Como mapear nomes de Rua no Openstreetmap com uma camada de fundo do senso-2022.

nesse video vou mostrar como mapear nomes de Rua com uma camada de fundo com dados de nomes de Rua disponibilizada pelo IBGE.

Link do arquivo usado no video com os dados de nomes de Rua de algumas cidades brasileiras para o mapeamento de nomes de Ruas no Openstreetmap.

OBS: use esse arquivo como camada de fundo.

https://projeto.softwarelivre.tec.br/s/3zxd54iSjr7YQZ4

Link do Video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hyHqiViMMw&t=118s

Baixar os aquivos da camada de face do Senso-2022;IBGE http://gpsutil.com/CNEFE-2022/

Fonte: IBGE; Senso-2022

UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiro do Openstreetmap

This is cross-linked from my blog, posted on 11 July 2023

I recently joined the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in modering their Community Working Group and Tech Working Group’s discussions on AI-Assisted Mapping.

This, in part, was a reminder that I (still!) haven’t published an OSM diary that summarises my MA research, and that publication is still process. But it was also a reminder that I have yet to really summarise or bring together what I have shared so far.

Here’s a short summary:

Moderation: “Perspectives on AI-Assisted Mapping”

• Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTtTh6gHEwI
• Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pfdDV9xSoo
• These two sessions - recorded as hour-long discussions with unrecorded 30 minute discussions at the end, were really interesting (and much-needed!) community spaces for the OSM community. I’m grateful to have been given the trust needed to facilitate, and learned a lot from folks there. Most notably, I think the discussion primarily ended up focusing not on “what we should be building” but what AI means to mappers in the first place (these being very different things)!

Talk: “Crisis Maps, Community, and Corporations (an Anthropologist’s perspective)”

• Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0a84F0pdNU&t=351s
• Slides: Coming soon!
• This was given at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in 2021 in the form of a talk. It shared some of my initial thoughts around crisis mapping specifically, and citations in that direction. In particular, I focused a bit more on what defines the kinds of crises that become maps, and informational asymmetries within the community.

Talk: “Mapping crises, communities and capitalism on OpenStreetMap: situating humanitarian mapping in the (open source) mapping supply chain”

• Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqkdY-NG0LI&t=636s
• Slides: https://zenodo.org/record/7004452
• This talk was given at the State of the Map conference (the global summit for the OSM community) in 2022 in the science/research track. I shared a summary of my MA research, with many more ethnographic excerpts than I was able to bring to the previous iteration. In this talk, I focused primarily on asking the kinds of questions that emerged from my conversations, discussions, and observations over the last ~2 years. Folks’ reactions were so kind!

Thank yous

• Thank you for the invitation to moderate Arnalie Vicario and Petya Kangalova for the invitation to join the Community Working Group
• Thank you to the Science track at the State of the Summit for accepting my talk proposal, and for the supportive folks who asked questions at the conference and encouraged this work

В iD появилось поле “ID изображения в Panoramax”, которое отвечает за тег panoramax=*. Все, кто по моему совету заливал фото/панорамы на Panoramax теперь могут пометить POI (и не только) тегами с ID их фото на этом сервисе.

Imagery Offset Database

Todo mapeador aficionado debería saber que todas las imágenes obtenidas de forma remota (por ejemplo, imágenes satelitales y fotografías aéreas) y otras fuentes, excepto las trazas GPS, suelen estar mal alineadas con respecto a la realidad. Como resultado, el cartógrafo debería poder alinear las imágenes en su editor preferido utilizando trazas GPS. El proceso lleva entre 5 y 10 minutos y, debido a la precisión del GPS, los resultados varían. No es tan malo si eres el único cartógrafo en cientos de kilómetros a lo largo de cientos de años, pero para la cartografía cooperativa, incluso una variación de un metro importa.

Un análisis del problema reveló dos posibles soluciones, ambas igualmente efectivas. La base de datos de desplazamientos y el complemento de desplazamientos implementan ambas; no se excluyen, sino que se complementan entre sí, lo que permite al mapeador verificar los desplazamientos no solo con trazas GPS, sino utilizando un método de alineación alternativo.

