, I used a range of devices and configurations. I flew two drones: the DJI Avata (2024) and the DJI NEO (2024). For the action cam, I used a GoPro HERO 12 Black, and I also wore a Garmin fēnix® 8...

Maps on Vinyl: An Atlas of Album Cover Maps collects some 415 examples of record albums with maps on the cover. “The book is the brainchild of renowned Australian cartographer Damien Saunder, whose expertise has… More

Utilities face growing pressure to identify and respond to environmental risk quickly and accurately. GIS platforms paired with mobile field data collection solutions empower utility teams by combining real-time location-based data with on-the-ground observations, enhancing environmental management strategies and compliance. By layering live and historical data while integrating field updates, this combination turns environmental risk from a reactive challenge into a proactive operational priority. La entrada How utilities use GIS to manage environmental risk se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

Should you map influence areas using distance or time? From retail site selection to public service planning, the way you define "reach" matters. In this article, we break down the difference between radial buffers and isochrones—when to use each, and why choosing the right method can dramatically improve the precision of your location-based decisions. Read now to avoid the most common mistake in spatial analysis.

Discover how combining market intelligence from NielsenIQ with geospatial analytics is helping retailers identify opportunities, outsmart competition, and move faster.

Mapidea partners with NielsenIQ to bring together powerful market data and geospatial intelligence—helping businesses make smarter, location-based decisions.

Girl on the Net received this stunning embroidered tube map as a gift

Watch this impactful panel from Geospatial World Forum 2025 on “Accelerating Future Geospatial Ecosystem through Collaborative Efforts of Professional Societies.” where global leaders of professional geospatial societies come together to […] The post Accelerating Future Geospatial Ecosystem through Collaborative Efforts of Professional Societies appeared first on Geospatial World.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) has released an interactive map which visualizes the gentrification of American cities over the last 50 years. Cities are constantly evolving. But behind many urban developments lies a deeper story of community transformation - one that often comes with a negative cost for the original residents. The Displaced by Design interactive map is a

When we began writing this blog on geospatial data and society, few articles and discussions existed about geospatial data trust. Certainly beginning with John Pickles’ book Ground Truth from the mid-1990s, people began to discuss the ethical decisions that are made when using GIS, and that GIS use was not an impartial act, nor was […]

DIARI SAYA #AWAIT #WAITTT

Just reached 1000 edits, so thought it would be good to dump what I have learnt so far. I started using OSM during the COVID 19 lockdown living in Hampshire, there were many walks available but the routes were not always clear on google maps. OSM was far better and I used it for information about walks before proceding. The level of detail was great and really useful. Fast forward to 2023 and I decide to start contributing using StreetComplete and MapComplete. I drive an Electric vehicle and the information on charge points is so obscure I wanted to contribute. This led me down a rabbit hole of StreetComplete, filling in addresses, road surfaces, bus stop shelter. Anything and everything. I learnt the importance of information that would be useful to users. Only in the last year, have I picked up mapping, this time using ID editor, chnaging tags was a little daunting but I slowly got there. I noticed some areas around me were missing house numbers. I learnt the importance of...

It seems as though the Quebec government has been in the process of updating its flood maps for the better part of the past decade (previously: Quebec’s Updated Flood Maps Prove Controversial; Quebec Flood Maps).… More

12/06/2025-18/06/2025 [1] OSM Perfect Intersections Editor, a prototype by Mikhail Kuzin | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors. Mapping campaigns The OpenStreetMap Russia community has announced the completion of a recent online mapathon focused on the city of Morshansk. Over the course of two weeks, 26 participants contributed by mapping approximately 8,000 buildings, 5,000 addresses, 300 shops, and 150 amenities. Contributors relied primarily on Esri satellite imagery, Yandex panoramas, and the official government cadastre map as their sources. In a blog post, Séverin Ménard related his experience mapping the POIs of a small town where he stayed for three days, and encourages other OSM field mappers to share their own experience with the hashtag #MakeYourStayOSM! Community [1] Mikhail Kuzin is developing ► OSMPIE, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get tool that makes adding and tagging roads and intersections in OpenStreetMap significantly easier, more precise, and more...

Jami posted this from a chilly Mexico (who knew?)

Didn’t think would see a day(again) where I have to use tor with bridge as proxy AND a vpn for accessing internet including OSM and it’s wiki but here we are… Sighs 🤦🤦🤦 Those guys at government always can and will shock/surprise civilians to the death (yet again) Never a dull moment!

다중다각형 어떻게 만들어요??? (Pls teach me how to make “type: polygon”)

Designing thematic world maps for #mobile devices is challenging. A research team explores new, innovative map types for effective communication of spatial information on small screens.

Please Look at the Data

Hi everyone. I recently started contributing to the map around my university’s campus, and I thought I should get in touch with the community a little. I’ve only labeled major buildings in the campus plus some road fixups, but I hope to continue contributing more to the map around here. Oh yeah, this account is old, but I don’t even remember having it until I tried to sign up lol.

I typically write my notes in English when they can be resolved by anyone. Even residents from another country than Sweden. Om anteckningarna pekar mot att en behöver kunna förstå svenska för att fixa ett problem så tenderar skriva jag på svenska istället.

　韓国の百科事典・ナムウィキのオープンストリートマップの記事には以下のような記述があります。 【ネット右翼が独島（韓国名）の関連するすべての情報を消したこともあり、独島を日本が主張する行政区域である島根県沖ノ島に名前に変更する事例もあり、鬱陵島から独島へ行く航路の名前を「不正入国海路」に変更しながら独島関連の地物を日本語に変えるなど、島を水没させる編集もあった。 独島を竹島と表記して日本領土に編集する場合が多く起きるので、関心を持ってみるのも良い。 独島削除と竹島で作ったり消したりする問題は現在進行形だ。 独島の衛星写真はうまく出ていないので、すべて消してしまえばJOSMのような高度なツールでない限り、再編集するのが難しい点がある。 】 　まあ、そうだろうなあと思い適当な地物をクリックしてみました。私は東アジア地域で地名の日本語表記を書くのに四苦八苦しているので、竹島は興味深い場所です。 　いくつかのポイントは実効支配を行っている韓国側が定めたと考えられる日本語名称が書かれているのですが、肝心な『独島里』の日本語名称が削除されているではありませんか！ 　ちなみに、韓国での『里』は日本では小字に該当します。 　削除した理由は『日本ではそう呼称されていないから』だそうです。しかも、政治的意図はない←？？？？？ 　この理論が罷り通るなら北方領土では同様な編集が行われていないのも疑問です。 　実効支配を行っている国の呼称を削除するのは、日本人の私ですら甚だ理解できません。当該編集は私が修正しましたが、おそらく、今後もこのような編集が行われると推測されます。 　日本の立場を表明することは重要ですが、【政治的意図のない編集】や【竹島は日本の領土】という編集をここで行って何になるというのでしょうか？ 　少し愚痴りたくなったので書かせて頂きました。

The #SOGI-#OSIG GIS Technology Specialist Group has released version 2.0 of their interactive GIS #TrendRadar at gistrends.ch, classifying 40 technologies and concepts into “Established”, “Emerging”, and “Descending” levels of maturity. Each entry is evaluated on market penetration, technological maturity, business viability, and user ecosystem.

Jeremy Garniaux shared these pics from a display in the forecourt of the Gare De Lyon. “A beautiful series of almost MapsInTheWild was waiting for me this morning on the forecourt of the Gare de Lyon this morning, as I arrived.” I wonder how they chose the images for this display?

Spending countless hours terracing thousands of buildings yet didn’t even bother to correct the errors caused by it?

Google has launched a new interactive map, Weather Lab: Cyclones, which shows AI-generated tropical cyclone forecasts and allows you to compare how different AI forecast models perform in comparison to  traditional physics-based models.If you’ve ever wondered how different forecasting models "see" a storm before it hits, or how accurate those predictions really are, Weather Lab:

Hi everyone, I’m giving a talk at State of the Map US 2025 called MapSwipe Today and its Future in OSM. This talk explores the potential of MapSwipe becoming its own OSM editor, and potentially also involving AI and machine learning models into the mix. You can find the slides here. This diary post is to collect thoughts from the OSM community on this topic. Once the recorded talk is processed, I’ll also add the link to that here. Looking forward to the discussion! Nicolelaine

ใ

This week I’ve been mapping rural communities in Honduras, focusing on areas within the Tegucigalpa Health Region. My work has included adding paths, correcting road alignments, and identifying visible structures such as houses and community centers.

Today we at Unique Mappers did our weekly presentation were I made a presentation on Humanitarian Use of OpenStreetMap where i talked about OSM what it is why it is crucial in Humanitarian context how it provides critical data in poorly mapped or un mapped areas. I still talked about the basics( getting started with OSM), the intermediate OSM data use(Analysis and virtualization) and advanced used of OSM. I still talked about the tools and resources( software) used with OSM and example is the HOT tasking manager, QGIS [qgis.org], Umap and many other software, site, organisation using OpenStreetMap

Forest Disturbance Mapping via Remote Sensing -216M Acres in Eastern US - Conservation Science and Data Visualization, United States posted on 2025-06-20

USA Conservation Science and Data Visualization, LLC Category: Remote Sensing

Last month the hiking app AllTrails announced AI-generated (“leveraged”) custom routes as part of a new premium membership plan, and some people are worried about it. According to the National Observer, AllTrails and other hiking… More

Hi :) I am mapping Eritrea these days and found some objects I am not able to identify. Can you help me with your wisdom? 1 I suspect those are some living buildings, but I might be wrong. 2 Is this something for collecting water? There is a discussion on this in the forum as well. Thanks

Matthew Edney spotted this map of Yonkers on the floor of the stage at a performance of Hello Dolly. “Map of Manhattan/Yonkers on floor of stage for Lyric Stage production of Hello Dolly (in Boston) … nifty” Nifty indeed!

As I write in my profile, I was really peeved off, that dozens of “Camino Apps” (apps used to track users along the Ways of St. James, the Caminos de Santiago) did ask their users for updates to opening hours or bed counts in albergues, but never contributed back to OSM what they’d discovered. I launched a “test balloon” in 2023, renaming an accommodation to reflect its real name, and lo and behold, of the 23 apps I checked, 22 had suddenly also changed the name, meaning they used OSM data, but didn’t ever give back to the community. So I changed it, wrote a Camino App that did contribute back. We don’t expect our users to have OSM accounts. Instead, we recruited a bunch of volunteers, who are served the changes, check them personally, and then contribute them back to OSM. First step: fountain potability. Along the Caminos are thousands of fountains providing drinking water to the 500k pilgrims walking the Way every year. Spain is excellent, when it comes to drinking water...

junction:cluster:radius - тэг для указания максимально возможного радиуса влияния/отношения пересечения на окружающие объекты Синтаксис node.tags { junction:cluster:radius: number[1..N] } Применяется для объектов Когда этот тэг применяется для объектов типа node, эта эта точка должна являться пересечением - junction. См статью про это. Тэг указывает радиус окружности в которую может быть вписана функциональная зона для данного пересечения. Это означает, что в данной зоне другие объекты (парковки, переходы, стоп-линии и так далее) могут отображаться или интерпретироваться как-то иначе. В какой-то степени это понятие соотносится с понятием функциональная зона перекрестка, только в данном случае - простейшего пересечения. Главной мотивацией введения данного тэга было обеспечить возможность группировки нод соседних пересечений в обобщающее понятие “Перекресток”. Для этого у нас есть несколько различный вариантов, как это может быть сделано: Relation:...

Say Goodbye to Your Outdoor LifeThe Wilderness Society has identified over 250 million acres of public land that Republicans are preparing to sell under new legislation. If the SENR Bill passes, then you can expect to spend a lot more time indoors.Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has already been dubbed a “Reverse Robin Hood Bill.” The legislation contains a range of measures explicitly

junction:radius - тэг для указания максимально возможной зоны конфликта на пересечении Синтаксис node.tags { junction:radius: number[1..N] } way.tags { junction:radius:lanes: number[1..N]|number[1..N]|... junction:radius:lanes(:forward|backward)(:start|end) number[1..N]|number[1..N]|... } Применяется для объектов Когда этот тэг применяется для объектов типа node, эта эта точка должна являться пересечением. Тэг указывает радиус окружности в которую может быть вписана зона конфликта путей для данного пересечения junction:radius - радиус окружности соотносящийся с зоной конфликта, в котором участвуют транспортные средства Когда этот тэг применяется дл объекта way, то обязательно применять суффикс lanes. Значения переопределяют радиус конфликтной зоны пересечения индивидуально для каждой полосы, если заданы. Рассмотрим несколько примеров. На рисунках ниже голубая окружность в правой части рисунка и есть визуализация значения данного тэга. Пример...

junction:shape - тэг для указания характерной формы пересечения 2х путей Синтаксис node.tags { junction:shape: rectangle|oblique|staggered } Применяется для объектов Этот тэг применяется только для объектов типа node и эта точка должна являться пересечением двух или 4х way. Для самых распространенных пересечений 2х дорог или одной дороги пешеходного перехода. Он отражает форму пересечения и отношения между воображаемыми или реальными стоп линиями конфликтующих путей в этом пересечении. Причины введения Две дороги могут пересекаться под совершенно разными углами, см примеры ниже, но углы пересечения иногда не отражает, как автомобили или пешеходы или другие транспортные средства, будут останавливаться перед этим пересечением. Форму задает проект организации дорожного движения и фантазия проектировщика. Значения rectangle - стоп линии конфликтующих путей находятся под углом ~ 90 градусов друг относительно друга. Точки стоп линий для каждой полосы lanes...

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

As geospatial data explodes, experts from Meta, Uber, TomTom, and the Overture Maps Foundation explore how open data is transforming from a mere free resource into critical digital infrastructure. This […] The post Managing the Explosion of Spatial Data: How Open Data Can Help Structure Data for Government and Enterprises | GWF 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

  Open source geospatial 3D innovation has just reached another important milestone, thanks to a Cesium Ecosystem Grant for a new 3D globe view in QGIS. This is the second grant that the team of North Road and Lutra Consulting received from Cesium, and we’re proud of what we’ve delivered for our QGIS users. The new 3D globe will be available to all in QGIS v.3.44. This was an extremely interesting project to undertake, as it required a heavy research and experimentation process by our developers. There’s many potential approaches for implementing a large-scale, 3D globe, and each have their advantages and trade-offs. We were very lucky to have insight from Cesium’s Kevin Ring to advise us at the start […]

KonGeoS - Konferenz der Geodäsie-Studierenden Die KonGeoS ist die Konferenz der Geodäsie-Studierenden der Hochschulen im DACH-Raum und findet zweimal jährlich statt. Ziel ist es die Studierenden der 24 Geodäsie-Fachschaften aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz miteinander zu vernetzen. Die KonGeoS tourt, ähnlich wie die FOSSGIS-Konferenz, dabei durch die Universitäten und Hochschulen des DACH-Raumes. Vom 19. bis 22. Juni 2025 fand die KonGeoS an der Universität Bonn statt. Beim Ausstellerforum am Freitagnachmittag informierten Torsten Brassat, Torsten Friebe, Harald Schwarz und André Henn über Open-Source-GIS und OpenStreetMap. Zahlreiche Studierende kamen mit Interesse oder Fragen am Stand vorbei. Fotoeindrücke FOSSGIS-OSGeo-OSM-Stand ist nachgefragt (Foto Torsten B.) FOSSGIS-OSGeo-OSM-Stand ist gut nachgefragt und hat auch mal Ruhe (Foto Harald S.)

Per ogni regione vengono fornite: una query overpass che visualizza i comuni d’Italia (livello amministrativo 8) per cui non è presente in OSM un node/way/relation con amenity=townhall ma per cui è noto un palazzo comunale in wikidata una query wikidata che elenca ordinati per comune i suddetti palazzi comunali una query overpass che visualizza i comuni d’Italia (livello amministrativo 8) per cui non è presente in OSM un node/way/relation con amenity=townhall di cui neppure in wikidata è noto un palazzo comunale Nota1: per efficienza le query lavorano su un sottoinsieme di comuni di cui era stata accertata al 1/6/2025 (a) la mancanza del municipio in OSM e (b) la presenza/assenza di palazzi municipali in Wikidata. Nel caso il municipio sia stato aggiunto in OSM dopo suddetta data le mappa generate dalle query overpass mostrano sia il territorio comunale che il municipio. Nel caso il palazzo municipale sia stato aggiunto dopo suddetta data, la...

This blog was originally posted on my personal site: Prograham.net - Strava Workouts Make OpenStreetMap Stronger I’m not much of an armchair mapper. Partly because ground surveying with Everydoor and StreetComplete is what got me started mapping in OSM. But I think it’s also because I hate having to decipher blurry aerial imagery. I still do it from time to time, but ever since I discovered how to use the Strava heatmap, I’m hooked. To hopefully sell others on the dataset and walk you through some ways I’ve found it helpful, I’ve collected some examples below of ways you can use the Strava heatmap data. Context For those of you who don’t know, Strava is used around the world to record all kinds of workouts. Strava has moved to using OSM data in their apps and to give back they’ve allowed use of their GPS traces as a source when contributing to OSM! To get it set up you can reference the OSM wikipage for Strava. Usecase 1: Misaligned Paths One of the most common...

The big goal with the TN 911 project is to eliminate steps and still enter good data. I’d like to fill out as much of the database as I could with minimal work from the person putting in data. Hence I’ve riddled the database with triggers and made drop down lists of about everything I […] The post TN911: Adding Elevation appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

[THIS POST IS AVAILABLE IN ITALIAN, ITALIAN LA SPEZIA DIALECT, ENGLISH, PORTOGUESE] [QUESTO POST É DISPONIBILE IN ITALIANO, DIALETTO ITALIANO DE LA SPEZIA, INGLESE, PORTOGHESE] [STU POST O LO TROVI IN ITALIANO, SPEZIN, INGLES e PORTUGHESE.] [ESTE POST TA DISPONÍVEL EM ITALIANO, DIALETO SPEZZINO, INGLÊS e PORTUGUÊS.] 🇮🇹 Italiano Vespucci – ultima tappa a La Spezia! Hai perso l’Amerigo Vespucci a La Spezia, Genova, Livorno, Civitavecchia o Trieste? Nessun problema: ora puoi vederlo anche da casa. 📸 Dai un’occhiata su Mapillary: https://mapillary.com/map/im/1346136963123189 Vedi la barca ormeggiata a La Spezia! 🗺️ Usa OSM + Mapillary per mappare virtualmente il suo passaggio finale. 🇮🇹 Dialetto spezzino A l’è passato o Vespucci a Speza (ultima tappa), Zena, Livorno, Civita, Trieste? Tranquillo, mo’ o peudi vede’ su Mapillary! 📸 Eccolo a Speza: https://mapillary.com/map/im/1346136963123189 Guarda a barca ormeggiou! 🗺️ Con OSM e Mapillary pè registrà ‘sto giru...

In what seems like a relatively minor update, Apple Maps will learn your preferred routes and remember visited places as of iOS 26, coming this fall. Meanwhile, Google Maps has announced some sustainable travel updates:… More

For many Americans, one of the consequences of climate change is higher insurance premiums. In Homeowners Insurance in an Era of Climate Change, the Brookings Institution maps U.S. Treasury Federal Insurance Office data to show where home insurance is becoming more costly and harder to obtain for millions of Americans.One way this is happening is through non-renewals of homeowners insurance. A

Doug spotted this “The amber trail in Europ – Bassano del Grappa Italy

Discover how leaders from banking, agriculture, logistics, and geospatial technology are coming together to harmonize IoT, AI/ML, spatial computing, and geospatial data for scalable, real-world solutions. In this high-impact panel […] The post Spatial Computing and Geospatial Platforms: Powering Business Enterprises | GWF 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

#CadenceMaps is a prototype cloud-native data service delivering #OpenStreetMap #OSM data for the Germany-Austria-Switzerland-Liechtenstein region as #GeoParquet files using a unified schema. The platform currently offers administrative boundaries and POI datasets.

https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.04106

Summary Thread Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon When and where? Geomob London took place at 6:00 PM on Wednesday the 18th of June, 2025 at Geovation Hub at (Sutton Yard, 65 Goswell Rd, London EC1V 7EN) Agenda Our format for the evening will be as it always has been: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We vote - using Feature Upvote - for the best speaker. The winner will receive a SplashMap and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Keir Clarke, Scrambled Maps Steve Karmeinsky, OpenStreetMap UK update Anne Lee Steele, How maps and spatial thinking can be used for art and advocacy ...

At Geospatial World Forum 2025, global industry leaders explore how space infrastructure is evolving into the “nervous system” of the geospatial world—driving real-time monitoring, disaster response, sustainability, and digital transformation. […] The post Space Sustainability: Nervous System for NexGen Geospatial Industry Ecosystem | GWF 2025 appeared first on Geospatial World.

Chiara Phillips presented at Geomob Berlin with a MapsInTheWild-approved dress code. Tonight is the Geomob London event, will anyone wear maps in the wild?

PLUS: the surprising limits of flood infrastructure, the hidden costs of droughts, and more.

The Nature Conservancy has released a new interactive map identifying 195 million hectares around the world where forest cover could be restored."Reforesting these areas could capture 2.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year, equivalent to removing 481 million passenger vehicles driven for one year."Click on a country on the Reforestation Hub map to see how much land could be reforested, how many

eoAPI is catching on. Here’s what we’ve learned and what we’re building next.

I like the occasional bold theory. A month ago, Drew Breunig blogged about a very bold one: #DuckDB probably being the most important geospatial software of the last decade. What gives?

Discover how spatial computing is revolutionizing data integration—from satellites to sub-surface sensors—in this compelling panel discussion held at Geospatial World Forum 2025. Featuring experts from national mapping agencies, geospatial giants, […] The post Spatial Computing and Digital Twins: Advancing Role of Mapping in National and Global Economy appeared first on Geospatial World.

Doug shared this “Valpolicella Wine Region @ Tenuta Santa Maria di Gaetano Bertani Winery. Beautiful relief map

AMOC Collapse VisualizationA new study suggests that global warming could paradoxically plunge Europe into dramatic cooling, leading to severe winter cold spells, more intense storms, and reduced rainfall. Average winter temperatures could plunge, sea ice could spread as far south as the British Isles, and nearly half the year could see temperatures below freezing.The Atlantic Meridional

Credits: Pixabay (Pixabay Content License) The Importance of Compliance A geographic data layer must comply with many rules and constraints. For example: Geometric Topological Arbitrary rules – no angles smaller...

Environmental compliance and environmental regulations are inherently tied to location: where rules apply, where inspections occur, and where records must point back to. This blog explores how GIS supports compliance efforts for regulatory requirements by providing spatial structure that helps teams stay coordinated on environmental impacts across projects. When GIS is integrated with structured field data systems, it gives teams the clarity to monitor conditions, document work accurately, and respond quickly to potential issues. La entrada Mapping environmental compliance: a GIS-driven approach se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

GIS Analyst - Sanborn Map Company, Baton Rouge, LA posted on 2025-06-16

Anita shared this neat little pirate map which comes with an attached cocktail

The longest day of the year occurs this coming Saturday. In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice is on June 21st. This is the day when the subsolar point - the location on Earth where the Sun is directly overhead at solar noon - reaches its northernmost position, directly above the Tropic of Cancer. The subsolar point moves north and south throughout the year as the Earth orbits the

Waymo Scaling, Waymo Insights

Jesse and Sue have been working on a new video series on Virtual Heritage called Recreatus. This first video episode focuses on the broader context of Digital Heritage before we […]

Doug shared this “The location of Western Michigan University on the shoulder of their jerseys”

With Assistant Professor Nelson Roque

The Universal Jurisdiction Interactive Map (UJIM), developed by TRIAL International, is a comprehensive and accessible digital tool designed to track and display criminal cases related to serious international crimes such as genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, enforced disappearances, and the crime of aggression.Universal Jurisdiction is a legal principle that allows states

What fueled the growth of the geospatial industry in the 2010s? An article on placing.technology explores the history and political economy of geospatial tech.

Reinder spotted this in a thrift shop. It’s a book of Ukrainian poems translated into English. We are wondering if the map is Kiev or …? Maybe one of our Ukrainian followers can help us out? Regardless this is a high impact book cover and could become one of my favourites.

Read about how the Amazon once flowed east to west and how the strength of Hurricane Isaac once change the course of the Mississippi river. The post Rivers that Flow Backwards appeared first on Geography Realm.

The newly unveiled COSMOS-Web is the largest, most detailed map of the universe ever created. The map plots nearly 800,000 galaxies, and almost spans the entire 13.8-billion-year history of the cosmos.The map is the result of a multinational collaboration led by astrophysicists at UC Santa Barbara and the Rochester Institute of Technology - using data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London has a new attraction. “The Ocean Map is a giant, 440m2 floor map that turns our view of the world inside out. While most world maps focus on countries and… More

Update from the “#Geoplatform Switzerland” planned in the #SGS strategy and action plans: The platform has got a landing page detailling the idea and next steps. And a name: #SWISSGEO.

Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-mergin-maps-tickets-1387725035939 One of the big questions I get asked on QGIS is “What’s the mobile environment like?”. Which leads to a whole discussion on Qfield and Mergin Maps. I’m more familiar with Mergin Maps (Plus a Business Partner). After talking to the Mergin Maps team we’re doing training. It’s going to be a mashup […] The post Mergin Maps Training on July 10th 2025 appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

Ingrid Burrington is working on a PhD dissertation on the history of geospatial software and she’s posting through it. Two gems I’ve run across so far: When we talk about the history of cartography (and… More

Angel Arenas sent me this pic of his latest giant interactive map in a square in Valencia. The map is 230 square metres, that’s pretty massive. Maybe the biggest ever?

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

So we’ve had some wildfires on our plate here in Canada. CBC News has a page tracking wildfires in Canada, including maps of wildfire location, risk and smoke. Richard points out that FireSmoke Canada (previously)… More

Nature-based solutions offer a sustainable alternative to hard infrastructure, but their success depends on high-quality, structured field data. This blog explores how environmental data management software and reporting apps help teams plan, scale, and sustain these efforts by making data collection, coordination, and reporting more effective from the start. La entrada Capturing the data that drives nature-based solutions for environmental challenges se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

AI chatbots don’t have the best track record when it comes to accuracy. They appear to struggle with geolocation too, as Bellingcat discovered two years ago in a test of OpenAI and Google chatbots. Bellingcat… More

I’ve got into a bit of a habit of writing occasional posts with links to interesting things I’ve found (probably because it’s a relatively easy blog post to write). This is another of those posts – this time, written in June 2025. So, let’s get on with some links: Why COUNT(*) can be slow in […]

Shortly after getting out of the Hospital I fell. I went down hard. It was embarrassing. Probably the worst thing is it took two people to help get me up. One person was pulling me up towards the left and one person was pulling me forward…which wasn’t helping my balance at all. I got up. […] The post I want to ride my bicycle Part 2 appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

Alan Leidner shares how 9/11 revealed the need for better underground data—and how that insight led to the global MUDDI Standard for smarter, safer cities. The post From Ground Zero to Global Change: Alan Leidner on the Power of Underground Data appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Reinder sent us this superb map of Amsterdam made out of padlocks. He said ” map of padlocks in the Groenburgwal (canal) in Amsterdam. To commemorate the 750th anniversary of the city. They do this here because many people attach a padlock to the nearby bridge. To kind of ‘seal’ the eternity of their love. Quite […]

ToxOnline is an interactive map that allows you to see which facilities are releasing toxins in your area. Simply enter your address into the map to instantly discover where and how toxic chemicals are being released near your home.The map displays markers for all facilities reporting toxic releases and includes a heat map showing the average toxic release in the searched area. By clicking

Constructed Landscapes

PLUS: Monitoring road damage from mobile phones, increasing the resolution of SAR images, and more.

Summary thread Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon When and where? Geomob Barcelona took place at 6:00 PM on Wednesday the 11th of June, 2025 at CoWorkIdea, at Carrer de Torres i Amat, 21, First Floor. doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. The talks will be in English. We vote - using FeatureUpvote - for the best speaker. The winner will receive a SplashMap and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). We head to a nearby bar for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Isaac Hoyes Ester, onocoy - High Precision Positioning Mick Larson, Giga - Building the largest open and live map of school locations and their connectivity status Toni del Hoyo, Cercador d’escoles ...

Marc-Tobias sent me this picture of his new hat. Can you work out when the map was printed and why? According to Ian Turton this xkcd may help you date the map

The concept of the '15 Minute City' aims to make urban living more livable and sustainable by ensuring that all essential individual needs can be met without reliance on a car or public transport. It's a very simple idea: ideally, an individual's essential needs should be accessible within a short travel distance.Such a simple concept deserves a suitably simple-to-understand map. CThood

The program of the fourth Journée Romande de la Géoinformation (#JRG) is published and registration is open. The event takes place on November 13 in Ecublens.

GIS Developer II - Innovate! Inc., Remote posted on 2025-06-10

Clark University has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), reinforcing its legacy in GIS innovation and environmental sustainability through its Center for Geospatial Analytics. The post Clark University joins the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Mark shared this impressive map on the entrance to an elevator (lift in English) at the Chicago Hyatt Place.

Tasmap is a powerful platform that allows anyone to create personalized, interactive maps - like Google My Maps, but better!To help you build your own custom maps, Tasmap includes built-in AI support. This means you can get started quickly by simply telling Tasmap what you want to include on your map.For example, I gave Tasmap the following prompt:Help me create a map of filming locations in Los

Aerial imagery for disaster response, and DOGE

A project led by Dr Michael Goodchild that I had the honor of participating in has resulted in the publication of an article documenting some key work in GIS and society: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10879120. Entitled “Locational Data and the Public Interest”, it not only documents the work a group of people in academia, industry, law, nonprofits, and […]

Lacey, WA, USA Washington State Department of Ecology Category: Applications Developer

Moscow, ID, USA University of Idaho Category: Geology

Denver, CO, USA Denver Water Category: Developer

Two articles by Michaël Galien on #Geotribu showcase how to leverage a Modern Data Stack (#MDS) for processing geospatial data from #Mapillary. The workflow features #dbt, Apache #Airflow, #PostGIS, #SQL, and #Python, highlighting a robust open-source approach to geospatial data engineering.

Reinder spotted this beautiful tiled map on the entrance to an underground car park in The Hague.

EthnoGuessr is a geography-based guessing game inspired by GeoGuessr, but instead of identifying real-world locations from street views, players are shown composite facial images representing average features of various ethnic groups. The facial averages (sourced from anthropological website Human Phenotypes) serve as clues. Players must guess the historical geographic origin of the

Join us at ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025 to build, explore, and reimagine EO workflows together.

From Aubry Cholleton comes isochrone.ch. Using #opendata, this website lets you find all areas reachable by #publictransport from any point in #Switzerland within a given amount of time and other parameters of your choosing.

Fancy some Italian wines?

Odyssey has released a demo of its new AI technology that enables users to explore 3D video environments in real time. Odyssey is similar to Google Maps Street View in that it allows users to visually explore real-world environments. However, instead of navigating through static 360-degree photos, Odyssey uses AI-generated streaming video that responds dynamically to user input. The result

The #GDAL Project Steering Committee recently hosted a webinar highlighting the major #modernization of the GDAL command-line interface, featuring the unification of commands and improved parameter consistency. You can now catch up on all the details through the webinar slides, the recording, and a Q&A summary.

Legami is a souvenir shop where maps can be found in various forms.

With Miles Kauffman

The way we observe our planet from orbit is undergoing a seismic shift, moving beyond the limitations of traditional satellite tasking to embrace a future of intelligent, interconnected Earth observation. This revolution is powered by the synergy of "virtual constellations" – diverse networks of coordinated sensors – and sophisticated "tipping and cueing" workflows, where broad-area monitoring by some assets automatically directs high-resolution satellites to points of critical interest. Underpinning this entire evolution is the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence, which not only automates the detection of subtle changes and orchestrates complex tasking but also distills vast streams of imagery into actionable insights, promising a more transparent, responsive, and understandable world.

Back to Rome and the Trastevere.

The ADS-B Massive Visualizer now maps 1.5 billion eBird observations. This powerful, interactive geospatial tool shows where and when different bird species have been observed by eBird users around the world.At first glance, the map may look like just a collection of dots - but click the selector button (the square with an arrow in the bottom left corner), and you can draw a region to

Interoperability isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. Learn how incremental, machine-readable standards unlock real ROI and reduce integration costs. The post The “All or Nothing” Myth of Interoperability. appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

In this interview from the 2025 GEOINT Symposium, Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial speaks with Phill Thomas from Innovate. Phill discusses his career path, starting at Accenture and moving into federal government work. He introduces Innovate as a woman-owned small business headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, with a history primarily in federal civilian and commercial sectors. Innovate is now excited about bringing their solutions to the Intel community. Phill details Innovate's evolution, including their decision in 2012 to focus intensely on the Salesforce and Esri platforms, becoming "an inch wide and a mile deep". He highlights their extensive experience with over a thousand Esri deployments and over 800 Salesforce deployments, their gold level partnership with Esri, numerous specialty certifications, and the presence of Salesforce certified architects. This deep expertise allows them to build reusable component repositories for efficiency. Phill shares that GEOINT 2025 is...

Adam Simmons interviews Yuval Lorig, VP R&D at Asterra, at the GEOINT 2025 conference. Yuval shares his background in physical geography and the geospatial industry. They delve into Asterra's work, which utilizes satellite data, particularly SAR, to monitor critical infrastructure like dams, levies, and canals, in addition to their traditional focus on water leaks. Yuval discusses the company's expansion into APIs, a SAS platform called EO 2.0, their global reach across over 70 countries, and their focus on improving technology accuracy and developing in-house AI models.Highlights• Interview with Yuval Lorig, VP R&D at Asterra.• Astera focuses on monitoring critical infrastructure (dams, levies, canals) and the water industry.• They utilize satellite data, specifically SAR, for subsurface penetration to gain insights.• Expanding their offering to include APIs and a SAS platform (EO 2.0).• Customer base is now global, working in more than 70 countries with almost a thousand projects.•...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial speaks with Burt Wagner, a Data Architect at Broadcom, during the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Burt, with 25 years supporting the US intelligence community and federal law enforcement, discusses Broadcom's lesser-known big data solutions. While Broadcom is widely known for semiconductors and acquiring VMware, Burt highlights their significant data products, including Gemfire and Greenplum databases. He explains how Greenplum, based on PostgreSQL, provides massive scalability (up to tens of petabytes) for analyzing geospatial data, overcoming PostgreSQL's limitations. The conversation also covers Broadcom's Unified Data Management (UDM) solution, which includes capabilities for crossing network security boundaries and operating in environments with denied, delayed, intermittent, and latent communications. UDM facilitates bringing edge data centrally for detailed analysis and building AI/ML models that can then be exported for use on small edge...

Adam Simmons interviews Craig Brower from Unseenlabs US at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Craig discusses Unseenlabs' capability to provide satellite-based RF (Radio Frequency) data for monitoring and tracking, which is integrated into customer workflows for rapid tasking and delivery. He highlights the ongoing need to educate the community about RF data and SIGINT-type sources, noting that many, including traditional imagery analysts, may be unfamiliar with it. Craig describes their data as simple "dots on a map" where status changes indicate behavior, such as a vessel turning off its AIS. He mentions that Unseenlabs is unique in being a profitable company, recently secured a large investment to build 20 new satellites and next-generation birds, and currently has 16 satellites on orbit.Highlights• Interview with Craig Brower from Unseenlabs US.• Provides satellite-based RF (Radio Frequency) data for monitoring and tracking.• Data is integrated into customer workflows for quick tasking...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews Dan DeGennaro (CTO), Bryan Cosme (CEO & Co-founder), and Brian Buttaccio (COO) of Trevity at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Bryan shares his background, including experience in the Marine Corps specializing in geospatial, which informs Trevity's focus. Dan, a physicist turned coder, focuses on AI, Augmentation, and integrating capabilities into analyst workflows. All of them discuss Trevity's mission to increase analyst productivity, believing they can nearly double it. They highlight their new software, Inkwell, which addresses the challenge of managing vast amounts of geospatial data. Inkwell allows for targeted data scraping and, crucially, enables analysts to interact with and filter data using natural language. This helps analysts quickly find and understand relevant data within an area of interest.Highlights• Trevity's founders have a background in the Marine Corps specializing in geospatial intelligence.• Trevity aims to significantly...

Mats Palsson, CEO of T Kartor Group, shares his journey from engineering to finding his passion in geospatial and maps. He introduces T Kartor Group, founded 40 years ago, which specializes in map and information management solutions based on the principle that maps represent information assets with a position. T Kartor provides solutions for major cities, defense organizations, and public safety sectors in Europe and the US. Palsson mentions T Kartor has significant operations in St. Louis and Sweden. He explains that "making maps" for them involves managing information and tailoring its presentation for diverse end-users, such as military personnel and public transport systems. The company has evolved to focus on information management with a cartographic element. Recent developments include providing customers with dashboards to monitor how their information is used. Palsson discusses the significant industry changes driven by the tremendous amount of data from satellites and...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews Geoffrey King, Vice President of Strategy at Greater St. Louis Inc. (GSL), at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Geoffrey discusses GSL's role in growing and strengthening the geospatial cluster in St. Louis through the GeoFutures Initiative. He explains GSL's various functions, including business attraction, downtown revitalization, and supporting small and diverse businesses. Geoffrey highlights NGA as a key anchor institution for the region's geospatial growth. He talks about GSL's presence at GEOINT for over five years, showcasing St. Louis's assets to attract talent and investment. He notes that St. Louis is hosting GEOINT for the third time this year and will host again in 2029, emphasizing the significant effort invested in the 2025 event. GSL aims to collaborate with partners and connect different sectors and communities to maximize the economic impact of geospatial growth in the region.Highlights• Geoffrey King of Greater St. Louis Inc....

Adam Simmons interviews Tim Klawa of Figure Eight Federal at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Tim discusses the critical importance of data validity for training effective AI programs, particularly for users like warfighters and operators. He emphasizes that understanding the attributes and relevance of training data to specific mission needs is essential for building confidence in the resulting AI models. Tim mentions that Figure Eight Federal's technology, including their enterprise data labeling platform Artemis and their Hydra AI platform for situational awareness and decision support, helps address this challenge. He notes that they will be demonstrating their capabilities at Amazon's booth.Highlights• Interview with Tim Klawa of Figure Eight Federal.• Emphasizes the importance of data validity for AI programs.• Understanding data set attributes and alignment with mission needs is crucial for AI confidence.• Discusses Figure Eight Federal's technology platforms.• Artemis platform is...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial speaks with Billy Soal and Brent Perry of Progress Federal during the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Brent, with a background in full stack engineering and data analytics for defense and IC customers, highlights geospatial as one of the top ways to visualize intelligence. They introduce Progress Federal, a business unit within Progress Software that includes the capabilities of the acquired company Mark Logic. They explain that Mark Logic's history spans diverse industries and government, focusing on a multi-modal database that can aggregate data from multiple systems, regardless of format. This database is designed to operate at immense scale and also to scale down to a laptop for use in hostile environments with denied, delayed, intermittent, or latent communications. They emphasize the importance of being agile due to the rapid rate of change in user expectations and technology in the market.Highlights• Progress Federal is a business unit of Progress...

Guy De Carufel, CEO of Cognitive Space, shares his background as an aerospace engineer from NASA and Firefly. He introduces Cognitive Space as an AI software company dedicated to making the most effective use of space leveraging assets. De Carufel explains his motivation for starting the company was to apply modern AI to automate space operations, addressing the manual methods previously used. He describes their product focused on mission management for ground systems, which automates the process of generating effective schedules from mission priorities and integrates with C2 systems. Cognitive Space uses AI to orchestrate proliferated satellite systems, diverse sensors, and different organizations (national, commercial, allied). He also mentions their Sentient Earth product for aggregating data and providing predictive capacity analytics. Their primary customers manage constellations, including government and commercial entities. De Carufel highlights Cognitive Space's focus on...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews Nicole Sullivan from Gateway Geospatial Group at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium in St. Louis. Nicole proudly states that Gateway Geospatial Group is St. Louis born and bred. She shares some of the company's capabilities and interests, including their work with low-cost mesh networks for data collection. A key area of focus is performing near real-time AI/ML on the data collected via their mesh network. They are also interested in the challenges related to different data formats. Nicole encourages attendees and viewers to visit their booth or website to learn more and share ideas.Highlights• Nicole Sullivan represents Gateway Geospatial Group at GEOINT 2025.• Gateway Geospatial Group is a company based in St. Louis.• They work with low-cost mesh networks for data collection.• A key capability is performing near real-time AI/ML on collected data.• The company is interested in exploring ideas related to their technology and addressing challenges...

Adam Simmons speaks with Will Clapperton from GDIT at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Will highlights GDIT's focus on supporting tactical missions with advanced technology. He provides an example of their innovative work using VR/AR technology for post-damage assessment scenarios. This allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual landscape containing geospatial data, identify areas needing attention like damaged infrastructure, plan subsequent steps, and share that critical information with other responders. Will stresses that GDIT's involvement goes deep into everyday missions, far beyond traditional IT support, and emphasizes their passion for working close to the tactical edge. He also offers advice to young professionals entering the field, encouraging technologists to prioritize understanding and addressing tactical mission needs.Highlights• Interview with Will Clapperton from GDIT.• GDIT focuses on supporting tactical missions with technology.• Discusses the use of VR/AR...

Adam Simmons speaks with John True and Andy Dearing from Cultivation Capital at GEOINT 2025, gaining insights from their perspective as investment professionals in the geospatial sector. They offer advice to startups attending GEOINT, emphasizing the importance of developing dual-use technology applicable to both government and commercial markets rather than focusing solely on federal contracts. They highlight that they look for companies that are genuinely solving problems for the customer base, particularly addressing the challenge of data overload and analyst shortages, potentially leveraging AI and machine learning. They discuss monitoring exit strategies in the market, like SPACs, and the increasing value of data for internal processing by larger companies to build solutions. John and Andy are proud of Cultivation Capital's foundation built on the experience of former geospatial operators, which allows them to offer unique insight and support to entrepreneurs.Highlights•...

Susan Moreira from Axiologic Solutions discusses her company's role as an Intel integrator specializing in system, data, and cyber security engineering for complex intelligence systems. She explains their support for geospatial data across customers like NGA and DIA, including managing the Mars program and improving analytic workflows. Moreira highlights their "mission ready" approach, working directly with analysts and operators to translate requirements. Axiologic Solutions is involved with AI efforts, supporting Project Maven and prototype development, focusing on successfully integrating AI with constrained resources and accelerating Authority to Operate (ATO) processes. Other supported efforts include the common data fabric and DIA's data hub. Cyber security is a key focus, integrated from the project's beginning, offering advisory services and researching future challenges like quantum engineering for security. Moreira shares what Axiologic hopes to achieve at GEOINT, such as...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews Trent Tinker, who leads the Federal Business Development team at Cesium, during the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Trent shares his extensive background in the geospatial industry, focusing on 3D geospatial for defense and aviation. His career includes experience with Esri, Hexagon, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where he developed a passion for interoperability and open standards. The discussion touches upon Cesium's history, having spun out of AGI and advancing their vision with Bentley. A key announcement is Cesium's upcoming first-ever developer conference in Philadelphia from June 23rd to 25th.Highlights• Trent Tinker leads the Federal Business Development team at Cesium.• Trent has a long career in 3D geospatial software, focusing on the defense and aviation domains.• His background includes working with Esri, Hexagon, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), highlighting his passion for interoperability and open standards.•...

This clip features Carter Christopher discussing Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. He highlights ORNL's core mission of doing science for the government. Carter emphasizes that ORNL's work is particularly centered on computing and AI. He suggests that this focus differentiates ORNL within the geospatial community and contributes to advancing the field for everyone.Highlights• Clip featuring Carter Christopher from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).• ORNL focuses on doing science for the government.• Work is centered on computing and AI.• This focus differentiates ORNL and helps advance the community.