Cada objeto en la base de datos OSM tiene coordenadas (en grados en la proyección WGS84/EPSG:4326), una fecha de creación, un autor y una descripción, que ayudan a determinar la aplicabilidad y la cobertura de un desplazamiento.

Es una buena práctica utilizar esta base de datos en nuestro mapeo de cada área. Si te interesa aprender a usar este mecanismo puedes leer: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ES:Imagery_Offset_Database

Some days ago, I searched online for a bus route that was supposed to be newly introduced to go from Kilkenny to New Ross. I didn’t find it, but I found another one which pleased me even more which goes from Kilkenny to Fiddown (ref=891). The reason it pleases me is that the other route is already partly covered by another bus company and I don’t really need it, and the 891 covers a route that goes past several historical sites and at least two hiking routes. Since I don’t drive, I will certainly avail of it myself. I don’t mind organizing myself lifts, and I enjoy the company of my “drivers”, but sometimes it’s good to be more independent. For context, the bus route started on January 20th 2025.

Street-level imagery

So I decided to track it, because I don’t really trust Transport for Ireland’s route maps, and I can’t be sure that they didn’t use proprietary map material to provide the routes online, even though their background map is OSM. But I have seen routes on their website which they seemed to have taken out of thin air which had nothing to do with the actual route the bus takes.

From the bus schedule, I had a fair idea of where the bus was going to go, and I had travelled most of the roads already and captured street-level-imagery, but I thought it would be no harm to do it again. Of course, that is a bit tricky on the bus, and I couldn’t ask the driver to leave the GoPro Max on the roof of the bus. I had brought the magnetic foot, but turns out, there is very little plane metal space on the bus. So the setup was a bit wobbly, but it worked. It only swayed in the bendier bends.

It’s partly held in place by my bag:

I was sure it was gonna crash at some point, especially with some of the bumpier rural roads, but it didn’t.

This is the sequence where I had least coverage before.

The battery lasted just about long enough.

As usual, I uploaded to Mapillary first and then to Panoramax. I might have forgotten to change the viewpoint angle on the Mapillary imagery… At least on Panoramax, I could go in and change it later.

Drive-by mapping

Speed limits and road ref numbers

A project I’m working on at the moment is adding maxspeed to the rural roads. On February 7th 2025, a directive from the Department for Transport lowered the speed limit on the “local rural roads” (the ones where the reference number starts with L and those without any reference number, I presume - I’m still waiting for a reply from the Department for Transport) from 80 km/h to 60km/h. If you’ve ever driven on one of those, you’ll wonder how anyone in their right state of mind would even attempt to go at 80 km/h, but that was the law. We’re (OSM) still missing a lot of the L numbers nationwide, because of course, the government is not able to provide them as open data, that would be too easy. So, that was one of the things I looked out for - missing L numbers. It would have saved me a lot of frustration, if they were displayed closer to the junction in OSMAnd, but I had to long-click on everyone of them where it wasn’t displayed to see whether it was already mapped or not. I also added notes for missing speed limit signs, even where they wrongly still displayed 80 km/h. I mapped those on the desktop PC without the wrong speed limit, just to know where the traffic signs are for later reference and to be able to split the highway at the correct location. I’m also not quite sure how to map speed limit signs which have different speed limits on the front and back, bc I can’t use direction then.

Bus stops

I used OSMAnd for tracking the routes, adding notes and adding the odd POI (post boxes, defibs, wayside shrine etc).

When I got on the bus, I asked the bus driver to point out where the new bus stops are, because I did not expect bus stop signs for most of them. #Ireland #experience He said I was right, because it was “a new bus route”. Sure, that makes sense. We wouldn’t want people to know where the bus stops are to promote the route and establish sustainable routines, would we?

Anyways, some locations are therefore also only estimates, because he didn’t slow down, and just told me the name of the place in passing. Someone will have to re-survey in about a year, when there is a slightly better chance of bus stop signs, but I have my doubts that they will ever come. As a Canadian friend put it, “oral tradition is still very strong in Ireland”.