Mike DeLaFleur from TekSynap, with over 34 years in the community, discusses his role in BD, capture, and geospatial solutions. He introduces TekSynap as a mid-size government contractor providing IT services and solutions for the DoD, Fed Civ, and IC, which has grown organically since 2008. TekSynap works with various agencies and is expanding into the geospatial world with R&D investments in AI and analyst tools. DeLaFleur highlights TekSynap's distinction as one of the few companies globally with CMMI Level 5 in Services, Development, and Security. He shares recent examples of applying AI in IT networking (Marvis AI) and document management (Megatron). Their core geospatial offering for the IC is ARTA (AI recommendation-driven analytics). TekSynap recently contributed to a project at NGA focusing on disaster response using UI/UX, data fabric, and integrating the unclassified data lake. DeLaFleur reflects on his extensive experience attending GEOINT symposiums and praises TekSynap's...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews Sean Walsh, Managing Partner of Turnberry Labs (part of Turnberry Solutions), at the GEOINT 2025 Symposium. Sean, with over 30 years in tech, discusses Turnberry Solutions' work, including geospatial custom development for both private sector clients (like Bayer Crop Science) and national geospatial agencies (like NGA). He highlights their approach as a commercial company that moves at commercial speed and their trademarked methodology: Human Centered Design Agile (HCD Agile). This method prioritizes understanding user needs before developing technology. Sean shares details of their work with NGA on the AIM 2 (Aeronautical Information Management System 20) project, where they migrated a system to AWS, focusing heavily on user engagement to ensure the new cloud-based application worked seamlessly for users without requiring training. He emphasizes that their HCD Agile approach allows them to quickly start solving problems and deliver value...

Bill Conroy discusses his diverse background, which includes serving in the Coast Guard on an Arctic icebreaker, studying GIS, and working for NGA on nautical charts. He introduces his company, Semaphore Maritime Solutions, which he started about a year ago. Conroy explains his primary work involves providing maritime analysis for the US Space Force TAC SRT program, handling unclassified data requests. Drawing on his extensive maritime experience and licenses, he analyzes data like AIS, contextualizing it with factors like weather and regulations to identify suspicious activities. He focuses on taking existing data sets and providing deeper insights through activities-based analysis. Conroy notes that his location in landlocked St. Louis is not a barrier to this work. He mentions utilizing NGA's Port Index data set in his platform. He highlights networking at events like GEOINT as part of his growth strategy and positions himself as a maritime subject matter expert valuable for...

Adam Simmons of Project Geospatial interviews John Berglund about the development of the geospatial ecosystem in St. Louis, particularly in the Downtown North area and its connection to the new NGA facility. John highlights that St. Louis has a long history with NGA, dating back to the 1930s, and is one of only two NGA locations in the US. The new NGA building is discussed, noting its more outwardly focused approach and the start of employee moves in September/October 2025. This move is anticipated to create a "geospatial bump," attracting companies interested in working with NGA. The goal is to expand this growth beyond just defense subcontractors to encompass areas like spatial finance and other cross-cutting applications, thereby growing the entire ecosystem. John, a St. Louis native, expresses pride in his hometown and encourages visitors to see the positive developments happening in the city.Highlights• The conversation focuses on the growing geospatial ecosystem in St. Louis,...

Today marks the final, quiet farewell to Landsat 7, a satellite that has tirelessly served as humanity's eye on Earth for over a quarter-century. Its incredible 2.5 million images have not only documented our planet's vital pulse – from receding glaciers to changing forests – but have also empowered countless discoveries and deepened our understanding of our world. As it drifts into its final, silent orbit, we honor its unparalleled service and the dedication of the countless individuals who guided its mission, ensuring its legacy of environmental insight endures.

The WWF has launched a new interactive map Blue Corridors that brings 30 years of whale migration data to life. Using the map you can:🛰️ See where whales travel.⚠️ Learn what’s putting them at risk.💙 Discover how we can protect them.The new Blue Corridors interactive map is designed to support global whale conservation efforts by visualizing decades of scientific data in a way that is

As drones become a staple in modern industries—from infrastructure inspection and agriculture to public safety and energy—the demand for skilled drone professionals is growing rapidly. But while the technology continues to soar, a major challenge has emerged: finding qualified drone talent. Why the Demand is Exploding Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are no longer […]

A light exploration into organizing stac-geoparquet

When and where? Geomob Berlin took place at 18:00 on Wednesday the 4th of June, 2025 at the office of Toll Collect at Linkstraße 4, 10785 Berlin - Google Maps - OpenStreetMap. The nearest station is Potsdamer Platz. Summary Thread Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon Agenda Our format for the evening will be as it always has been: doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling at 18:30 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. We vote - using Feature Upvote - for the best speaker. The winner will receive a SplashMap and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Georg Held, Community Mapping for Safe Roads to School Evgenii Burmakin, Dawarich and how it uses...

PLUS: planning flood evacuations using AR, generating terrain models using text, and more.

The wildfires currently raging in Canada have forced the evacuation of over 25,000 people across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Manitoba has been the hardest hit, with entire communities like Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage forced to flee. The smoke from the wildfires is now affecting air quality not just in Canada, but in several U.S. states.You can use Smoke Forecast to view

Here are two maps of Poland. The map on the left shows the partitioned Poland of 1815–1918 (from Lessons from the Partitions of Poland). The map on the right is Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza's interactive map of this week's 2025 Polish Election.It has long been a tradition, after every Polish election, for observers to note that current voting patterns in the country still seem to follow

Two decades after its debut, the canton of #Zug unveils #ZugMap’s new #3D mode and various 3D datasets. Users can test the ZugMap 3D experience and help shape its future by participating in the canton’s user survey.

GIS Specialist - City of Decatur, IL, Decatur, Illinois, United States posted on 2025-06-03

When and where? Next on our tour-de-Belgique is Brussels, the event’s venue is at The Sister Cafe on the first floor. We will welcome everyone at 6:30 PM and aim to start the talks by 6:45 PM. Agenda Our format for the evening will be: 6:30 PM: doors open, set up and general mingling 6:45 PM: we begin the talks with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. This time we stay in the same place (we are already in a ‘pub’!) #geobeers paid for by the sponsors. The speakers: Joost Schouppe, NCCN (National Crisis Centre) and OSM.be, Dealing with disasters: geodata challenges for emergency response. Tommaso Di Gioacchino, Center for Climate Crime Analysis, Translating satellite data into action to support rapid methane emissions reductions. Martijn van Erp, Climbfinder, Mapping 65.000 cycling ascents with a shoestring budget. Pieter De...

GIS Supervisor - City of Richland, Richland, WA USA posted on 2025-06-03

Decatur, IL, USA City of Decatur Category: Government

Chris Holmes giving the opening keynote at CNG Conference Well, we did it. The Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) community came together on April 30-May 2 for our first in-person conference in Snowbird, Utah–and honestly? It was something special. For 2.5 packed days, we welcomed around 250 attendees from over 100 organizations, spanning cloud service providers, government and nonprofit agencies, academic institutions, and private sector companies. People flew in from across the globe, with participants joining from countries including Australia, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, and more – all ready to learn and share what it takes to build geospatial workflows for the cloud. Who showed up? Our attendees largely consisted of highly technical, skilled data practitioners, including software engineers, data scientists, and geospatial developers. Here’s a breakdown of who was in the room: 45%: Senior...

Edge computing for earth observation

Agentic AI is poised to transform field operations by executing repetitive tasks autonomously, adapting to changing conditions, and reducing the need for human coordination. This evolution in agentic AI for field operations is built on decades of progress and now stands ready to address real-world challenges in industries like utilities, construction, environmental consulting, and others. La entrada Built to act: Agentic AI for field operations se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

The Hunger Map by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is a visual tool that illustrates the prevalence of undernourishment across the world. It visualizes the geographic distribution of hunger and helps monitor global food insecurity trends.Hunger Map allows users to explore data across multiple geographic scales, including countries, subregions, and regions,

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

An interactive map that brings wildfire progression and wind conditions into focus.

Last week, Switzerland’s Birchgletscher collapsed and caused a major rock avalanches, altering the landscape and burying the village of Blatten. With the data of the federal Rapid Mapping service and the help of individual experts, a first open post-event elevation model was made available. I used the model to create pre- and post-event visualizations and prints at a local scale.

The story behind #QGIS: The new canonical open-access paper, “The QGIS project: Spatial without compromise,” authored by core members of the QGIS Project Steering Committee, Anita Graser, Tim Sutton, and Marco Bernasocchi, explores the evolution of the QGIS project, its organizational structure, and future challenges.

GIS Manager (REQ. 1244) - geocgi, Okinawa, Japan posted on 2025-06-02

Artificial intelligence is rapidly redrawing the boundaries of the geospatial industry, unlocking powerful new insights and efficiencies at an unprecedented scale. Yet, beneath the veneer of technological marvel and the often-touted narrative of 'AI augmentation,' a more profound and unsettling transformation is underway for its workforce. This investigation delves into the stark realities of how AI and machine learning are not just reshaping, but in many cases, actively replacing traditional geospatial roles, forcing a critical reevaluation of skills, careers, and the very future of human expertise in mapping and understanding our world. As the AI wave crests, the line between assistant and successor is becoming increasingly, and for some, alarmingly, clear.

* Terms and Conditions Apply

Explore how homophily—our tendency to bond with similar others—shapes customer behavior and risk. Discover how geospatial analysis of homophily patterns reveals opportunities in marketing, sales, and fraud detection across industries.

Discover how our partnership with IQGEO and Mapidea's geospatial intelligence can help telecom operators find growth opportunities, improve operational efficiency, and drive innovation. Dive into data-driven business cases for network planning, marketing, and more!

Last Wednesday, the #Birch Glacier in Switzerland collapsed beneath debris, burying parts of the evacuated village of #Blatten. Using #Swisstopo’s openly available #RapidMapping geodata, professionals quickly produced detailed pre- and post-event textured #3D models and animations, enabling interactive exploration and enhanced understanding of the impacted area.

Tell Us About YourselfMy name is Antonia Blankenberg. Alongside being a drummer with the fantastic TBL8 Brass, I’m a Lead Consultant in Utilities with Esri Ireland and I’ve been working in GIS for 6 years now. I’ve always been interested in geography, but I only first came across GIS during my undergraduate degree. I was […] The post Maps and Mappers of the 2025 Calendar – May – Antonia Blankenberg appeared first on GeoHipster.

Linda Stevens says it’s time to move past GIS: Since its inception, the evolution of GIS has often felt like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Over the years, the layer-based model has been… More

The current version of GIS can be seen as a 1.0 model—built in an era when computers were in their infancy, and storage and processing power were both limited and prohibitively expensive.

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used to assess the severity of a storm in the U.S. South, because Waffle House restaurants don’t close unless Things Are Very Bad. But when Jack LaFond… More

At this point in my entry-level upskilling project, the ground work has been done. I have a polygon of the Chesapeake Bay laid over an OpenStreetMap layer and I know how to change the color of it. Going back to the initial post, my hope with this project is to show change over time in … Continue reading A Novice Takes a Stab at GIS – Part 3 →

GeoAI combines artificial intelligence with geospatial data in a deep learning model to help field teams work faster, make better decisions, and stay ahead of operational challenges. This blog explains how GeoAI evolved, what it enables today, and how it’s reshaping asset management, risk detection, and resource planning across industries. It also explores practical considerations like implementation, data security, and future trends including IoT integration and adaptive machine learning. La entrada How GeoAI is shaping the future of field operations se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

Above the Arctic Circle, Point Barrow is the northernmost point in the United States. The post Northernmost Point in the United States appeared first on Geography Realm.

A lot of news

Reflecting on Another Event Facilitating Regional Collaboration, Share, and Advancement of Geospatial Innovation in the DMV The DMV GIS Day 2025: Midpoint Meetup, held on April 30, 2025, served as an engaging follow-up to the successful DMV GIS Day 2024. This virtual event convened a vibrant geospatial community to highlight the significant impact of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the innovative advancements shaping progress throughout the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region. 

A team of researchers has released #GEDTM30, a global #DigitalTerrainModel with 30-meter (1 arcsecond) resolution, generated through #MachineLearning fusion of various data sources, and accompanied by 15 geomorphometric parameters computed at multiple spatial scales. Published under a CC-BY license, GEDTM30 offers open, high-resolution global terrain data and is accessible as cloud-optimized #GeoTIFF-s (#COG) via Zenodo and OpenLandMap.

The post Turning Insight Into Action: The Next Wave of GeoAI Innovation is Here appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

 For anyone not familiar. I can recommend this for general GIS stuff.GeoGPT

Geospatial systems are rapidly evolving from isolated data silos into dynamic, interoperable ecosystems. This shift enhances resilience, decision-making, and national development. Learn how standards, semantics, and sovereignty are redefining geospatial infrastructure and why this matters now more than ever. The post The Shift That’s Reshaping Geospatial—and Why It Matters Now appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

PLUS: When AI models get it wrong in urban planning, detecting ships using radar, and more.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

#Grid features an interesting interview with Jennings Anderson, a #Meta Software Engineer and #OpenStreetMap (#OSM) researcher, who shares his perspective on the #Overture Maps Foundation (#OMF) — an initiative aiming to integrate diverse open geodata into a consistent base map.

If you're technically inclined, consider using Borg, Vorta, and rsync.net for encrypted remote backups. If that feels a bit too complex, Arq Backup might be a simpler option for you.

Yes, yes, maps are spatial communication devices and we can obsess over precision and clarity. But it all depends on your map’s purpose. Maps are also designed objects so they can carry within them the power of sentiment. Memory, joy, nostalgia. Or just plain old wonder and curiosity. Here’s how you can create a charming …

Learn how to create a radial flow map in QGIS to visualize migration using metro-to-metro data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The post How to Create a Radial Flow Map Using QGIS appeared first on Geography Realm.

#geowerkstatt has updated their open-source plug-in “#INTERLIS 2” for Microsoft #VSCode. The plug-in now supports drawing the #UML class diagram of Interlis models. It still also offers: syntax highlighting, snippets, and #Markdown documentation.

Let’s examine an oft-heard question from students and even from GIS colleagues, “Is my map right”?  Let’s explore some valid responses to this question that encourages people to think about what “right” actually means, and also what might be better questions to ask.   The responses are listed in text form below and in this video on […]

Topoprint has introduced three significant updates to its service for creating 3D mini-reliefs, or Topodiscs, of Swiss locations: bridges with arches, an easy-to-use Topodisc designer and an automated printing-as-a-service option.

Wie wir für den Kanton Graubünden komplexe Daten nutzerfreundlich aufbereiteten – und dabei auf das richtige Tool setzten. Im Auftrag des Kantons Graubünden analysierten wir, wie sich der Tourismus auf die regionale Wertschöpfung und Beschäftigung auswirkt – kantonsweit sowie in einzelnen Regionen. Grundlage bildeten drei Befragungen mit über 30’000 Personen, Daten des Bundesamtes für Statistik …

#Python and CLI tools #QuackOSM and #OvertureMaestro offer easier access to data from #OpenStreetMap (#OSM) and the Overture Maps Foundation (#OMF) through #PyArrow, #GeoParquet, or #DuckDB. These tools can simplify large-scale geospatial data tasks for seamless data engineering and analysis.

New Light Technologies Inc. (NLT) is honored to serve as a Platinum Sponsor of the 10th annual Innovation Summit for Preparedness & Resilience (InSPIRE), taking place May 28–29, 2025, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Organized by the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation, InSPIRE brings together leaders from across the public and private sectors to advance the role of geospatial technology in public safety and disaster resilience.This year’s summit is especially significant as it looks back at the 20 years since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, recognizing the transformative role these devastating events played in shaping today’s emergency management practices. Many of the professionals attending and organizing InSPIRE 2025 were directly involved in the response to those historic storms.

After not saying much up here for the last month – here’s an update on the TN 911 Database. To catch you up if you don’t know – Tn has a NG911 setup and generally 97% of everyone is running ESRI Arc Something to input data. A few years ago I moved one county over […] The post Update on the TN 911 Database appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

GIS data is the cornerstone of planning decisions. It collects development project data and helps with project monitoring. Having GIS data in a project is a clear path to success when paired with a rigorous project management approach and a controlling process within the project team. GIS data helps us understand the relationships between a location and the surrounding environmental and social context. In sectors like utilities, environmental engineering, telecom, and others, GIS project managers use geospatial data to create accurate models and forecast possible risks. Project teams plan and oversee the completion of all major GIS-related projects. They depend on accurate field data to create timelines and allot resources. Because every stage must align with the team’s application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques, GIS project management is a complex job, with many moving parts. In addition to creating the overall workflow plan and timeline, the project manager also...

For many years, I’ve used pre-made Garmin maps from the internet on my devices while hiking, running, or mountain biking. These maps have always been based on data from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. In the early days, a map of Europe was just a few hundred megabytes in size and usually fit comfortably on the device’s memory card. However, in recent years, the OSM dataset has grown so extensively that, depending on styling and content, the required storage space for maps can quickly reach into the gigabyte range. Since my old Garmin device only allows one map to be loaded at a time, switching between, for example, a Germany map and an Alps map isn’t easily possible for me. So, what to do? The answer: build my own custom map, including a style tailored to my personal preferences. While researching how to build a Garmin-compatible map from OSM data as easily as possible, I came across the Freizeitkarte project by Klaus Tockloth. His website offers a complete development...

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

When and where? Geomob Netherlands took place in Utrecht on the evening of Thursday, May 22nd, 2025 at the NOVI University of Applied Sciences: Newton House, 4th floor, Newtonlaan 247, 2584 BH Utrecht OpenStreetMap, Google Maps Summary Agenda Doors open at 16.30, set up and general mingling Talks begin at 17:00 with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. After the speeches, we vote for the best speaker. The winner will receive the best speaker prize and unending glory (see the full list of all past winners). Discussion and #award and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors: NOVI Hogeschool. The speakers: Jeffrey Benning, The impact of AI on search behavior: Google Maps, fresh data and smart LI combinations Jorrit Okkerman, A green living environment because of the automatic ‘Kapwachter’ Maarten Hogeweij, Heat stress and...

Wired reports that Trump administration cuts to NOAA are threatening an already-delayed update to the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), which was supposed to replace NAD 83 and NAVD 88 in 2022 with corrected spatial… More

The Osher Map Library’s illustrated mapmaking contest for elementary school students has been a thing since 2016. For the 2025 contest, some 350 entries from Maine fourth, fifth and sixth graders were received. They’ve been… More

Immer wieder wird im Geschäftskontext über Datenqualität gesprochen. Leider oft genug ziemlich unscharf. Nachdem ich im ersten Blogpost dieser informellen Serie auf den Begriff der Datenqualität generell eingegangen bin, möchte ich nun etwas hineinzoomen auf die Beschreibung der Datenqualität. Ich tue das anhand eines breit etablierten Standards. Aber erst ein Kürzest-Recap von Teil 1: Wieso …

PLUS: mapping walkability in Europe, the unpredictability of rivers, and more.

TLDR; After 10²¹ FLOPs and 500 B patches, IBM’s TerraMind beats a supervised U‑Net by just +2 mIoU on PANGAEA; losing on 5/9 tasks, most other GFMs do worse.

Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I am very pleased to share it with you. Most of you will wonder what this place is, … Continue reading Planetfall →

Learn how modern GIS (Geographic Information Systems) mapping workflows transform raw field data into actionable insights. This guide covers everything from the four pillars of effective GIS mapping to real-world use cases and practical rollout steps, plus how Fulcrum streamlines data collection, sync, and integration with ArcGIS. La entrada Building better GIS mapping workflows: from field data to real-time insights se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

Undersea cables are the invisible lifelines of the global internet, yet they face growing threats—from accidents to sabotage. This article explores how geospatial standards from OGC, including MUDDI, enhance the security, monitoring, and resilience of this vital infrastructure powering global communications and economies. The post The Vital Role of Undersea Cable Infrastructure and the Importance of Geospatial Standards appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Oslandia is pleased to invite you to a webinar dedicated to open source 3D on Thursday, July 3, 2025 at 5pm (Paris time). [in English] Program: 3D challenges in 2025:...

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Regional Technical Manager - EagleView, Western US posted on 2025-05-19

Learn how Fulcrum clients have mastered field data GIS integration by building seamless data pipelines from the field to the office. Discover how they’ve reduced rework, improved data accuracy, and streamlined workflows to unlock faster insights. See how the right tools can turn raw field data into a strategic asset. La entrada Bridging the field-to-GIS gap: GIS integration lessons from real deployments se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

Why I am reporting on the NEOM human rights situation and publicly traded engineering consultancies involved.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.6.0alpha1! Best Served with PostgreSQL 18 Beta1 and GEOS 3.13.1. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 18beta1, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 2.1.0+ is needed. 3.6.0alpha1 source download md5 NEWS HTML Online en ja fr zh_Hans PDF docs: en ja, zh_Hans, fr Cheat Sheets: postgis: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_raster: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_topology: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_sfcgal: en ja fr zh_Hans address standardizer, postgis_tiger_geocoder: en ja fr zh_Hans This release is an alpha of a major release, it includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.5.3 and new features.

The latest releases of MovingPandas and Trajectools come with many “under the hood” changes that aim to make your movement analytics faster: Let’s have a look at some example performance measurements! Example 1: MovingPandas ValueChangeSplitter The ValueChangeSplitter splits trajectories when it detects a value change in the specified column. This is useful, for example, to …Read More

News episode

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.3. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 18beta1, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5+ is needed. 3.5.3 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en HTML Online en ja fr zh_Hans Cheat Sheets: postgis: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_raster: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_topology: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_sfcgal: en ja fr zh_Hans address standardizer, postgis_tiger_geocoder: en ja fr zh_Hans This release is a bug fix release that includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.5.1.

When it comes to quality standards and operational efficiency, people tend to notice when things go wrong rather than when they’re going right. La entrada How field inspection management software helps demonstrate the benefits of your Quality Assurance and Quality Control programs se publicó primero en Fulcrum.

Last week, I was able to settle on what the map I was creating would illustrate and find trustworthy data to use. This week, the focus is on actually creating the map itself. To do this, I need shapefiles of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.  I was able to source one from the Chesapeake Bay Program … Continue reading A Novice Takes a Stab at GIS – Part Two →

What is it? pgPointcloud is a PostgreSQL extension that allows storing point clouds in a PostgreSQL database. This article presents its various features, trade-offs, and main use cases. The Problem...

Introduction In this post, we’ll explore an experimental project — not something built for practical use, rather for exploring some technology and techniques. The goal is to create an immersive, cube-shaped map visualization using web tools and Python backend services. Specifically, we’ll use: Imagine standing inside a cube where every wall is a piece of … Building a Virtual Map Cube with FastAPI and Marzipano Read More » The post Building a Virtual Map Cube with FastAPI and Marzipano appeared first on Sparkgeo.

The OGC Simple Features Standard powers seamless geospatial data exchange—enabling smart maps, disaster response, and real-time navigation across platforms worldwide. The post The OGC Simple Features Standard: The Silent Backbone of Modern Mapping appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

A step closer to spatial AI with geospatial processing with Fabric The post The Geospatial Capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and ESRI GeoAnalytics, Demonstrated appeared first on Towards Data Science.

When and where? Geomob Zürich took place on the evening of Thursday, May 8th, 2025 May 15th, 2025 at the Meta Zürich office Giesshübelstrasse 30, 8045 Zürich: OpenStreetMap - Google Maps Enter on the ground floor, you may see Samsung signs, and look for Meta reception desk behind glass doors near the toilets. Agenda Doors open at 18:00, set up and general mingling Talks begin at 18:30 with a very brief introduction Each speaker will have slides and speak for ideally 10 minutes or less. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions. Relaxed discussion over beers drinks, and pizza paid for by our generous sponsors. The speakers: Oliver Wiplfi - Mapterhorn John Shimshack - Reasons for the “duplicates” Problem on Meta Maps and Collaborative Ways to Solve It Stefan Keller - OSM Swiss style: Innovations and Challenge INTERMISSION Petr Pridal - TimeMap.org: interactive map of history ...

As the man said, “Life moves pretty fast.” At the start of the year, I had a planned eye surgery that sidelined me for a couple of weeks and then kept me somewhat limited after that. During that recovery, I was further sidelined by a respiratory illness. Five days after getting the all-clear from my … Continue reading Happy New Year to Me →

In the past month of April, there were 28 new plugins published in the QGIS plugin repository. Here follows the… Read more Plugin Update – April, 2025

PLUS: new job vacancy in my team, generating DEMs from optical images, and more.

Oslandia and partners ( e.g. OPENGIS.ch) publicly launch the “Security Project for QGIS” : a mutualized funding effort to increase QGIS cybersecurity. Oslandia is pleased to invite you to a...

SFCGAL 2.1.0 : New Features and Improvements The upcoming version 2.1.0 of SFCGAL will soon be available, bringing with it a host of new features and improvements for this library...

Friends, you might remember that, last year, I wrote to you about how I was finally able to see a dream I’d had for many years come true: bringing together a bunch of map creators onto a single website. I had hoped that this would only be the beginning of our cooperation with each other. … Continue reading Map of the Month: An Experiment →

A month ago, a news headline about a landslide near Kelowna caught our attention, not just for its tragic impact, but for the question it raised: Was this slope destabilized by last season’s wildfires? We’ve since had a chance to explore the event more closely. Our satellite-based analysis suggests that wildfire-related landscape changes likely played … When Fire Sets the Stage for Landslides: Understanding Through Satellite Risk Analysis Read More » The post When Fire Sets the Stage for Landslides: Understanding Through Satellite Risk Analysis appeared first on Sparkgeo.

One of our goals at CNG is to create a larger and more diverse community of geospatial data practitioners. While tremendous progress is being made to make geospatial data easier to access and use in the cloud, we know that there are many people in need of training and educational opportunities to benefit from this progress. To this end, we are starting to experiment with issuing badges to recognize individuals who have completed cloud-native geospatial trainings. We have started by partnering with thriveGEO, a training and technical consulting company based in Germany. In April 2025, thriveGEO gave its first Cloud-Native Geospatial 101 training course and we have issued CNG Badges to course participants. CNG Badges use the Open Badges Specification which allows us to give people a verifiable digital credential that asserts they have completed a CNG-approved training course. By maintaining a vendor-neutral view of the geospatial technology landscape, we seek to...

In the past we have explored how social media can be used to delineate earthquakes, study human-wildlife interactions, understand urban morphology, urban smells or  locating wildfires among many other things. Keeping with the last topic (i.e., locating things), in a new paper published in GeoJournal entitled "Crowdsourcing dust storms in the United States utilizing social media data," Stuart Evans, Festus Adegbola and myself explore how we can use X (formerly Twitter) and Flickr  to source observations of windblown dust. As such the paper demonstrates how social media data can act as supplementary source for dust events monitoring and captures the seasonal trends of such events. Furthermore, the paper highlights the potential of using crowdsourced data for the often overlooked field of dust monitoring that has substantial health and economic impacts. If this sounds of interest, below we provide the abstract to the paper along with some figures which showcase our methodology and...

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

You must be logged into the site to view this content.

GIS Specialist (Stavanger, Norway) (Req. 1241) - geocgi, Stavanger, Norway posted on 2025-05-13

Geospatial technology is no longer just for scientists and surveyors—it's a powerful business tool that can benefit almost every industry.

Location intelligence is becoming increasingly central to enterprise analytics, with organizations in sectors such as retail, logistics, and financial services integrating geospatial data into decision-making systems. A 2016 McKinsey report projected that data-driven decision-making could generate trillions in economic value, with location data playing a key role in operational and strategic improvements (Manyika et al., … Continue reading Reframing Location Intelligence From Where to Why →

One of the cartographers whom I respect most, Andy Woodruff, created a map where all of the features are (intentionally) mislabeled, here: https://andywoodruff.com/posts/2023/30-day-map-challenge/images/badmap_usa_final.png Here is a section of it, below. I have recently shown this in a workshop and a course in which I am teaching. I then am silent, and wait until someone notices. […]

Tell Us About Yourself I’m a cartographer, geospatial scientist and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. I work on the mapping team at the California Coastal Commision. On the side, I teach GIS courses at the University of San Francisco and help run BayGeo, a local non-profit organization focused on GIS education and training. My past […] The post Maps and Mappers of the 2025 Calendar – April – Cameron Denny appeared first on GeoHipster.

Every year, around 1.3 billion tons of food – nearly a third of total global food production – goes to waste (FAO). At the same time, 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, with one in five affected in Africa (WHO). It’s a painful paradox: tons of food are thrown away while millions go without. The post Food Systems Have Complicated Problems. Where Can Geospatial Help? appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

For the last handful of months, I’ve been working with my father’s company, Cercana Systems, to assist with content marketing and business development. In college, I finished most of a public relations degree at The University of Alabama before the first of my two daughters graced us with her presence and we decided to move … Continue reading A Novice Takes a Stab at GIS →

How the EO Community Went from Adopting AI to Driving Its Future

Identify spatial gaps in the urban pharmacy network suitable for the installation of new pharmacies, while adhering to legal requirements on minimum distance between establishments, using geospatial tools such as OSMnx and NetworkX. The post Pharmacy Placement in Urban Spain appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Discover how the MUDDI standard is transforming underground infrastructure data to build safer, smarter, and more resilient cities from the ground down. The post What Lies Beneath: The Standard Making Underground Infrastructure Smarter and Safer appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Geospatial Intelligence is quickly becoming a game-changer in Pharma. As more companies adopt spatial analytics to optimize sales, marketing, and territory planning, those who delay risk falling behind. This article explores how geography adds critical context to business data — and why now is the time to make it part of your data strategy.

The 2025 papal conclave is underway. Here's which countries the 135 voting cardinals eligible to elect the next pope come from. The post Map and Chart of Cardinals and the 2025 Papal Conclave appeared first on Geography Realm.

GIS Manager (IT Application Development - Manager) - WA State Department of Ecology, Lacey, WA posted on 2025-05-07

GIS Analyst - City of Columbia, MO, Columbia, MO posted on 2025-05-07

The largest iceberg in the world is A-23A, with an area of about 1,240 square miles. The post World’s Biggest Iceberg appeared first on Geography Realm.

Join New Light Technologies at the 2025 New Mexico APCO GIS Conference to explore cutting-edge solutions in public safety and geospatial innovation.

A stark vision for America's fiscal future now casts an ominous shadow, as the proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget threatens a veritable demolition of non-defense federal capabilities, launching an unprecedented assault on the agencies underpinning our nation's world-leading geospatial infrastructure with a staggering $163 billion targeted for removal from base non-defense spending . This plan strikes at the heart of essential government functions, and even as it calls for "unprecedented increases for defense" , the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) faces a deep paradox: its direct appropriations may rise, but devastating cuts to civilian partners like NOAA, NASA, and USGS threaten to hamstring its operational effectiveness, potentially forcing NGA to divert its own increased budget to backfill widening data gaps and maintain "GEOINT Supremacy" with a critically weakened foundational support system. The reverberations are already palpable, and as the...

PLUS: making radar images colourful, foundation models for estimating carbon stocks, and more.

A new way to query geospatial metadata without the overhead.

You must be logged into the site to view this content.

Senior Tax Map Technician - Albany County Real Property Tax Service Agency, Albany, NY posted on 2025-05-05

OGC’s GeoPose team recently engaged with W3C and the Khronos Group to promote adoption of the GeoPose 1.0 standard. Through presentations at Google HQ and the 3D on the Web event, they demonstrated how GeoPose enables interoperable, spatially anchored digital content for XR and web platforms. The post OGC GeoPose Outreach to W3C and Khronos Group appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

At the "Calgary 11," Tee referenced "spatial thinking" as a key future workforce attribute. In an age of AI, why is simply being able to think so important?

When most people hear “geospatial,” they immediately think of maps. But in many advanced applications, maps never enter the picture at all. Instead, geospatial data becomes a powerful input to machine learning workflows, unlocking insights and automation in ways that don’t require a single visual. At its core, geospatial data is structured around location—coordinates, areas, … Continue reading Geospatial Without Maps →

At its 2025 Partner Conference, Esri announced it will integrate Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles into the ArcGIS ecosystem. The move is more than a technical milestone. It’s a bold endorsement of open standards—and the latest example of a greater shift towards openness in tech. The post How Esri’s Adoption of 3D Tiles Accelerates the Open Geospatial Future  appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

FedGeoDay 2025, held April 22nd in Washington D.C., was a packed and energized convergence of over 200 geospatial experts dedicated to a vital mission: building resilience through open source tools and data. Project Geospatial's coverage of the event revealed a community deeply committed to collaboration, showcasing everything from NASA's critical Earth observation data applications and foundational government datasets like USGS's 3DAP to the complexities of AI reliability, the dynamics of open data initiatives like OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, and the necessity of robust cybersecurity. The day underscored the immense potential of open geospatial solutions in facing increasing challenges and the collective effort required to harness their power for societal benefit. The palpable energy and high turnout signaled a community ready to tackle complex problems together, leveraging open platforms for a more resilient future.

In today’s AI-driven and geospatially enabled world, data is an organization’s most valuable asset — yet it is often treated as an afterthought until issues arise. Poor data quality, incomplete metadata, and inconsistent governance can quickly derail even the most sophisticated projects. At Cercana, we believe that data stewardship must be intentional, continuous, strategic, and … Continue reading Data Stewardship in AI, Geospatial, and Security Operations →

PLUS: using geospatial data to select power plant locations, new open-source geospatial tools from Microsoft, and more.

It’s all hot air until AI takes your job. In the geospatial community of practice, AI tools are making an increasingly big impact. We can choose to flip the table, or take the win. Three weeks ago I was introduced to Lovable by Sparkgeo’s UK Lead, Dan Ormsby. The next week I messed around with it, and was deeply … Prompt disruption, geoAI took my job. Read More » The post Prompt disruption, geoAI took my job. appeared first on Sparkgeo.

Immer wieder wird im Geschäftskontext über Datenqualität gesprochen. Aktuell wird Datenqualität in Diskussionen häufig mit anderen Themen verwoben: Autorität im Sinn von «authoritativeness», Offizialität, Entstehungskontext, Governance-Modelle, Rechtssicherheit, «foi publique» etc. Das sind wichtige weitere Themen rund um Daten. Und diese können im Einzelnen die Erkenntnistiefe erhöhen, aber es lohnt sich meines Erachtens, zuerst die Begrifflichkeiten …

What is FedGeoDay? FedGeoDay is a single-track conference dedicated to federal use-cases of open geospatial ecosystems. The open ecosystems have a wide variety of uses and forms, but largely include anything designed around open data, open source software, and open standards. The main event is a one day commitment and is followed by a day … Continue reading Reflections on the Process of Planning FedGeoDay 2025 →

As a major theme of our book and this blog is spatial data, this article in ArcNews from my Esri colleague Sarah Hanson that summarizes 7 ways to integrate data into ArcGIS Online is one I trust will be very useful to this community: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/data-management/seven-ways-to-integrate-data-with-arcgis-online/ The article discusses why and how to use each of […]

OK I will admit it took me longer than I had planned to finish this up.  Life got in the way.  But now I think is a good time to finish up the series and move on to another. In … Continue reading →

It’s all hot air until AI takes your job. In the geospatial community of practice, AI tools are making an increasingly big impact. We can choose to flip the table, or take the win.

The post What If Becomes What’s Next: Inside the TGI-AWS GeoAI Challenge appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

Here’s how to use compositing to tint flowing wind patterns by underlying terrain colors. Why? Because rather than a basemap providing some context around a layer that inherently blocks your view of it, you can leverage the amazing compositing blend modes of the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer to make the phenomenon reveal context rather than …

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

OGC’s Open Science Persistent Demonstrator (OSPD): A living lab for reproducible scientific results and reusable research The post From Wildfires to Water Scarcity: OGC’s Open Science Demonstrator Is Turning Research into Real-World Impact appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

We are extremely pleased to announce the six funded proposals for our 2025 QGIS.ORG grant programme. Funding for the programme… Read more QGIS Grant Programme 2025 Results

Telcos are sitting on a goldmine of spatial data—but most of it is locked behind technical tools and inaccessible to the majority of the organization. Operational GIS is critical but not enough. To win, telcos must democratize Geospatial Intelligence across departments, empowering thousands of users to make smarter decisions, faster.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

What we would like to see in geospatial

A sampling of Cercana's favorite parts of FedGeoDay 2025.

The present moment is the only reality. Embrace it fully, and you will discover true contentment.

Web Mapping, Meets Generative AI AI is reshaping how we build the web, from how we write code to how we visualize data. While tools like ChatGPT and Copilot have turned heads in software development, a new wave of tools like Lovable claim to make entire front ends with just a prompt. No coding. No … Exploring Lovable UI for AI-Powered Web Map Creation Read More » The post Exploring Lovable UI for AI-Powered Web Map Creation appeared first on Sparkgeo.

Our team will be in Snowbird to talk all things cloud-native.

What do you do when you’re cleaning up data. Especially address data and you get down to the sloppy part of the data cleanup? I did 80% of this in Postgresql by shaking off the cobwebs on my sql skills but this part requires visual. I have addresses assigned to roads with no street type […] The post Tips for Data Cleanup: Virtual Layers appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

Readers might of noticed that recently we have been exploring the use of street view images to explore cities or how we can utilize geosocial media to understand the form of function of cities, but one thing we have not explored is the role of smell and how it shapes peoples perceptions of urban spaces. However, in a new paper recently published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers with Qingqing Chen, Ate Poorthuis we do just that. The paper is entitled "Mapping the Invisible: Decoding Perceived Urban Smells Through Geosocial Media in New York City" In the paper we use text mining techniques to tease out smell related information from over 56 million geolocated tweets which are then assigned to specific small categories (e.g., nature, food, waste) resulting in a new smellscape map for New York city. If this sounds of interest, below you can read the abstract to our paper, see our workflow and resulting smellscape map. While the the analysis steps, along with the...

Wussten Sie, dass Daten zu Naturereignissen wie Überschwemmungen, Lawinen oder Bergstürzen systematisch erfasst werden? Die Webapplikation StorMe ist die schweizweit zentrale Datenbank des Bundesamtes für Umwelt (BAFU) für die Erfassung und Verwaltung von Naturereignissen. Sie zählt mehr als 70’000 Einträge, welche laufend vom Bund und den Kantonen ergänzt und ausgewertet werden. Aber auch andere Organisationen, …

PLUS: Using fiber optic cables to measure seismic activity, a new tool from IBM to finetune geospatial foundation models and more.

Cercana Systems is excited to share that our entire team will be in attendance at FedGeoDay 2025! This is a great opportunity to meet with us face-to-face and learn more about our capabilities and the work we do. The event is happening April 22, 2025 at the Department of Interior’s Yates Auditorium in Washington, D.C.  … Continue reading Cercana At FedGeoDay →

The Mysteries of the Official QGIS Server Docker Image

⛔️ Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait

An open letter to event organizers.

Exciting times are ahead for the QGIS project! We’re thrilled to share some major updates coming to the QGIS platform over the next few months. These changes are part of a long-planned technical migration that will bring new possibilities and ensure QGIS stays modern, fast, and future-ready.

PLUS: WorldPop extends its data to 2030, mapping pesticide exposure, and more.

In today’s fast-paced professional world, it’s easy for young professionals to assume that hard work alone will get them ahead. While grinding at the desk and delivering results matters, relying solely on your work to speak for itself may leave you overlooked in a competitive field. Getting out of the office and into local conferences, … Continue reading Why Young Professionals Should Get Out of the Office and Into Industry Events →

The United States is facing a looming crisis in its geodesy workforce, threatening the nation's capacity to maintain and advance this essential science. Our research delves into the definition, applications, and history of geodesy in the US, examining the workforce challenges and potential consequences if this crisis remains unaddressed.

At its core, wayfinding is about understanding our position in relation to a place and planning effective routes.

The Geospatial Data Catalog was recently announced and as this blog is focused on the topic of geospatial data, I wanted to review it and bring it to our readers’ attention: https://www.geospatial.community/. The catalog was created by Rob Johnsen, and since Rob used to work at the World Bank, an organization which we have discussed […]

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Though it’s been about a week since we sent it out there, I just recalled that I haven’t alerted all of you to the 2025 edition of the freelance cartographer survey that Aly Ollivierre and I conduct. Due to popular demand, we are going to try conducting it annually, rather than biennially. This survey is … Continue reading 2025 AFC Freelancer Survey →

Friends, I’m excited to share that I have just completed a world physical map, in my new asymmetric monstrosity projection. It’s free to download, or if you want to buy a 30″ × 20″ print, you can also do that (and I will be pleasantly surprised). If you download it and print it yourself, I … Continue reading A Usefully Useless Projection →

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

More interviews from NC GIS 2025

It’s amazing what you can find when you plug in an old external hard drive. I recently rearranged my desk and realized that one of the external drives on top of my desktop Linux machine had apparently been unplugged for a while. I plugged it in to see what it held, and there were a … Continue reading A Geospatial Time Capsule →

PLUS: How accurate are population datasets, foundation models for generating 3D images and more.

This is a link to my presentation given at the 2025 GISSIG Conference in Rochester, NY

You must be logged into the site to view this content.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

In the last couple of months a total of 57 new plugins were published in the QGIS plugin repository. Highlights… Read more Plugin Update – February to March, 2025

Depending on your point of view, “vibe coding” – using generative AI to iteratively develop code by using natural language to describe desired functionality – is either revolutionary or the slippery slope to deploying poor, irresponsible software. While both viewpoints have merit, I fall somewhere in the middle. As a programmer who is approaching 50 … Continue reading “Vibe Coding” a Mock API →

The high cost of commercial remote sensing data is a major obstacle to widespread adoption. As Keith Barber notes, 'Right now, the price point is such that it's still cheaper to go hire 150 guys to walk that field than it is to use the technology.' By refactoring the executability of the commercial and government markets from a macro-economic perspective and moving to a Defense-wide budget, the price per image or access would decline, amortizing the value and creating a price point where commercial adoption would rapidly increase, essentially baselining the cost.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

We’re excited to announce that New Light Technologies (NLT) is once again a proud sponsor of FedGeoDay, happening April 22, 2025, in Washington, D.C. at the American Red Cross Building – DOI Yates Auditorium.

You know how you can crank up the sense of drama and studio photography professionalism by switching over to portrait mode on your phone’s camera? It just looks…cool. The subject is in focus and the peripheral background content is blurry. It’s actually how our eyes and brains work, so it’s pleasing to see in photography. …

I’m happy to once again be participating in a DMV GIS Day event. GIS Day is still months away, but Cercana Systems is partnering again with New Light Technologies on a “Midpoint Meetup.” Like the inaugural event, it is a free virtual event. The midyear event will be about two hours long and serves as … Continue reading DMV GIS Midpoint Meetup 2025 →

Building your own AI assistant can be a powerful learning experience — especially when you decide to stop.

I was today years old when I realised you can stream a COG into QGIS.

Esri will soon be publishing an article featuring CapMetro’s Geospatial Program and how we have combined Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise with FME Flow to create a robust Geospatial Platform. View the sneak peek below.

We are excited to announce the DMV GIS Day 2025: Midpoint Meetup, a follow up to the inaugural DMV GIS Day 2024.  This is where the dynamic geospatial community of the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region comes together to showcase the history, latest innovations, applications, and trends in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This half-day event highlights the diverse ecosystem of GIS professionals, organizations, and enthusiasts working to solve real-world challenges using cutting-edge geospatial technologies in our community.

You must be logged into the site to view this content.

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait.

PLUS: How Google's improving vision-language models for remote sensing and more.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

TGE hosted a workshop to begin the second phase of our collaboration on AI for Earth Observation and Field Boundaries. Learn how to get involved. The post AI for Satellite Imagery: Fields of the World Phase 2 Begins appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

NLT at the 2025 North Carolina GIS Conference From March 18-21, 2025, Winston-Salem, North Carolina held its annual NC GIS conference, a dynamic gathering of state, local government, academic, and industry professionals dedicated to leveraging GIS for real-world solutions. New Light Technologies (NLT) proudly participated as a platinum exhibitor and Herb Stout award sponsor, making their first appearance and engaging deeply with the incredible North Carolina GIS community, demonstrating their latest geospatial innovations and strengthening collaborative partnerships for mission success.

For the past two years, have been working with a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) provider supporting various data architecture and geospatial activities. This is a classic infrastructure business that cycles through phases of design, construction, and maintenance as the built environment changes. This leads to a lot classic GIS editing over time – which can mean the … Continue reading GeoParquet Backup and Restore →

Unveiling the Drive Behind New Light Technologies' Bold Move New Light Technologies (NLT) has long been a beacon of innovation in the realms of technology, geospatial science, and data solutions. However, the company is now poised to illuminate a new path by venturing into the lighting industry. This strategic pivot seems both unexpected and ingenious, rooted in the convergence of brand perception and market demand. Over the years, NLT has been inundated with inquiries about lighting solutions, from LED retrofits to smart lighting systems, and even decorative fixtures. This surge in interest highlighted an intriguing opportunity: the potential to expand their brand into an industry closely aligned with their name and ethos.

Here are some interesting geography facts that are unique to individual U.S. states and do not occur in any other state. The post Only State… Geography Facts appeared first on Geography Realm.

For years, St.

Administrative boundaries (level 1) – GAUL 2024 – https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/iso/34f97afc-6218-459a-971d-5af1162d318aAdministrative boundaries (level 2) – GAUL 2024 – https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/iso/60b23906-f21a-49ef-8424-f3645e70264e

Coral restoration and the realities of tech in climate fieldwork

As the AAG has just wrapped up I thought I would write brief (well actually quite long) post on the talks that I was involved with at the conference. These talks would not have been possible without the many great students and colleagues who I have been collaborating with over time. Below you will find a brief summary of the talks and if any sound interesting, please reach out and we can give you more details. First up (in order in which they were presented) was "Utilizing Streetview Images for Mapping Building Attributes with ChatGPT" with Qingqing Chen and Linda See. In this talk we discussed how multimodal Large Language Models are giving us a new way to study cities, in the sense, lowering the boundary for information extraction. Using ChatGPT and street view images from Mapillary as an example, we showed how one can extract building age, usage (e.g., commercial, mixed use, residential) and estimate building height  which could all be used to inform urban climate models which...

Sometime in 2020, I ordered the ArcGIS Home Program and ran it on some virtual machine I had sitting around. My problem is I have too much fun learning things on the open source side of the house so I didn’t use it a lot. As I look back I’m pretty sure I stayed in […] The post Opening a ArcPro Template in QGIS appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

I recently took and highly recommend the Open Science 101 course entitled “Transform to Open Science (TOPS)”, a NASA initiative designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities to an inclusive culture of open science. Developed by the TOPS initiative, the guidance provided by the Open Science 101 curriculum promotes “the transformation of the research […]

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

At the end of yesterday’s TimeGPT for mobility post, we concluded that TimeGPT’s trainingset probably included a copy of the popular BikeNYC timeseries dataset and that, therefore, we were not looking at a fair comparison. Naturally, it’s hard to find mobility timeseries datasets online that can be publicized but haven’t been widely disseminated and therefore …Read More

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

tldr; Maybe. Preliminary results certainly are impressive. Introduction Crowd and flow predictions have been very popular topics in mobility data science. Traditional forecasting methods rely on classic machine learning models like ARIMA, later followed by deep learning approaches such as ST-ResNet. More recently, foundation models for timeseries forecasting, such as TimeGPT, Chronos, and LagLlama have …Read More

I recently gave a careers talk to students at Solent University, and through that I got to know a MSc student there who had previous GIS experience and was now doing a Data Analytics and AI MSc course. Her GIS experience was mostly in the ESRI stack (ArcGIS and related tools) and she was keen […]

Broken promises

Tell Us About Yourself I’m Bernie Connors, a Geomatics Engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick in Atlantic Canada.  I have been working in GIS since 1993 and I have worked for the Province of New Brunswick since 1997.  I manage an ArcGIS Server architecture that is used to share the province’s rich GIS resources as online […] The post Maps and Mappers 2025 – March – Bernie Conners appeared first on GeoHipster.

Interviews from the 2025 NC GIS Conference

Listed here are different clouds formations as seen on satellite imagery. The post Satellite Imagery of Clouds appeared first on Geography Realm.

PLUS: AI traffic lights can reduce emissions, identifying building damage from satellites, and more.

MKBHD did a great take on how Zipline does drone delivery. While he doesn’t talk a lot about the geography of the process, it is still very cool and, of […]

Earth holds trillions of tons of water, mostly in oceans. Only 2.5% is freshwater, primarily found in glaciers, groundwater, lakes, and rivers. The post Water on Earth appeared first on Geography Realm.

Tell us About Yourself: I’m a cartographer at Woodwell Climate Research Center where I make maps that communicate climate science to address the climate crisis. Previously I was a graphics editor at National Geographic magazine where I made maps on topics ranging from climate change to conservation and biodiversity. My background is in physical geography, […] The post Maps and Mappers of 2025 – February – Christina Shintani appeared first on GeoHipster.

The “Security project for QGIS” is now public ! Pledge now ! The goal of this project is to mutualize funding to improve QGIS security to the highest levels. Oslandia...

Data drives decisions, but where that data comes from—or converges—can be the key differentiator. By weaving geospatial analytics into your everyday workflows, you unlock the ability to detect trends, spot opportunities, and handle obstacles more proactively.

Last year we put out a call for abstracts for presentations for our sessions Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges. The session description is as follows: There is an urgent need for research that promotes sustainability in an era of societal challenges ranging from climate change, population growth, aging and wellbeing to that of pandemics. These need to be directly fed into policy. We, as a Geosimulation community, have the skills and knowledge to use the latest theory, models and evidence to make a positive and disruptive impact. These include agent-based modeling, microsimulation and increasingly, machine learning methods. However, there are several key questions that we need to address which we seek to cover in this session. For example, What do we need to be able to contribute to policy in a more direct and timely manner? What new or existing research approaches are needed? How can we make sure they are robust enough to be used in decision making? How can...

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Where Game Recognizes Game

Introduction New Light Technologies team member, Douglas Rose, recently attended the annual Earthquake Summit, a premier event that brings together hundreds of professionals to explore the latest insights on earthquake risks, preparedness strategies, and recovery planning in the Midwest. Featuring expert-led sessions on best practices in earthquake response, transportation resilience, healthcare readiness, communication strategies, and utility impacts, the summit provided invaluable knowledge for communities and organizations striving to enhance their disaster preparedness. With a diverse lineup of speakers and sessions, this free event also offered professional development opportunities, reinforcing its role as a crucial gathering for those dedicated to seismic resilience.

The post Unlocking the Power of AI in Geospatial Technology appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Those of you who know me, know that I am a proud Penn State alumnus with a degree in geography.

Researchers analyzed GIS faculty hiring data to identify geographic patterns influencing job placement. The post Where are GIS Professors Hired From? appeared first on Geography Realm.

Satellite Earth observation is at a crossroads, balancing national defense priorities, environmental monitoring, and commercial innovation. As competition intensifies and AI-driven analytics reshape the industry, the sector faces key challenges: pricing models, regulatory shifts, and the push for actionable intelligence over raw imagery. With market consolidation on the horizon, the future of Earth observation lies in the ability to extract value from data while navigating geopolitical and technological disruptions. 🚀

Sure, there’s a glorious drop shadow effect in the ever-more-capable ArcGIS Online Map Viewer to give features a sweet glow, BUT there’s no inner glow effect. How do we cast that beautiful glow inward? I’ll admit that I’ve been stumped by this one for longer than I care to admit, but then it just hit …

What scientists have discovered about our planet.

PLUS: predicting wildfires using deep learning, estimating emissions from road intersections and more.

..and everything is changing geospatial. If I were to characterize the last five years, I would use the word complex. We have a changing climate, with seemingly more extreme events every day. We are seeing increasing international tensions break out into kinetic conflict. The pillars of entrenched economic systems are creaking under the weight of fragile … Geospatial is Changing Everything Read More » The post Geospatial is Changing Everything appeared first on Sparkgeo.

I did a post a while back which was just a lot of links to things I found interesting, mostly in the geospatial/data/programming sphere. Since then I’ve collected a lot more links – so here are some of them. The theme, such as there is, seems to be ‘this would have really helped me about […]

The Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO) has recently released its third Assessment from its ongoing review of the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). This Assessment serves as a periodic evaluation of the condition of the nation’s geospatial data infrastructure, which, like other forms of public works, is essential for our economy, health, safety, and […]

Notes and experiments from our latest wanderings in geospatial tech, GeoAI, and open data.

GIS 2.0: How Geography, Technology, and Connectedness Will Transform Our World

First attempt to come with a weekly GeoRoundup.

The Marine Corps instills a leadership philosophy rooted in decisiveness, adaptability, and integrity.

Just as I have been contemplating and obtaining ‘zines again myself, I find that others have created Geo specific distribution outlets and have presentations at the 2025 AAG later this […]

As always, this post is very delayed – apologies. In fact, I was encouraged to write this by a friend who I see at PyData Southampton (Hi, if you’re reading this!). I mentioned my talk in passing to her, and she asked if I’d blogged about it yet. I admitted that I hadn’t, and promised […]

I hate putting in Deed calls. Some of you may call it Metes and Bounds. I usually even utter “Survey” as more of a curse than anything. There’s always the Azimuth and Distance plugin but if you check the homepage you will see it’s basically on life support or as it’s called – maintenance mode. […] The post GRASS and m.cogo appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

Happy 314 Day, St. Louis!

Geospatial technology is the modern expression of geography, encompassing geographic information systems, remote sensing, and surveying technology. “Geospatial technology” is a convenient catch-all term for anything with a location component. The problem is that geography is quite literally everywhere, and modern geospatial technology is, in fact, changing everything.

Whether you are a parent who happens to be a geospatial veteran or want to help educate the next generation, check out these ideas to help the next generation develop integral geospatial skills and understanding.

For a proper Pi Day celebration in Postgres, Paul shows off a proof for CIRCULARSTRING.

Cloud-Native Geospatial is quietly revolutionizing geospatial data

Here’s how you can make a map inspired by the glorious collaboration of geologist Marie Tharp and landscape painter Heinrich Berann. We’ll use ArcGIS Pro (injected with a special terrain toolbox provided by cartographer, author, and public figure Ken Field), its amazing raster functions and blend modes, and luscious bathymetry data from GEBCO. Let’s dive in! 0:00 a brief …

A few weeks ago, I posed a simple yet thought-provoking question to the geospatial community on LinkedIn, one that many found difficult to answer, including myself:

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Innovating in GIS in North Carolina and Surrounding Region

In the past I have blogged about disasters, but mainly from a social media or agent-based modeling perspective. However, after the devastating wildfires that impacted parts of Los Angeles County earlier this year led me to wonder how resilient are cities to such events? Or more generally, what role could urban analytics play on the various stages of disaster management (i.e., preparation, response, recovery, and mitigation), or how can data, models, and methods at the disposal of researchers be leveraged to better prepare us for future disasters and be linked to policy?If these questions sound of interest, I encourage you to go and read  a short editorial that I recently published in Environment and Planning B entitled "Cities and Disasters: What can Urban Analytics Do?"Full referece: Crooks, A.T. (2024), Cities and Disasters: What can Urban Analytics Do?, Environment and Planning B, 52(3): 523-526. (pdf)

In today’s post, we (that is, Gaspard Merten from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and yours truly) are going to dive deep into how to analyze public transport data, using both schedule and real time information. This collaboration has been made possible by the EMERALDS project. Previously, I already shared news about GTFS algorithms for Trajectools that …Read More

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait.

Simple facts about the new Cloud-Native Geospatial hype.

OK, it has been a while since the last time I published this data, but I have a valid excuse. The most striking feature of the 2024 chart is the zero’ing out of IBM’s piece of the pie. Big Blue, which once billed the government $107M in a year, has been reduced to a billing rate of less than $5M per year over the last two years. Everything else feels more or less the same. After seven years of NDP government, the overall trajectory of outsourcing growth has beeen flattened, but in no way reversed. It is a smaller proportion of overall spend, but the substantial change wrought by the Campbell Liberal government starting around 2005 has been durable – BC IT has a huge outsourced component still. The initial surge in smaller local companies after 2017 stalled out by 2021 and had been flat since. The most consistent grower is now CGI, which entered the Victoria market around 2005 and has grown to $60M/year in billings with consistent year-over-year increases.

Back to entry 1 I recently “celebrated” my “cancerversary”, the one-year mark since my GI doctor phoned me up and said the fateful words – “you have cancer”. At that moment, my universe shrank down immensely. All the external stuff, job, professional relationships, volunteerism, just kind of fell away, I had no mental space for it. It was just me and my immediate family and the many, many unknowns. My experience since then has included two major physical insults. The “curative” surgery that removed most of my rectum, and the associated c.difficle infection that brutally wrecked my GI tract. The insults really knocked me back. Moving around the house involved effort. Meals would lead to stomach pain and long sessions on the toilet. Runs were replaced with walks and then shorter walks. A trip to the cafe became my gold standard for “getting out”. Now, I am immensely “better” than I was this summer. But I am still a very long way from the physical condition I was before (which was...

Every year, around 1.3 billion tons of food – nearly a third of total global food production – goes to waste (FAO). At the same time, 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, with one in five affected in Africa (WHO). It’s a painful paradox: tons of food are thrown away while millions go without. The post How Geospatial Innovation Can Reduce Food Waste and Improve Access to Nutrition appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

The GRASS GIS 8.4.1 release provides more than 80 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.4.0. Enjoy! The post GRASS GIS 8.4.1 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

The 2025 NLT Annual Conference was an incredible opportunity for our team to come together, collaborate, and strengthen the foundation that drives our success. Held alongside the Esri Federal User Conference, this event is an essential part of our company’s culture—bringing NLT team members together from the DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) region and across the country to align on our mission, share knowledge, and advance our work for customers.

We are pleased to announce that the minutes from the QGIS.ORG Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2024 are now available for… Read more QGIS.ORG Annual General Meeting 2024 – Minutes Now Available

PLUS: ESA's new open-source Sentinel-2 super-resolution model, quickly detecting landslides from satellite images, and more.

You must be logged into the site to view this content.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Store data in JSON format in PostgreSQL, consult it... and all this using INSEE french census data as an example.

Despite the world’s agricultural systems producing enough food to feed the current population, global food insecurity remains a critical challenge. The scale of the gap remains significant, with approximately 733 million people worldwide experiencing hunger in 2023. The post How Can Geospatial Innovation Promote Sustainable Agricultural Land Management?  appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

While there isn’t a direct way to symbolize a line feature in ArcGIS Pro to have a gradient that travels along its length (rather than across its width), there are a handful of workarounds to get you there. If your line is wiggly, you might have to try a more robust method, like split the …

We are delighted to announce a special track on “Integrating Large-Language Models and Geospatial Foundation Models to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in ABMs” as part of the Social Simulation Conference 2025, 25th to 29th August 2025 at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Full conference details can be found at the end of this email.Abstract for the Special Track: Recent developments in the use of large language models (LLMs) offer exciting opportunities to control agent behaviour in potentially more realistic and nuanced ways than has previously been possible. However, an LLM-backed agent can only interface with their surroundings through text prompts, which is severely limiting. The integration of large language models (LLMs) and geospatial foundation models (GFMs) presents an exciting opportunity to use AI techniques to advance agent-based modelling for spatial applications, potentially allowing for agents with more comprehensive behavioural realism, as well as an improved...

In the article Private, Public, Personal: Shifting Patterns in Geospatial Data Sources in Geographic Research, which recently appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, the authors (Appiah et al. from the Georgia Institute of Technology) explored the extent to which peer-reviewed geospatial research has adopted three data source types: public sector, private […]

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides that happened when I worked at Amec Foster Wheeler in Kuwait.

The Trajectools repository is migrating from GitHub to Codeberg. The new home for Trajectools is: ➡️ https://codeberg.org/movingpandas/trajectools The GitHub repo remains as a writable mirror, for now, but the issue tracking is only active on Codeberg. Why the move? I am working on moving my projects to European infrastructure that better aligns with my values. …Read More

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Caution - this episode contains some details of suicides.

FOSS4G:BG: Open GIS conference is coming early in March as a local FOSS4G event in Bulgaria organized by the QGIS.bg community. The event will span in two days, having a day with workshops with deep dive in different topics and a second day with conference presentations.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

The post Joe Cornelius Advocates Geospatial Innovation to Tackle Food Insecurity appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

PLUS: the link between population growth and flooding, satellite object detection with RS-YOLO, and more.

Around this time last year, we made a pivotal decision, GEO261 needed a true headquarters, a space that reflected not just where we worked, but who we were evolving.

Giro3D is a geospatial data visualization library for the Web. Free and open-source, it is compatible with many geospatial data sources (rasters, vectors, point clouds, etc.). 👉 See the full...

Demon Dialogues is a collection of comics which serves as a Handbook for Living with Your Inner Critic

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Thoughts on duplicating data with modern tooling and STAC

The post explores an SQL query using DuckDB and OvertureMaps data to extract, filter, and visualize pizza places in Switzerland. All these steps can be done in one line, and the generated map of Swiss pizza places can be viewed immediately using PMTiles.

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 3.42 Münster! Installers for Windows, Linux, and Mac are already out.… Read more QGIS 3.42 Münster is released!

Prompted by Free The Map, a book about change in the way we do cartography, I offer reflections on doing geospatial in Cambodia.

Dear QGIS Community, We are very pleased to announce that this year’s round of grants is now available. The call… Read more QGIS Grants #10: Call for Grant Proposals 2025

A funny thing happened when I wrote up my 2025 book list – a lot of the books were parts of pairings. And I started wondering what other pairings I had read that were memorable. So here’s another list! Wicked, Gregory Maguire and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum You wouldn’t know it to look at me (or would you?) but I am a person who has read all 14 books of the original L. Frank Baum Oz series. From “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” to “Glinda of Oz” and all in between. As… that kind of person, I was truly tickled to pick up “Wicked” a couple years ago and take in not only the invented back-story of the Wicked Witch of the West (Elphaba), but also all the references to the Oz world that Maguire builds into his narrative. “Wicked” is the best kind of reimagining, one that manages a completely fresh story, but without tearing down the original source material on the way. Maguire clearly is also… that kind of person, and he treats Oz with respect while building a totally fresh...

The post The Future of Geospatial AI is Here – And It’s Just Getting Started appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

I recently had a project requirement to export the contents of a delta table in Databricks to several formats, including shapefile and file geodatabase, with the output being placed in object storage mounted to DBFS. I set up the logic in a notebook, with the intent to use geopandas, which provides an easy wrapper around … Continue reading Exporting Data with GeoPandas in Databricks →

Safe Software highlighted CapMetro's Geospatial Program in a success story, showcasing the integration of FME and ArcGIS to enhance transit operations, planning, and performance management. Their comprehensive GIS platform automates workflows and utilizes real-time data, ensuring decision-makers have access to vital information.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

We are thrilled to announce the release of Iris 2.10, our most powerful and feature-rich update yet.

The Swiss Rooftop Explorer is a cloud-native web app that retrieves Swiss building roof heights without a GIS server. Using PMTiles, Geoparquet, and DuckDB-WASM, it enables fast, low-maintenance geospatial queries. This post explores the data pipeline and its benefits of cloud-optimized formats, and how static files can replace traditional GIS infrastructure.

Profound changes are on the horizon.

PLUS: some surprising vulnerabilities when using pre-trained models, examining travel patterns in Africa and more.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Literacy skills, are essential for enabling students to develop their geographical understanding and being able to communicate this, both in writing and verbally. In order for students to be able to develop their literacy skills and become confident with reading, writing, speaking and listening, to enable communication and geographical understanding, vocabulary plays a key role.Continue reading "The Importance of Vocabulary Learning in the Geography Classroom"

may the odds be ever in your favor

Demystifying cloud-native geospatial formats through illustrated storytelling.

Use Tailscale to build your own gated community (a.k.a. VPN) within the public internet: bypass geo-blocking, remotely control your smart home, and quickly provide services as a developer.

I can’t remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him – it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the following year – but I clearly remember what he said to me. By then, I had been writing this … Continue reading Long-Form Spatial Writing →

Time should be a first-class citizen in geospatial. In many ways, measuring change might always have been geospatial's killer app. But are we giving time enough structured attention?

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

UPDATE: This post has been edited to provide the new, user-friendly URL. I’ve missed Planet Geospatial. I’ve missed it so much that I messaged James the other day and said we should get it going again. He wholeheartedly agreed and then started going on about perfectly valid stuff like not wanting to wrestle with 15-year-old … Continue reading GeoFeeds Is Online →

Learn about our plan for Phase 2 of the AI for Earth Observation and Field Boundaries Initiative and how to get involved. The post Join TGE in Phase 2 of AI for Earth Observation and Field Boundaries appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

50+ Female Product Manager/Senior GIS Analyst at North Road, Program Chair FOSS4G Oceania 2022-2024, QGIS AU Committee Q. Emma, Where in the world are you and what do you do? In sunny South East Queensland where the winter temperatures are in the 20° (Celsius degrees), but I am more of a -1° Celsius gal. I […] The post When I was 15 years old, I proclaimed I would be a cartographer appeared first on GeoHipster.

Continuing the tech company basemap theme

Seven months ago, we issued A Call to Action for the Data Community to break down geospatial data silos and make GIS a core part of analytics. Today, we’re thrilled to announce two major developments that bring this vision closer to reality: The Parquet specification has officially adopted geospatial guidance, enabling native storage of GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY types Iceberg 3 now includes GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY as part of its official specification Now both Parquet and Iceberg support columns of type GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY just like INT32, INT64, FLOAT32, etc. columns! Yay! This is a landmark achievement for geospatial data! 🎉 A Community Achievement First, a heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to this effort—engineers, early adopters, and advocates who pushed for geospatial data to be treated as a first-class citizen. This milestone wasn’t achieved overnight; it took years of collaboration across organizations and...

The GRASS GIS 8.4.1RC1 release provides more than 70 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.4.0. Please support us in testing this release candidate. The post GRASS GIS 8.4.1RC1 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

PLUS: downscaling temperature data, and examining the best locations for wind and solar energy.

January, the first month of 2025, brought us 36 new plugins, published in the QGIS plugin repository. Here follows the… Read more Plugin Update – January, 2025

Well-designed geospatial tools help decision-makers absorb information quickly, improve situational awareness, and enhance user experiences.

Courtesy of Wyvern

Installing the most widely used open-source GIS software on the most popular Linux distribution should be straightforward, yet it often raises questions and even problems. This guide walks you through the process so you can refer back to it whenever needed.

Use Spliit App (open-source, web-app, mobile app) for an easy way to track and split expenses with a group.

The post Innovation Bridge 2024 Wrapped: A collaboration to build a global dataset using AI and satellite imagery appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

For PostGIS Day this year I researched a little into one of my favourite topics, the history of relational databases. I feel like in general we do not pay a lot of attention to history in software development. To quote Yoda, “All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing.” Anyways, this year I took on the topic of the early history of spatial databases in particular. There was a lot going on in the ’90s in the field, and in many ways PostGIS was a late entrant, even though it gobbled up a lot of the user base eventually.

This blog post was first published on Chris’ personal blog on February 9, 2025 and is being cross posted here. Have you benefitted from Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF’s? SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs? Zarr, COPC or GeoParquet? Not just the formats, but the whole ecosystem of tools and data around it? Well I’d like to present you with an incredibly easy opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ and help build and expand the movement. And all you have to do is attend a conference! One that should be a totally awesome experience, the first in-person CNG Conference, from April 30th to May 2nd. I have big dreams for this conference, as my hope is that it can expand in the next few years to become a truly vendor-neutral gathering for anyone working in and around geospatial data. To be one of those conferences that has the critical mass where you know ‘everyone’ you want to talk to will be there. In North America there’s really only two options for this: Esri...

It Takes 1

We are thrilled to announce that QGIS has been officially recognized as a Digital Public Good (DPG) by the Digital… Read more QGIS recognized as Digital Public Good

With the QGIS Grant Programme 2024 (Updates #1 & #2), we were able to support 7 enhancement proposals that improve… Read more Reports from the winning grant proposals 2024

Tell Us About Yourself My name is Kseniia. Right now, I am a student in the International Cartography Master program, but before starting my studies, I worked for many years as an analyst in the field of urban and transport planning. I think it’s because this field often involves working with different barriers (physical, social […] The post Maps and Mappers 2025 – January – Kseniia Nifontova appeared first on GeoHipster.

Paul shows you how to access raster data stored in the cloud or object storage for PostGIS using cloud optimized GeoTIFF (aka COG) files. He also includes some functions for working with raster elevation.

Due to some issues I’m running behind just a bit – so enjoy this map from December of 2024. Tell Us About Yourself I am a Senior Cartographer at National Geographic Maps, own my own freelance business, Tombolo Maps & Design, and have been making maps professionally for 15 years.  My maps have been in more […] The post Maps and Mappers 2024 – December – Aly DeGraff Ollivierre appeared first on GeoHipster.

What Will be the Tableau of Geospatial?

Photo by fabio on UnsplashContinue reading on Spatial Data Science »

In previous posts we have noted how one can explore urban issues through newspapers, while at the same time we have used social media to explore trends in vaccinations. In a recently published paper in PLOS Digital Health entitled "From print to perspective: A mixed-method analysis of the convergence and divergence of COVID-19 topics in newspapers and interviews" with Qingqing Chen, Adam Sullivan, Jennifer Surtees, Laurene Tumiel-Berhalter and myself, we thought we would explore how COVID-19 was reported in newspapers and how this varied from interviews. The rationale behind this was that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to diverse experiences influenced by public health measures like lockdowns and social distancing. To explore these dynamics, we introduce a novel ’big-thick’ data approach that integrates extensive U.S. newspaper data with detailed interviews. By employing natural language processing (NLP) and geoparsing techniques, we identify key topics related to the pandemic and...

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Are we finally getting somewhere?

Cloud-Native Geospatial represents a significant shift in how geospatial data is processed, stored, and analyzed. This approach offers GIS Professionals greater scalability, allowing them to handle massive datasets without relying on traditional and often limited on-premise infrastructure. Additionally, the cloud-native approach enhances collaboration by enabling multiple users to access and work on shared datasets in real-time, regardless of their physical location, helping to eliminate data silos. This level of accessibility and flexibility empowers GIS professionals to deliver faster results, streamline workflows, and adapt to the growing demands of modern geospatial applications. What is Cloud-Native Geospatial? Cloud-native geospatial refers to the practice of leveraging cloud-based technologies and architectures to handle geospatial data in the cloud, ideally without migrating it between heavy/purpose-built storage and file formats. This approach focuses on...

This past December, I attended the Thermal Remote Sensing (TRS) Workshop in Leicester, UK.

PLUS: How Meta is improving vision transformers, handling uncertainty in mapping, and more.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Loftmyndir ehf. is an Icelandic company providing geospatial data for Iceland, such as aerial photography, LIDAR data and terrain models. They also provide online maps taylored to specific needs of...

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share some more details about the experience of using AI tools to code a plugin for QGIS, one that has seen some reasonable success, with over 2000 downloads in the past couple of months. My hope is to inspire others to make their own QGIS plugins and other geospatial tools, as I think more people doing AI-assisted coding has the potential to accelerate the momentum of the open source ecosystem. Cursor & QGIS — awesome together :) Can you really code a QGIS plug-in just using AI tools? Before we dig in I want to give everyone who is not a coder some encouragement to jump in and try things out. The quick answer is yes! You can code a QGIS plug-in even if you’re not a software developer. I’m sure you’ve seen the videos of people building cool things with AI tools, but it can still be hard to actually dive into it. For me the most important thing is to have a real problem you’re...

The post discusses AI hallucination - when AI generates incorrect information. It explores two main problems: user frustration with incorrect outputs and uncertainty about managing these errors long-term. Using a geodetic network analogy, it explains how AI errors can propagate like measurement errors in surveying, suggesting we need better frameworks for detecting and managing hallucinations.

Graphic designers! Here’s an easy way to grab beautiful accurate open map data for your design work. Real data. No tracing. Download vector map data as points, lines, and polygons, all styled and ready for your work in Illustrator or whatever program you use. Maps rule, and it’s too fun not to dive into the …

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

Slides and links for my February 2025 Pangeo Showcase talk

I have been watching the codification of spatial data types into GeoParquet and now GeoIceberg with some interest, since the work is near and dear to my heart. Writing a disk serialization for PostGIS is basically an act of format standardization – albeit a standard with only one consumer – and many of the same issues that the Parquet and Iceberg implementations are thinking about are ones I dealt with too. Here is an easy one: if you are going to use well-known binary for your serialiation (as GeoPackage, and GeoParquet do) you have to wrestle with the fact that the ISO/OGC standard for WKB does not describe a standard way to represent empty geometries. Empty geometries come up frequently in the OGC/ISO standards, and they are simple to generate in real operations – just subtract a big thing from a small thing. SELECT ST_AsText(ST_Difference( 'POLYGON((0 0, 1 0, 1 1, 0 1, 0 0))', 'POLYGON((-1 -1, 3 -1, 3 3, -1 3, -1 -1))' )) If you have a data set and are running...

Sometimes I realize that in the amount of time I’ve spent looking for detailed data, I could have just created it. Often, water polygons at the scale you need for your mega-detailed map just aren’t available. Here’s how to draw a complex polygon in ArcGIS Pro super easily. And, for giggles, how you can style …

Are the Geoawesome Top 100 Companies worth buying?

Last month I released my first QGIS plug-in, and promised I’d write an in-depth post about it. I’ll give an overview and dig into some of the motivations, and then I’ll put the details of my experience of coding with AI in its own follow up post. Background I’ve been a long time QGIS user, though am very far from an expert — I mostly open different files and visualize them. I’ve never been able to afford an Esri license, so it’s QGIS all the way for me. And I’ve always loved the plugin ecosystem: the fact that many people worldwide are adding all kinds of functionality so that anyone can customize it to their needs is just awesome, and a testament to the power of open source. There’s still things Esri can do better, but we’re now at the point where there’s a lot of things QGIS can do better. I also recently have ‘become a coder’ again, thanks to the power of AI tools. I’ll dive into more of the experience in my next post, but it meant...

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into geospatial technology is fundamentally reshaping industries, from urban development and environmental conservation to logistics and disaster relief. With businesses increasingly adopting AI-powered geospatial solutions,  the need for professionals who can harness these tools is higher than ever. To stay ahead, hiring teams must grasp the evolving landscape and […]

Today, I’m super excited to share with you the announcement that our open source textbook “Geocomputation with Python” has finally arrived in print and is now available for purchase from Routledge.com, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and other booksellers. “Geocomputation with Python” (or geocompy for short) covers the entire range of standard GIS operations for both vector and …Read More

In previous posts, we have written how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be used in various urban analytical applications. We have kept exploring this potential especially with respect to citizen science applications. To this end we have just published a new paper in iScience, entitled "New Directions in Mapping the Earth’s Surface with Citizen Science and Generative AI". In the paper, lead by Linda See, we discuss how multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) which are like LMMs but can take different forms of inputs (e.g., text, images, video) and output multi-modal information (e.g., take an image and output a description) could be leveraged to enhance citizen science land cover/land use mapping campaigns. If this sounds of interest, below you can read the abstract to the paper, see some of the figures we use to build our argument, while at the bottom of the post you can see the full reference and a link to the actual paper.Abstract: As more satellite imagery has become openly...

Partner of International Charter: Space and Major Disasters

I know it’s short notice, but I wanted to let you all know that I’m doing a livestream tomorrow. It’s been well over 2½ years since my last one. I’ll be covering a few monochrome maps I made for an upcoming book. Please come on by to ask questions, offer feedback, and share your thoughts … Continue reading Going Live →

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

As a consultant, I have to submit my resume a lot. You always want you resume tailored to the project you’re trying to land. In the old days, that meant taking the most recent version, tweaking it, and hope that any gaps from the previous version aren’t fatal. But these aren’t the old days and … Continue reading A Career Narrative – Not a Resume →

Let us explore the world of TenserflowContinue reading on Spatial Data Science »

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

When maps understand what you mean, not just what you click

I found myself sitting in a hospital talking to a doctor: Doc: You sure you haven’t had a heart attack? Me: I’m pretty sure…..Wouldn’t I know? Doc: Well……Yes and no. It was a conversation I didn’t want to have but there I sat having it. I didn’t know this was going to turn into the […] The post Once upon a time appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

A goal for me this year is to ‘ship more’, so in the spirit of releasing early and often I wanted to share a little new project I got going this past weekend. See https://github.com/cholmes/geoparquet-tools. It’s a collection of utilities for things I often want to do but that aren’t trivial out of the box with DuckDB. It started focused on just checking GeoParquet files for ‘best practices’, which I’ve been working on writing up in this pull request, as I realized that lots of people are publishing awesome data as GeoParquet but don’t always pick the best options (and the tools don’t always set the best defaults). So it can check compression, if there’s a bbox column, and row group size. It also attempts to check if a file is spatially ordered, but I’m not sure if it works across different types of approaches. It does seem to work with Hilbert curves generated from DuckDB. I do need to refine the row group...

The post Tech Fellow Update: Exploring Field Boundary Data with LLMs appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

DuckDB continues to be my go to tool for geospatial processing, after I discovered it over a year ago. Since that time its functionality has continued to expand, and as of version 1.1 it reads and writes GeoParquet natively, as long as you have the spatial extension installed. LOAD spatial; CREATE TABLE fields AS (SELECT * from 'https://data.source.coop/kerner-lab/fields-of-the-world-cambodia/boundaries_cambodia_2021.parquet'); COPY fields TO 'cambodia-fields.parquet'; Be sure to always run LOAD spatial; or the table won’t get a geometry column, it will just create blobs. If you see errors or your output data is just Parquet and not GeoParquet that’s likely the source of your problems. I often forget to add it at the beginning of my sessions — perhaps there is some nice way to configure DuckDB to always load it, but I don’t know it (yet). I also do recommend that you always use zstd compression, as it generally results in at least 20% smaller files, and its speed is...

For the month to 2025-01-27, a summary of:

Transforming data into valuable insights.

Part 2Continue reading on Spatial Data Science »

Wir haben etwas auf die letzten Monate zurückgeschaut. Was hat unsere Kunden und uns bewegt? Was haben wir als relevante und interessante Themen angeschaut und im Blog behandelt? Manchmal wird man sich dessen aufgrund der dynamischen Entwicklungen in manchen Tätigkeitsbereichen von EBP gar nicht in der ganzen Breite bewusst. Aus diesem Grund haben wir in …

Drought conditions in the lead-up to the 2025 L.A. fires

In den vergangenen Jahren kommt es in der gesamten Bundesrepublik Deutschland immer wieder zu Geldautomatensprengungen. Das Bundeskriminalamt veröffentlicht hierzu jährlich ein Bundeslagebild, das sowohl deskriptive Statistiken als auch weitere Informationen zu den Vorfällen in den einzelnen Bundesländern bietet. Auch in meiner Heimatgemeinde Hünstetten wurde bereits mehrfach ein Geldautomat gesprengt und ausgeräumt. Für mich persönlich war dies unter anderem der Ursprung, sich dieses Phänomen einmal genauer mit Studierenden und im Kontext eines betreuten Lehrforschungsprojektes an der Hochschule Mainz anzuschauen.   © Beke Heeren-Pradt: Gesprengter Geldautomat in Hünstetten   Die Ergebnisse der umfangreicheren Untersuchung, die zusammen mit den Studierenden der Hochschule Mainz für das Land Rheinland-Pfalz durchgeführt wurde, sind jetzt in einer Open Access Publikation veröffentlicht. Im Fokus des Artikels stand nicht die Sprengung des Automaten an sich, sondern ein innovativer...

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Let us have a look.Continue reading on Spatial Data Science »

It's 2025 and all we've got is a spreadsheet of humanitarian satellite data

Every coordinate tells a story; geofencing lets us bring those stories to life within defined boundariesContinue reading on Spatial Data Science »

Die GRASS GIS-Community würdigt die langjährigen Beiträge von Roger Bivand zur Entwicklung des rgrass-Pakets. The post Großer Dank an Roger Bivand! appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

We are thrilled to announce the development of the BNG Co-Pilot, an innovative platform for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) assessment supported by the Taylor Geospatial Institute (TGI) and Amazon Web Service (AWS). This groundbreaking initiative applies Generative AI and advanced geospatial analytics to address the complexities of ensuring that land development projects in the UK … Introducing BNG Co-Pilot Read More » The post Introducing BNG Co-Pilot appeared first on Sparkgeo.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.2. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5+ is needed. 3.5.2 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en ja, fr, zh_Hans HTML Online en ja fr zh_Hans Cheat Sheets: postgis: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_raster: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_topology: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_sfcgal: en ja fr zh_Hans address standardizer, postgis_tiger_geocoder: en ja fr zh_Hans This release is a bug fix release that includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.5.1.

In this experiment I used AI to automate architecture documentation by testing Aider (an AI coding assistant). After just 5 minutes and 5 prompts, I generated a decent C4 diagram for a Streamlit web application. While not perfect, this experiment shows the promising future of AI-assisted documentation.

Tasks for the weekend.Continue reading on Spatial Data Science »

The post Transforming Agriculture in Latin America with Geospatial Innovation  appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

Whether you're a student charting your career path or a professional looking to pivot into a new industry, there are numerous ways to gain the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in Geospatial.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Modernizing the geospatial industry is critical.

"Playground" by Richard Powers explores the interplay of technological ambition and environmental concerns, highlighting tensions between progress and preservation through diverse characters on a remote island.

Precipitation in the US corn belt

If Google won't, I will.

Die BIM-Methodik und der damit verbundene BIM- und Daten-Lebenszyklus werden meist anhand des Ideals “Projekt auf der grünen Wiese” (z.B. Neubau einer Immobilie) dargestellt. Je länger die BIM-Methodik jedoch in (Pilot-)Projekten praktiziert wird, desto deutlicher wird, dass dieses theoretische Ideal des einfachen Lebenszyklus-Pfeils mit interagierenden Akteuren, den Anforderungen der Praxis und insbesondere des Infrastrukturbaus nicht …

In this new release, you will find new algorithms, default output styles, and other usability improvements, in particular for working with public transport schedules in GTFS format, including: Note: To use this new version of Trajectools, please upgrade your installation of MovingPandas to >= 0.21.2, e.g. using import pip; pip.main(['install', '--upgrade', 'movingpandas']) or conda install …Read More

Understanding your data’s coordinates is the first step to turning spatial information into actionable insights.Continue reading on Spatial Data Science »

In 2025, research on the web involves using ChatGPT for specific technical queries while considering sources and environmental impact, as Google's search has become less efficient.

Another post over break! This one also comes from a student’s suggestion on how to use Weather data in the form of gridded NetCDFs. This is a common format of the weather data provided by NOAA. The data are set up as a time-stacked set of rasters or spacetime cubes. The downloads have multiple years’ […]

This article describes "star-collector," a tool for automatically publishing web favorites using GitHub Actions and AI-generated titles, leveraging transformers for title creation from Mastodon posts.

I did a lot of reading last year, a lot, perhaps because I had a lot of down time. I tend to read before going to sleep, and recovery from surgery and other things means I go to bed early and then fill the time between bed and sleep with books. Books, books, and more books. To be totally precise, I read books on a Kindle, which allows me to read in the middle of the night in the dark with the back light. Also to read from any position, since all books are the same, light weight when consumed via an e-reader. I am a full e-reader convert. Anyway, I’ve had means, motive and opportunity, and I read a tonne. Some of it was bad, some of it was good, some of it was memorable, some not. Of the 50 or so books I read last year, here are ten that made me go “yes, that was good and memorable”. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver I used to read Booker Prize winners, but I found the match to my taste was hit-and-miss. The Pullitzer Prize nominees list, on the other hand, has given me piles...

Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting the customerContinue reading on Spatial Data Science »

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

Welcome to GeoAI Unpacked! I am Ali Ahmadalipour and in this newsletter, I share insights and deep dives in geospatial AI, focusing on business opportunities and industry challenges.

How to visualize country borders with Python The post Easy Map Boundary Extraction with GeoPandas appeared first on Towards Data Science.

With many students graduating, I have had questions about how long will my ArcGIS Online account live and how can I move my work to another so I can keep a portfolio. Most schools only keep accounts open for a semester or two after graduation, and others right after graduation. So your best bet is […]

Paul explains the best way to run the http extension in production.

Introducing Topoprint.ch, a platform for creating personalized, 3D-printable topographic models of any location in Switzerland, accessible through social media bots. This post explains the "what," the "why," and a bit of the "how.".

Making the bears play nice The post Harnessing Polars and Geopandas to Generate Millions of Transects in Seconds appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Nearly five years ago, I completed a project that, to my mind, remains the most significant of my cartographic career: An Atlas of Great Lakes Islands, manually printed in cyanotype, with a hand-stitched binding. I wanted to share this project with all of you, but there were only a few copies. So, I decided to … Continue reading Journey’s End →

Elizabeth digs into the history and various uses of the vector.

In 2010, I first conducted a study which identified regions (places) in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project in Germany that still had potential for more detailed mapping. Later, in 2016, this analysis was repeated and extended to the entire world. I have since regularly carried out these studies and published the results. The algorithm and some more details are documented in an earlier blog post of mine. For the year 2024, I have recalculated this analysis and published the results on my website: “Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap“. For the study, the OSM Planet File in PBF format from Dec. 7th was used. It can be downloaded here. https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/unmapped   Currently, there are about 8.6 million elements in the OpenStreetMap project that use the place-key, representing either the center or the outline of a named place. Approximately 1.5 million place nodes are registered as villages, defined as “A village/town with up to 10,000 inhabitants.“. More details about the...

The GRASS GIS community recognises the long-term contributions of Roger Bivand for the development of the rgrass package. The post A big thank you to Roger Bivand! appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

The PostGIS development team is pleased to provide bug fix releases for 3.5.1, 3.4.4, 3.3.8, 3.2.8, 3.1.12 Please refer to the links above for more information about the issues resolved by these releases.

The post Taylor Geospatial Institute & AWS Announce Winners of Generative AI for Geospatial Challenge appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

If you aren’t doing anything else on the allotted 2.5 hours of January 24, 2025, then consider tuning in to this Women in GIS workshop where I’ll share the process (and all the data and documents) for making this migration map. The cost is free, unless you count the 2.5 hours of life you’ll invest, …

Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation

As you create your 2025 budgets, we invite you to join us as a sponsor at CNG Conference 2025 in Snowbird, Utah from April 30 to May 2, 2025. Sponsorship amplifies your organization’s visibility and aligns you with the innovators and leaders driving the future of geospatial data. CNG Conference 2025 is designed to foster collaboration, innovation, and growth within the geospatial community, with sessions organized around four main tracks: On-ramp to Cloud-Native Geospatial Data, The Bridge Between Science and Technology, Technically Advancing Cloud-Native Geospatial, and Enabling Interoperability. These tracks will guide attendees in exploring foundational skills, interdisciplinary collaboration, technical advancements, and best practices, ensuring a comprehensive experience for professionals across the geospatial field. Through keynotes, workshops, and networking opportunities, the conference aims to advance knowledge sharing, career development, and community...

The earth is round. Our screens are flat. Therein lies the problem.

What happens when top geospatial minds come together? Big questions, bold ideas, and a roadmap for what’s next.

Today, I want to point out a blog post over at https://carto.com/blog/urban-mobility-insights-with-movingpandas-carto-in-snowflake written together with my fellow co-authors and EMERALDS project team member Argyrios Kyrgiazos. For the technically inclined, the highlight are the presented UDFs in Snowflake to process and transform the trajectory data. For example, here’s a TemporalSplitter UDF: You can find the full code …Read More

A quick guide to prepping digital elevation data The post USGS DEM Files: How to Load, Merge, and Crop with Python appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Notes and experiments from our latest wanderings in geospatial tech, GeoAI, and open data.

Last time we learned why English is a hard language, both for humans and especially for computers.  For this time I think we will look at the past of NLP to understand the present. It actually has been an interesting … Continue reading →

Here’s how to make the drought map used in the Drought Aware app. This video covers creating a custom imagery basemap, modified to best support thematic data, and a styling method for the overlain drought polygons so they tint the imagery a color based on severity and have a cumulative shadow appearance to give a …

As the holiday season wraps us in its warm embrace, we at T-Kartor can't help but reflect on a year filled with challenges, triumphs, and moments that made our hearts grow.

This past week we attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington DC. At the AGU we presented two abstracts. The first follows on our work with respect to using synthetic populations within agent-based models. This work was with Na Jiang, Fuzhen Yin and Boyu Wang and entitled "A Framework for Populating Urban Digital Twins with Agents." Or more specially why digital twins need agents. Below you can see our abstract and a couple of figures showing our synthetic population workflow and how we integrate these into agent-based models.  Abstract:Over the last few years, considerable efforts have been placed in creating digital twins from diverse fields ranging from engineering to urban planning and many things in-between. These digital twins have benefited from the growth and availability of computational power and data. For example, in urban planning the growth of computational resources and the explosion of spatial data sources(e.g. remote sensing) has lead to...

From real-time applications to ethical considerations, these trends could define the industry's trajectory in 2025 and beyond.

Night-time satellite imagery reveals a key reason for the Syrian Government's combat ineffectiveness.

Kyle Barron, Cloud Engineer at Development Seed. You’ve spent years figuring out how to visualize large geospatial datasets in web browsers. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what initially drew you to this area? I have a bit of a nontraditional background; I have virtually no official training in geography or computer science. In college, I was interested in urban and environmental economics, trying to understand how policies shape cities and the environment. I planned to pursue a PhD in economics and after college worked for a health economics professor at MIT for two years. In that time I learned data analysis skills, but more importantly, I learned that I preferred data analysis and coding to academic research. I decided not to pursue a PhD and left that job to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile hiking trail from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. Over five months...

The AGU Fall Meeting 2024, the largest gathering for Earth and space science, starts this morning, Monday December 9-13 in Washington, DC. This year, there are many papers on cloud-native geospatial technologies by CNG members and other experts. This blog post highlights some key talks and posters you won’t want to miss. Monday Dec 9 Dynamic Tiling for Earth Data Visualization: This talk explores dynamic tiling, a method for generating map tiles on-the-fly, allowing for real-time modifications and eliminating the need for constant updates. Presented by Aimee Barciauskas from Development Seed. Learn more. Wednesday Dec 11 VirtualiZarr - Create Virtual Zarr Stores Using Xarray Syntax: This paper presents VirtualiZarr, a tool that allows accessing old file formats (like netCDF) as if they were stored in cloud-optimized formats (like Zarr). The authors will demonstrate using the Worthy Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Efficiency Map dataset, which consists of ~40TB of data...

Spatial finance is emerging as a significant component of the geospatial landscape. As I have suggested before, this change has been happening incrementally for the last decade. That change has reached a tipping point.

As industries increasingly rely on geographic information systems (GIS) to unlock actionable insights, the demand for skilled GIS professionals has reached unprecedented heights. Hiring managers and HR professionals often face a unique challenge in sourcing and retaining top GIS talent. While our comprehensive guide on hiring GIS professionals outlines the broader hiring process, this article […]

Tell Us About YourselfMy name is Antonia Blankenberg. Alongside being a drummer with the fantastic TBL8 Brass, I’m a Lead Consultant in Utilities with Esri Ireland and I’ve been working in GIS for 5 years now. I’ve always been interested in geography, but I only first came across GIS during my undergraduate degree. I took […] The post Maps and Mappers 2024 – October – Antonia Blankenburg appeared first on GeoHipster.

We're excited to share the latest Iris updates, designed to deliver even more robust capabilities and a streamlined experience for our customers and partners.

Some news about QChat and the features provided by the new 1.1 version. #GISChat #GISTribe

Our team will be in Washington, DC to see "What's Next for Science."

Create and visualize GIS data on the progress of the Vendée Globe 2024 race from official spreadsheets.

Jira is a powerful tool for managing Geospatial Programs, especially when integrated with Confluence and Bitbucket. This combination enhances task organization, documentation, and collaboration. Features such as task linking, smart commits, and expansive writing capabilities streamline complex project management, making these tools essential for optimizing workflows and improving efficiency.

Webseiten und mobile Anwendungen öffentlicher Einrichtungen müssen barrierefrei gestaltet sein, damit sie für alle Menschen, einschliesslich Personen mit Behinderungen, zugänglich sind. Was bedeutet Barrierefreiheit für digitale Produkte? Welche Richtlinien und Gesetze gelten und wie können diese umgesetzt werden? Barrierefreiheit bezeichnet die Gestaltung der Umwelt, so dass sie auch von Menschen mit Beeinträchtigungen ohne fremde Hilfe …

Crunchy Data hosted an online event for PostGIS on November 21st, 2024. Paul has a wrap up post discussing the highlights and themes throughout the day.

The Burmese Junta is looking for more ways to inflict terror.

I just shared this approach with some friends, and thought I’d blog it here too. When I get a relatively small amount of monetary compensation for something, I take the ‘Feynman Approach’ to it and buy something fun with the money, giving me a sense of satisfaction from the compensation (which, presumably, was to compensate […]

After a year on the offensive, the Arakan Army has nearly captured the entire countryside.

.. small area data refer to geographic, demographic and economic data tabulated for census blocks, block groups and census tracts — all subdivisions of counties. While these data might be produced by anyone, perhaps the most useful data in examining … Continue reading →

For Intellisense happiness

Für ein Forschungsprojekt habe ich die Anfrage erhalten, eine Karte mit allen Einbahnstrassen Europas zu erstellen. Ziel war, die «Einbahnstrassen-Systeme» verschiedener europäischer Städte miteinander vergleichen zu können. Ich hatte die Idee, Daten von OpenStreetMap dafür zu nutzen, war mir aber nicht recht sicher, wie und wo ich die Daten ablegen sollte. Und es wäre auch …

tldr; Tired of working with large CSV files? Give GeoParquet a try! “Parquet is a powerful column-oriented data format, built from the ground up to as a modern alternative to CSV files.” https://geoparquet.org/ (Geo)Parquet is both smaller and faster than CSV. Additionally, (Geo)Parquet columns are typed. Text, numeric values, dates, geometries retain their data types. …Read More

Gestern habe ich seit langem wieder mal eine GIS Day-Veranstaltung besucht und zwar in Zürich. Es wurde ein Nachmittag voller interessanter Einblicke in Werdegänge im GIS-Umfeld, Diskussionen zur persönlichen Entwicklung und vielen Gelegenheiten zum Austausch und Netzwerken. Der Anlass wurde organisiert durch Adriana Kissling, Andreas Reimers (beide Stadt Zürich), Christian Sailer (ETHZ) und Philippe Lebert …

It feels like only yesterday I was typing “2024 Geohipster Calendar”……….. 2025 is here and has been “triple checked” for my sanity. The price increased just a bit to $18.00 dollars. There are warnings all over the order page about the Canadian Mail Strike so order appropriately if you are in Canadia. Link to Purchase! […] The post 2025 Geohipster Calendar appeared first on GeoHipster.

I know lately I’ve been in commercial mode, pointing you toward various projects of mine that you can support by giving me money. And I promise I’ll get back to less commercial musings as time goes on. But for now, I also want to alert you to a way you can give other people money, … Continue reading The Dream Lives →

.. using iVDA and Visual Data Analytics .. a Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer -based tool that allows users to store, analyze, visualize, and interpret geographic data. Geographic data, also known as spatial or geospatial data, identifies the … Continue reading →

In einer digitalisierten Welt sind präzise und aktuelle Daten entscheidend. In dieser Blogserie zeige ich, wie moderne Technologien wie Deep Learning genutzt werden können, um Daten zu Rollstuhlpark-plätzen effizient zu pflegen. Im dritten und letzten Teil dieser Serie wenden wir das trainierte Deep-Neural-Network flächendeckend auf den Kanton Fribourg an. Zusätzlich skalieren und automatisieren wir die …

We invite you to join us at CNG Conference 2025 in Snowbird, Utah from April 30 to May 2 2025. Set against the beautiful backdrop of Snowbird, Utah, this inaugural event will convene the cloud-native geospatial community to learn from one another and collaborate to make geospatial data easier to access and use. The event will include keynote speeches, panel discussions, hands-on workshops, networking opportunities, and showcases of open-source projects, all designed to enhance attendees’ skills and knowledge. Participants will explore the newest developments in cloud-native geospatial technology, data accessibility, and practical applications. Save the date: April 30 - May 2, 2025 Where? Snowbird, Utah – about 40 minutes from Salt Lake City International Airport. Sponsorships: We are developing sponsorship packages. If you are interested, email us at [email protected] Interested in presenting? We will soon publish a call for proposals for presentations and...

Today, with the combined efforts of T-Kartor team members Dela Awadzi and Mercedes Fernandez, along with the support of T-Kartor, Theorose School is poised to reach new heights in digital learning.

Step-by-Step Tutorial on Applying Segment Anything Model Version 2 to Satellite Imagery for Detecting and Exporting Field Boundaries in... The post Field Boundary Detection in Satellite Imagery Using the SAM2 Model appeared first on Towards Data Science.

For the past several years, I’ve enjoyed the process of cyanotype printing, and have released a number of projects based on this technique (including my favorite item I’ve ever made). Now, I’ve decided to take my recent work in developing terrain sketches, and turn it into a new series of prints. For this, though, I … Continue reading Kickstarter 3: The Return →

From emergency response to crime prevention and disaster management, GIS provides actionable insights, helping public safety agencies make informed decisions.

AI and ML aren't simple add-ons. They're powerful tools that call for responsive, adaptable workflows to thrive. It's a commitment to efficiency, to cost savings, and ultimately, to future-proofing our processes.

This week on Wednesday, November 13, the CNG Virtual Conference 2024 will gather data user practitioners, enthusiasts, and newcomers to explore the latest in cloud-native geospatial technology. Come hear keynotes from NASA, Carto, the University of Tennessee, and speakers from many other organizations sharing updates and insights on cloud-native geo. This online event is an inclusive space for anyone curious about cloud-native geospatial, whether you’re an industry expert, an innovator, or just starting to explore cloud-native concepts. We invite you to join us to learn, connect, and engage with a field that’s rapidly changing how we work with geospatial data. Why You Should Attend Engage with the Future of Geospatial Cloud-native geospatial represents a transformative approach to handling data. At this conference, you’ll get an inside view into how cloud-native technology makes geospatial data faster, more flexible, and more scalable. And then discover how this...

Be Prepared for a Shift in Funding

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

In numerous posts, we have been discussing synthetic populations and their use in agent-based modeling. But there are many modeling styles that also utilize synthetic populations. In our own work we often spend significant amounts of time creating such synthetic populations, especially those grounded with data, due to the time needed to collect, preprocess and generate the final synthetic population. To alleviate this, we (Na (Richard) Jiang, Fuzhen Yin, Boyu Wang and myself) have a new paper published in Scientific Data, entitled "A Large-Scale Geographically Explicit Synthetic Population with Social Networks for the United States." Our aim of this paper is to build and provide a geographically explicit synthetic population along with its social networks using open data including that from the latest 2020 U.S. Census which can be used in a variety of geo-simulation models.Summary of the Resulting Datasets.Specially, in the paper we outline how we created the a synthetic population...

One of the major outputs of Taylor Geospatial Engine’s first Innovation Bridge is the recently released Fields of The World dataset, also known as FTW. We wanted to take some time for a deep dive into the core idea, the various parts of the effort, and where things could go from here. The post Introducing Fields of The World appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

Am diesjährigen CNO Panel vom 28. Oktober im Casino Bern waren wir mit unserer CNO Academy zum Thema «KI und Nachhaltigkeit» vertreten. Die Resonanz der Besucherinnen und Besucher für die drei EBP-Workshops war überwältigend: Mit mehr als 65 Anmeldungen war unsere CNO Academy bis auf den letzten Platz ausgebucht. Unsere Workshops zogen zahlreiche Fachleute aus …

How to turn vector elevation lines into a grid - and build it from Lego The post Rasterizing Vector Data in Python appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Building new worlds with travel advisories

Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000! (Click image for a larger […]

These systems are not just about understanding our present but about anticipating our future—guiding us safely and sustainably through the challenges ahead.

While in the past we have written about how we can use agent-based models to capture basic patterns of life, and even developed a simulations, but until now we have never really demonstrated how we go about this. However, at the  SIGSPATIAL 2024 conference  we (Hossein Amiri, Will Kohn, Shiyang Ruan, Joon-Seok Kim, Hamdi Kavak, Dieter Pfoser, Carola Wenk, Andreas Zufle and myslf) have a demonstration paper entitled "The Pattern of Life Human Mobility Simulation." in which we show: How to run the Patterns of Life Simulation with the graphical user interface (GUI) to visually explore the mobility patterns of a region.How to run the Patterns of Life Simulation headless (without GUI) for large-scale data generation.How to adapt the simulation to any region in the world using OpenStreetMap data,Showcase how recent scalability improvements allow us to simulate hundreds of thousands of agents.If this sounds of interest, below we show the GUI to the model, along with the steps to generate a...

Making sense of planetary data with next-generation AI.

Friends, earlier this week I mentioned that I’d completed a whole bunch of terrain sketches using some novel techniques that allowed me to create a hachure drawing style from digital elevation data. If you’d like to see the whole set, I’ve now assembled them into a quick eBook for your perusing. Click the image below … Continue reading A Free eBook of Terrain Lines →

In the past we have written about the use of synthetic populations and their use in agent-based models. We are finding such synthetic populations to be extremely useful in the creation or initialization of agent-based models. To give you a sense of how we are utilizing such synthetic populations at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024),   Na (Richard) Jiang and myself have a new paper entitled  "Studying Contagious Disease Spread Utilizing Synthetic Populations Inspired by COVID-19: An Agent-based Modeling Framework." In the paper we show how we can we utilize a method to create the geographically-explicit synthetic population along with capturing their social networks and how this can be used to study  contagious disease spread (and various lineages of the disease) in Western New York. If this sounds of interest, below you can read the abstract from the paper, see some of the results and find the full reference and the link to the paper....

I thought I would switch topics and start to talk about things like Large Language Models and how they could be applied to things like Geographic Information System (GIS) data.  To do this, I think first it would be good … Continue reading →

Just a quick post, In recently released Encyclopedia of Human Geography edited by Barney Warf we were asked to write a short chapter entitled "Agent-based Models and Geography" In the chapter we discuss how over  the last several decades, agent-based modeling has gained widespread adoption in geography.and introduce the reader to what are agent-based models, how they have developed and types of geographical applications that can be explored with them, especially when linked to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The chapter concludes with a brief summary along with a discussion of challenges and opportunities with agent-based modeling (ABM). If this sounds of interest, below you can find the full reference and link to the chapter. Example application domains for agent-based models over various spatial and temporal scales. For more examples and further details can be found at https://www.gisagents.org/Full Referece:Crooks, A.T. and Jiang, N. (2024), Agent-based Models and...

In the past we have explored how agent-based modeling can be used to study vaccine uptake and what is the mechanism underlying the diffusion of different vaccine opinions in hybrid spaces (e.g., physical, relational and cyber) can affect individuals’ vaccination decisions. But this prior work was limited to  just one small area. However, we know that urban and rural communities have different levels of digital connectivity and we were wondering if our initial findings are applicable to other counties which are more urban or to a larger study area. To explore this, at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024)  we (Fuzhen Yin, Na Jiang, Lucie Laurian and myself) have a paper entitled "Agent-based Modeling of COVID-19 Vaccine uptake in New York State: Information Diffusion in Hybrid Spaces". This paper significantly extends our previous work in a number of ways. First we move from a single rural county to the entire state of New York which has...

Geopy's great circle method The post How to Make Proximity Maps with Python appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Gentle readers, I have some exciting things to share with you. After several months of tinkering and toolmaking, I have created a series of posters of iconic peaks (and other terrain), illustrated in a sketch style inspired by old hachure drawings. There are 37 designs to choose from, and I hope you’ll browse through. And, … Continue reading A New Take on an Old Style →

Die Mailingliste grass-dev (GRASS GIS Development) wurde von Mailman auf die Discourse-Plattform von OSGeo umgestellt. The post Umzug der Mailingliste grass-dev zu OSGeo Discourse appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

How to contribute to GRASS GIS development: Guidance for new developers in the GRASS GIS Project. The post How to contribute to GRASS GIS development appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

The effects of educational attainment on individuals and society have been the subject of much research. However, there is still a need to study what factors matter the most, and what is worth investing more time and resources into, and how new methods of analysis can provide additional ways of looking into some of the challenges faced by higher education. To this end at the 2024 International Conference of the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas (CSSSA), Amira Al-Khulaidy Stine and myself had a paper entitled "Retention in Higher Education: An Agent-Based Model of Social Interactions and Motivated Agent Behavior."  In the paper we introduce an agent-based model which explores retention where we focus on students and their levels of motivation (i.e., "grit"), their immediate connections (i.e., sense of belonging) and institutional support. At the same time we capture institutional locales (i.e., urban and rural) and their selectivity. Taken all together the model...

Innovation, at its best, is invisible; there is just an audible sigh of satisfaction. A good strategy is to make things look the same but be better.

As part of our showcase of the seed grant awardees for the Field Boundaries for Agriculture initiative, Taylor Geospatial Engine is pleased to highlight Jed Sundwall and Radiant Earth. The post Innovation Bridge Community Spotlight: Jed Sundwall and Radiant Earth appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Building upon last year’s successful sessions related to geosimulation, were various topics and issues from across the urban, social and environmental fields and the resulting application areas. More excitingly, we are witnessing the emergence of the integration of cutting-edge techniques (e.g., machine learning and generative AI) which is energizing the geosimulation community as they offer new approaches for advancing geosimulations. This year, the 2025 AAG Annual Meeting will take place in Detroit, Michigan from March 24 to March 28. We are continuing to organize sessions on "Geosimulations for Addressing Societal Challenges," and we encourage you to submit abstracts if this area aligns with your research interests.Session Description:There is an urgent need for research that promotes sustainability in an era of societal challenges ranging from climate change, population growth, aging and wellbeing to that of pandemics. These need to be directly fed into policy. We, as a...

Welcome to GeoAI Unpacked! I am Ali Ahmadalipour and in this newsletter, I’ll be sharing insights and deep dives in geospatial AI, focusing on business opportunities and industry challenges.

T-Kartor and DEMINE Foundation need your support—whether it's through sharing our story, donating resources, or simply spreading awareness and keeping Ukraine on the agenda.

Unter diesen Titel habe ich meinen Vortrag im Rahmen des GEOSummit-Webinars vom 15.10.2024 gestellt. Ich war angefragt worden, mich zum Zustand der Schweizer Geoinformationslandschaft zu äussern und zu überlegen, wo es bezüglich Bereitstellung und Verteilung von Geoinformationen heute noch harzt und worin allfällige Lösungen bestehen könnten. Das GEOSummit-Webinar funktionierte wie alle Webinare in diesem Rahmen …

In 2024, it's time to leave Teams and IRC behind to enter a new era where you can chat directly from QGIS with other GIS fellows. #GISChat #GISTribe

We are excited to announce the founding CNG Editorial Board, a group of leaders in our community who have graciously volunteered to guide our work. The experience and good judgment of our board helps us identify new technologies on the horizon and what fads can we safely ignore as we create our events and content. The editorial board is also designed to provide opportunities for visibility and leadership to our community members. Half of the CNG editorial board will be replaced every 12 months with new members selected by the existing editorial board. This will allow us to gain expertise from more people throughout our community and support emerging leaders. We are immensely grateful to our board for their support as we build CNG together. Ryan Abernathy CEO Earthmover Dana Bauer Geographer-at-large Freelance Tyler Erickson Founder VorGeo ...

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

(better than the USDA)

How to get clients, reviews and stable income The post My Freelance Experience as a Geo Data Scientist on UpWork after 10 Months appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Hopefully the final installment in our 'Dependency protection in Python' series

In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, industries rely more than ever on geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial technologies to streamline operations, make informed decisions, and foster growth. As an HR professional tasked with identifying top talent in this specialized field, understanding the value of GIS professionals and how they contribute to various sectors is paramount. […]

I thought I’d finally wrap this up so I can move on to other things.  Since I’ve last posted, I replaced my Jankinator 1000 (nVidia Tesla P40 with a water cooler) and my nVidia RTX 2060 with an Intel Arc … Continue reading →

A quick post today to talk about a couple of PostGIS functions I learnt recently. I had a CSV file that contained well-known binary (WKB) representations of geometries, stored as hexadecimal strings. I imported the CSV into a PostGIS database, and wanted to convert these to be proper PostGIS geometries. I initially went for the […]

For a long time now I’ve maintained a version of the Public Domain Census Tiger Data converted from county-level to state-level.  Over the years I’ve actually had a lot of those shape files downloaded so I’m glad they were useful … Continue reading →

The Four Corners, FL Urban Area experienced the highest percent population change (31.7% or 92,396 to 121,694), from 2020 to 2023, among the 431 Urban Areas having 2023 population of 65,000 or more. Urban Areas are a statistical geography defined … Continue reading →

Rust can be useful for building geospatial systems, but it's not a silver bullet.

The post Migration of grass-dev mailing list to OSGeo Discourse appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

At TGE, our guiding principle is to contribute purposefully by elevating research-grade innovation into user-friendly and accessible capabilities that have broad awareness and reach. Because we are a very small team, this means that we are heads down most of the time. It’s important this week to take a minute to pop up and do a little celebrating! Two very different efforts, that are both critically important to us, have reached milestones. The post Celebrating Our Community’s Success appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

Last year I ran into the always-incisive Will Cadell and we immediately started discussing a favorite hallway-track topic:  how to effectively sell Geo. ME:  “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t even bother with the web but just sell PDF maps to the Oil & Gas industry with big red arrows that […]

Understanding modern techniques for encoding geographic coordinates in a neural network The post Geographic Position Encoders appeared first on Towards Data Science.

It’s been a while since I posted here – I kind of lost momentum over the summer (which is a busy time with a school-aged child) and never really picked it up again. Anyway, I wanted to write a quick post to tell people that I won two awards at the British Cartographic Society awards […]

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Exploring the technical implementation of directional markers for an improved user experience.

Welcome to GeoAI Unpacked! I am Ali Ahmadalipour and in this newsletter, I’ll be sharing insights and deep dives in geospatial AI, focusing on business opportunities and industry challenges.

In case you haven’t seen the news – we had a lot of rain Last Friday. A hurricane hit Florida and then proceeded to drench a large portion of the world I Inhabit I was fine. Chattanooga was fine. North East Tennessee and Western North Carolina aren’t. The more I read up that also included […] The post Paper Maps or Something close appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

🔍 Insights and deep dives for Geospatial AI

Back to entry 1 I was glancing at the New York Times and saw that Catherine, the Princess of Wales, had released an update on her treatment. And I thought, “wow, I hope she’s doing well”. And then I thought, “wow, I bet she gets a lot of positive affirmation and support from all kinds of people”. I mean, she’s a princess. Even us non-princesses, we need support too, and I have to say that I have been blown away by how kind the people around me in my life have been. And also how kind the other folks who I have never really talked with before have been. I try to thank my wife as often as I can. It is hard not to feel like a burden when I am, objectively, a burden, no matter how much she avers I am not. I am still not fully well (for reasons), and I really want to be the person she married, a helpful full partner. It is frustrating to still be taking more than I’m giving. From writing about my experience here, I have heard from other cancer survivors, and other folks who have...

The post GRASS GIS PSC Elections 2024: nomination period ongoing appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Lineage distribution of SARS-CoV-2 across geographic regions of Ontario, Canada, Western New York, and New York City over timeIn the past we have posted on using agent-based models for explore the spread of diseases. We have been keeping up with this work especially in light of COVID-19. To this end we are excited to introduce our new paper entitled "Genomic Profiling and Spatial SEIR Modeling of COVID-19 Transmission in Western New York" published in Frontiers in Microbiology"  In this paper have been collaborating with other researchers at the University at Buffalo who focus  on the genomic sequencing of various lineages distribution of SARS-CoV-2. What is special about this  new paper is that we explore how such linages change over space and time and how this relates to movement patterns. If this sounds of interest, below you can read the abstract of the paper, see some the lineages in different regions which change over space and time, and our agent-based model which explores how...

Tell Us About Yourself I grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and moved to Austin, Texas, where I was an undergraduate student and then a geologist. I’m currently graduating in October from an international cartography master’s program based in Europe, and I am excited to see what life brings next. Tell us the story behind […] The post Maps and Mappers of the 2024 Calendar – September – Phoebe Ly appeared first on GeoHipster.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.0! Best Served with PostgreSQL 17 RC1 and GEOS 3.13.0. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5 is needed. 3.5.0 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en ja, fr, zh_Hans HTML Online en ja fr zh_Hans Cheat Sheets: postgis: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_raster: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_topology: en ja fr zh_Hans postgis_sfcgal: en ja fr zh_Hans address standardizer, postgis_tiger_geocoder: en ja fr zh_Hans This release is a feature release that includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.4.3, new features, and a few breaking changes.

The US government should build searchable indices (e.g. STAC) for their geospatial data, and it should devote resources (aka money) to helping open commercial satellite companies' archives.

I’ve been too busy to write anything as of late. I have a lot to talk about – just not much time to do it. So FOSS4GNA happened on Sept 9-11 2024. Probably the biggest thing for me during the conference was we had two BOFs on QGIS. Granted – I think it was supposed […] The post QGIS US User Group appeared first on North River Geographic Systems Inc.

Back to entry 1 What happened there, I didn’t write for three months! Two words: “complications”, and “recovery”. In a terrifying medical specialty like cancer treatment, one of the painful ironies is that patients spend a lot of time suffering from complications and side effects of the treatments, rather than the cancer. In my case and many others, the existence of the cancer isn’t even noticable without fancy diagnostic machines. The treatments on the other hand… those are very noticable! A lot of this comes with the territory of major surgery and dangerous chemicals. My surgery included specific possible complications including, but not limited to: incontinence, sexual disfunction, urinary disfunction, and sepsis. Fortunately, I avoided all the complications specific to my surgery. What I did not avoid was a surprisingly common complication of spending some time in a hospital while taking broad spectrum antibiotics–I contracted the “superbug” clostridioides difficile, aka...

Don't Get Blinded By Your Vendor's Stories

Last week I had the honor to give a keynote talk entitled "Exploring the World from the Bottom Up with GIS and Agent-based Models: Past, Present and Future" at the 19th annual Social Simulation Conference which is the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) annual conference. Attending the conference was a great experience being exposed to various applications of social simulation, catching up with old friends and meeting many new people. For anyone interested below I have pasted the abstract from my talk and the slides from the talk can be found here. Abstract We have seen explosion in the availability of data along with utilizing such data in agent-based models. At the same time, we have seen a huge growth in computational power and the associating agent-based models to real world locations through the use of geographical information systems (GIS). This talk will explore how geographically explicit agent-based models have grown and evolved over the last 20 years taking...

Bringing a new approach to an old way of thinking

.. the new 119th Congress Congressional Districts are those that will be used in the 2024 elections .. each state has one or more congressional districts whose boundaries are based on redistricting and the decennial census. Each of the U.S. … Continue reading →

As part of our showcase of the seed grant awardees for the Field Boundaries for Agriculture initiative, Taylor Geospatial Engine is pleased to highlight Dr Nathan Jabobs. Dr Jacobs is Director of the Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory (MVRL) and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. His research centers on developing learning-based algorithms and systems for extracting information from large-scale image collections. The post Innovation Bridge Community Spotlight: Dr. Nathan Jacobs appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

The first significant release of Python bindings for stac-rs.

We’re excited to announce the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) membership program. We have changed our name, but not our commitment to making geospatial data easier to access and use. As geospatial data becomes more important, so does the need for a vendor-agnostic, trusted platform to help people understand the true benefits and limitations of geospatial technology. CNG is stepping up to meet this need, providing a neutral forum where geospatial data users can come together and exchange ideas, share experiences, and learn from one another. Our membership program is designed to unite and empower a diverse community of geospatial professionals from across industries and specialties. In the last few years, we’ve witnessed how the cloud ecosystem, fueled by open standards, has changed how we work with geospatial data online. Cloud-native technologies have created capabilities that have been rapidly adopted across the commercial and public sectors. Despite this, many...

Slides and reflections from FOSS4G-NA 2024 in St. Louis.

A new release of stac-rs that includes STAC v1.1 and stac-geoparquet support.

How a design sprint helped us envision the future of food systems.

More than just a data platform, Prescient is a gateway to smarter, safer, and more efficient operations. Designed to help midstream companies optimize Lidar data, Prescient makes data management easier and boosts risk mitigation. The post Enhancing Risk Management in the Midstream Oil and Gas Industry with LiDAR and Prescient appeared first on Sparkgeo.

In May last year, we announced the “Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation” as an initiative to “help people adopt patterns and best practices for efficiently sharing Earth science data on the Internet using a cloud-native approach.” Since then, we’ve done quite a bit. We’ve published 29 blog posts and quickly attracted over 1,000 followers on X. We created a new Slack workspace which has over 400 members and 200 monthly active users. Combined with some of Radiant Earth’s previously created online channels, we now have a social media following of over 6,000 across X, LinkedIn, and Medium, and our quarterly newsletter has over 8,000 subscribers. We have hosted in-person sprints for Zarr, STAC, and GeoParquet. We’ve been a part of the first SatCamp, the ESIP 2023 Summer and Winter Meeting Cloud Computing sessions, and convened a two-day workshop in Rwanda focused on improving access to air quality data throughout Africa. We’ve hosted a series of webinars to introduce...

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.0beta1! Best Served with PostgreSQL 17 RC1 and GEOS 3.13.0. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5 is needed. 3.5.0beta1 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en ja, zh_Hans, fr This release is a beta of a major release, it includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.4.3 and new features.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.0rc1! Best Served with PostgreSQL 17 RC1 and GEOS 3.13.0. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4+ is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5 is needed. 3.5.0rc1 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en ja, zh_Hans, fr This release is a release candidate of a major release, it includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.4.3 and new features. Changes since 3.5.0beta1 are as follows: #5779 Failures building in parallel mode (Sandro Santilli) #5778, Sections missing in What’s new (Regina Obe)

Understanding the different types of GIS data, formats, and their uses is critical for anyone looking to maximize the potential of GIS technology.

Case study of the Russian-Ukrainian war The post Can You See the War from Space? appeared first on Towards Data Science.

We are proud to announce the final release of STAC 1.1.0. The focus has been the addition of a common band construct to unify the fields eo:bands and raster:bands. Additionally, Item Asset Definition (field item_assets) - formerly a popular STAC extension - is now part of the core specification. Various additional fields have been made available via the common metadata mechanism, e.g. keywords, roles, data_type and unit. We collaborated closely with the editors of OGC API - Records to align better with STAC, which resulted, for example, in a change to the license field. The link object was extended to support additional HTTP mechanisms such as HTTP methods other than GET and HTTP headers. The best practices have evolved and various minor changes and clarifications were integrated throughout the specification. A shoutout to all the participants and sponsors of the last STAC sprint in Philadelphia, who laid a solid basis for this release. Emmanuel Mathot and I were...

7 Nov 2024 Edit: Updated the command to install Pytorch. 22 Dec 2024 Edit: Updated and simplified the software install as there are aliases now. Note: It’s much easier if you upgrade your environment to just nuke the conda install … Continue reading →

Join the Taylor Geospatial Engine team on September 12, 2024 in St. Louis, MO for the 2024 Geo-Resolution conference. This year’s conference focuses on the development and application of geospatial models, such as digital twins, that can be used to address some of the world’s most critical challenges. The post Join Us at Geo-Resolution 2024 appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.4.7! This is a bug fix release. 3.3.7 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.4.3! This version requires PostgreSQL 12-17, GEOS 3.8+, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5+ is needed. 3.4.3 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en, ja, fr

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Have you ever got a really good piece of life advice from your dad? Something along the lines of Good intentions matter, but your actions will define you.That’s basically what a design principle is, but instead of your dad, it’s a designer. And instead of advice about life, it’s about the thing you're building. The post Sparkgeo’s Design Principles appeared first on Sparkgeo.

John is a geospatial consultant based in Fremantle, Western Australia, where he runs Mammoth Geospatial, an open-source-focused GIS company. Specialising in open source GIS consulting and training, his career has taken him from BC & the Yukon to South America, PNG, the Pacific, and Australia. Deeply involved in the open geo community, John started Geogeeks Perth, chaired […] The post Local FOSS4Gs are a great way to bring the magic to the community appeared first on GeoHipster.

This post introduces STAC GeoParquet, a specification and library for storing and serving SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) metadata as GeoParquet. By building on GeoParquet, STAC GeoParquet makes it easy to store, transmit, and analyze large collections of STAC items. It makes for a nice complement to a STAC API. STAC Background STAC makes geospatial data queryable, especially “semi-structured” geospatial data like a collection of cloud-optimized GeotTIFFs (COGs) from a satellite. I can’t imagine trying to work with this type of data without a STAC API. Concretely, STAC metadata consists of JSON documents describing the actual assets. STAC metadata can typically be accessed in two ways: Through a static STAC catalog, which is just a JSON document linking to other JSON documents (STAC Collections and / or STAC Items, which include the links to the assets) Through a STAC API, which also enables things like search. In practice, I haven’t encountered much data...

Addressing the fragmented access to crisis response data

In the past we have wrote about using simulation to build synthetic datasets for trajectory analysis due to the limited availability of real world comprehensive datasets. In relation to this work we  (Andreas Züfle, Dieter Pfoser, Carola Wenk, Hamdi Kavak, Taylor Anderson, Joon-Seok Kim, Nathan Holt, Andrew DiAntonio and myself) have a new vision paper entitled "In Silico Human Mobility Data Science: Leveraging Massive Simulated Mobility Data" published in Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems. In the paper we sketch out a framework  for in silico mobility data science. The rationale being in someway that mobility data alone does not tell us much about why people do what do and to quote from the paper "but imagine a world where we can go back in time to ask people about the purpose of their mobility to understand why an individual visited a place of interest." By building models (aka, agent-based models) we can do just that which therefore allows us to build in silico human...

.. examining block group demographics developed for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act .. block groups (BGs) are the smallest geographic areas for which demographic data are developed from the American Community Survey (ACS). The most recent Citizen Voting … Continue reading →

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

Spatial and Community

Why and when to use the FeatureHolder transformer in FME workflows.

The GRASS GIS 8.4.0 release provides more than 520 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.3.2. The post GRASS GIS 8.4.0 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Taylor Geospatial Engine and the core team of the Field Boundaries for Agriculture (fiboa) project are happy to share another technical update from Matthias Mohr and the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation on the continued development of open source tools to accelerate innovation in AI and computer vision models to extract field boundaries from earth observation imagery. The post Creating Interoperable Field Boundary Data with the fiboa Converter Tool | Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Engine.

I’m Chris(topher) Ren, and this is my publication.

The post describes the creation of an ArcGIS Dashboard in ArcGIS Enterprise to track data collection progress on field assets, including photo capturing. A dynamic query counts the number of attached photos and a map displays the results. The feature class is in an Enterprise Geodatabase on SQL Server with enabled attachments and versioning.

Automation is crucial in my work as a Geospatial Professional. I rely on three key types of automation: Dynamic, which reacts to user interaction; Scheduled, which runs tasks at set intervals; and Triggered, which responds to specific events. These methods streamline data management, map creation, and dashboard building for efficient projects.

Geospatial technology has been a significant component in the last several Olympics, and Paris 2024 is no exception.

How many pixels are captured but never looked at; how many pixels could be captured but aren't?

It’s already been three years since the last release of the STAC specification and it’s time to improve the specification based on feedback from the STAC community that we received since the last release. After some intense time of discussions and document editing, we are proud to announce the release of STAC 1.1.0-beta.1. The focus has been the addition of a common band construct to unify the fields eo:bands and raster:bands. Additionally, Item Asset Definition (field item_assets) - formerly a popular STAC extension - is now part of the core specification. Various additional fields have been made available via the common metadata mechanism, e.g. keywords, roles, data_type and unit. We collaborated closely with the editors of OGC API - Records to align better with STAC, which resulted, for example, in a change to the license field. The link object was extended to support additional HTTP mechanisms such as HTTP methods other than GET and HTTP headers. The best...

In May, we discussed Field Boundaries for Agriculture (fiboa) and the fiboa ecosystem and mentioned that there is a new converter tool, which can take non-fiboa datasets and help you turn it into fiboa datasets. Back then we had 5 very similar datasets converted. In the meantime, we’ve converted additional datasets and improved the converter tool. Today, we’d like to give an update on the status and show how easy it is for you to make your field boundaries more useful by converting and providing them in a “standardized” format. Seven people are currently working on creating more than 40 converters: ~20 converters are fully implemented and easily usable ~20 converters are currently in development and available in a draft version How does it work that we can convert so many datasets so easily? We have implemented the fiboa Command Line Interface (CLI), which is a program that offers various tools to work with field boundary data. One of them is a command to convert...

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

.. the growing/changing U.S. Hispanic population .. between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of the overall growth of the U.S. population, driven primarily by Hispanic births. Hispanics of any race grew to just over … Continue reading →

The EO sector has found itself in the Doldrums. How can we blow up a storm to move the market?

Tell Us About Yourself I’m a GIS Analyst at Summit Design and Engineering Services where I manage data and collection processes for projects focused on asset maintenance. I started my career in GIS on a whim; I was thinking of getting my masters in Geology but realized I would need to fill a GIS-sized hole in […] The post Maps and Mappers of the 2024 Calendar – Katherine Rudzki – July appeared first on GeoHipster.

How to create building model maps in Python The post Visualizing 3D Spatial Data With Pydeck appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Today, we celebrate a true geospatial legend: GRASS GIS! The post Happy 41st birthday, GRASS GIS! appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Predicting urban blight via street view imagery to enable violence reduction

Making sense of huge amounts of remote sensing data is a job that many companies are working hard to solve. TorchGeo aims to fill the gap between deep learning and remote sensing.  The post Remote Sensing and Computer Vision: TorchGeo Data Loading appeared first on Sparkgeo.

On July 11th, the military and political scene in Burma was uprooted as 2,000 soldiers from the United Wa State Army crossed the Salween River from their bases in the Wa Self-Administered Division and fanned out from the town of Tangyan across much of central Shan State.

Determining the burned area in forests due to wildfires using Sentinel-2 images with Python in Google Colab The post Quantifying Burned Areas from Wildfires Using Satellite Imagery appeared first on Towards Data Science.

.. VDAGIS Discovery (https://proximityone.com/vdagis_discovery) is a web-based tool thats provides issue-oriented stakeholders with access to easy-to-use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) resources .. for non-GIS users. VDAGIS Discovery may be accessed/used with any browser on any device. This unique and powerful … Continue reading →

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI

Over two years ago, the GeoParquet project brought together a diverse group of interests around a clear objective: standardizing how geospatial data is used within Parquet. The initial goal was modest: to ensure that any tool reading or writing spatially located geometries (points, lines and polygons) does so in a consistent and interoperable way. But the ultimate goal of the effort has been to make geospatial a primary data type within the broader data community, thereby breaking the ‘GIS’ data silo and enabling the seamless integration of geospatial data with all other data types. We envision a world where spatial data is simply another column in your dataset, not a special case requiring unique handling. This integration will unlock new insights, reduce the need for specialized tools, and make geospatial information accessible to a broader range of users and innovations. Without standardization, the current situation is that...

On June 25th in Northern Shan State and Mandalay Region, the approximately 6-month long Haigeng ceasefire broke down following mutual escalation and Junta air-and-artillery strikes on rallying resistance forces between Kyaukme and Mogok. In the first fourteen days following the resumption of clashes in the area, Resistance forces - primarily the Ta’ang National Liberation Army - captured 4 military bases along with the towns of

The fusion of Project Jupyter with powerful cloud-native solutions is reshaping browser-based geospatial scientific computing.

Government contractors and departments within the military use geospatial technology to improve operations and carry out missions.

Data Monetization is a hot topic, with companies looking to create new revenue streams from this asset. Learn what the main problems are and how to work around them to build and sell your Data-as-a-Service products.

Summary: I’ve created a demo web app where you can search an aerial photo of Southampton, UK using text queries such as "roundabout", "tennis court" or "ship". It uses vector embeddings to do this – which I explain in this blog post. In this post I’m going to try and explain a bit more about […]

Key takeaways and future directions from our recent convening.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Deploy YOLOv8 for Object Detection and Counting on Your Customized Database from A to Z. The post How Many Cars Are in This Aerial Imagery? Let’s Count Them with YOLOv8 from Scratch! appeared first on Towards Data Science.

I am excited to be presenting at the ESRI User Conference in San Diego this year. I will be presenting my work on creating a 3D Printed Map. I will be presenting on Wednesday, Jul 17, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM PDT in the Marriott Grand Ballroom Salon 10. If you would like to attend […]

This is The Geospatial Digest.

Keeping geospatial professionals informed on the legal and policy issues that will impact GeoAI.

I’m interested to find out who is reading my blog. Following the lead of Jamie Tanna who was in turn copying Terence Eden (both of whose blogs I read), I’d like to ask people who read this to drop me an email or leave a comment on this post if you read this blog and […]

The PostGIS Team is pleased to release PostGIS 3.5.0alpha2! Best Served with PostgreSQL 17 Beta2 and GEOS 3.12.2. This version requires PostgreSQL 12 - 17, GEOS 3.8 or higher, and Proj 6.1+. To take advantage of all features, GEOS 3.12+ is needed. SFCGAL 1.4-1.5 is needed to enable postgis_sfcgal support. To take advantage of all SFCGAL features, SFCGAL 1.5 is needed. 3.5.0alpha2 source download md5 NEWS PDF docs: en ja, zh_Hans, fr This release is an alpha of a major release, it includes bug fixes since PostGIS 3.4.2 and new features.

Call for Abstracts! At the 2024 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting to be held during the 9th to 13th of December in Washington, D.C., Carter Christopher, Wenwen Li, Gautam Thakur and myself are organizing a session entitled: “GC077: Future Map: The Convergence of Generative GeoAI, Population Synthesis, and Agent-Based Modeling to Develop Geographic Futures for Climate Assessments” Abstract: The climate community has long developed reliable climate models grounded in trusted Earth systems data and physics, but it has not been until recently that human dynamics and feedbacks have been viewed as a necessary coupling within these models. Including human dynamics within integrated models necessitates a forecasted understanding of human transitions within the landscape. The geospatial science domain has typically not looked forward through simulations. Advances in agent-based modeling, synthetic population generation, and GeoAI/GenAI are presenting new opportunities for generating...

In the recent edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place edited by Mary Gilmartin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Sue Roberts, I was asked to write a chapter about Mike Batty. While I have known Mike for a while, to say writing the chapter was easy, is a understatement. In the sense, we had a word constraint (3,000 words plus references) and trying to sum up his biographical details and theoretical context, his spatial contributions along with his key advances and controversies, and key works was a challenge.  Anyway, if you would like to read a draft of my contribution to the book and my attempt to sum up Mikes work, you can find the reference and the link to the chapter below.Full reference:  Crooks, A.T. (2024), Michael Batty, in Gilmartin, M., Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Roberts, S. (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place (3rd edition), Sage, London, UK. pp. 37-43. (pdf)