The “highlight” of the trip was an unscheduled excursion into the bus depot, because the heating on the bus wasn’t working, and the gaggle of bus drivers (four at some point on the bus) thought it would help to add water somewhere. It didn’t. So, four hours at about 8°C. The sacrifices we make for the general good. But the bus depot is mapped now which one would not locate from the street.

Here’s the route, if anyone is interested.

construction

I also spotted a couple newly built or under construction houses for which I also left notes. Most of them are not visible on the outdated aerial imagery yet, so I drew estimates and left fixmes.

Addresses

I think I spotted one house number and three house names which I added to the map. Because, unlike in other countries like Lithuania or the Netherlands, the government also doesn’t publish open address data. Do I sound frustrated? That’s because I am.

I think in total, I left 7 pages of notes: Notes by b-unicycling.

All in all, I’m glad to report that I was not the only passenger on the bus; there was a bus driver in training and for most of the journey, there were one to four other people with me. The word has spread already, it seems.

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.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, please setup and configure a Oracle Cloud instance for mapillary tools. Please refer to this guide for instructions on how to accomplish this.

Uploading a 360 video to Mapillary on Oracle Cloud instance from ARM computer

1. Login to Oracle Cloud Instances.
2. Select your Mapillary instance configured from this guide.
3. On the top bar, click Start to boot your instance and note any public IP address changes.
4. Open Terminal and SSH into your Oracle instance.
   • ssh -i ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)] opc@[IP Address copied from Oracle]
5. Open a second terminal window and copy files from your local machine / SD card / elsewhere to your Oracle instance. This will place the file into the folder on your instance you created during configuration.
   • scp -i ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)] [/path/to/local/360/file] opc@[IP Address copied from Oracle]:~/mapillary
6. Wait for these file(s) to transfer to the Oracle instance and switch back to the instance terminal window. Upload the transferred files to Mapillary.
   • mapillary_tools process_and_upload ~/mapillary/*.360
7. Wait for the upload(s) to complete. Delete the files off the instance and gracefully exit the instance.
   • rm ~/mapillary/*.360 && exit
8. Return to Oracle dashboard on the web, select Stop from the top bar to stop the instance from running while not in use.

Tools Used

• GoPro MAX 360 Camera
• SD Card
• SD Card Reader
• Raspberry Pi 4
• Internet Connection

See also

• How to upload a video to Mapillary via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using this configuration.

Installation & Configuration

1. Open terminal.
2. Create a hidden ssh directory and a directory to store your keys for this setup.
   • mkdir ~/.ssh && mkdir ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys
3. Open a web browser and navigate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
4. Login to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
5. Navigate to Compute > Instances in the hamburger menu.
6. On the left panel, select compartment name you chose during signup if not automatically applied.
7. Select Create Instance from the center panel of the screen.
8. Fill in the following settings:
   • Name: “Mapillary”.
   • Placement: use default values.
   • Security: use default values.
   • Image & Shape:
     1. Click edit on the right hand side of Image & Shape panel.
     2. Under Shape click Change shape.
     3. Use the following settings:
        • Instance Type: use default values.
        • Shape Series: Specialty and previous generation.
        • Image: VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro
     4. Choose Select Shape on the bottom of the dialog box.
   • Primary VNIC Information: use default values.
   • Add SSH Keys: IMPORTANT: Download Private and Public keys.
   • Boot Volume: use default values.
   • Block Volumes: use default values.
   • Live Migration: use default values.
9. On the bottom of the page, select Create.
10. Wait for the status on the left to turn green and say “RUNNING”.
11. Under Instance Access, click copy or copy the public IP address provided.
12. Return to the terminal and move your downloaded keys to your specific folder created earlier, and change permission level for your private key.
    • mv ~/Downloads/[your private & public keys] ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/ && chmod 600 ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)]
13. Test your ssh connection to Oracle. When prompted to continue, type yes.
    • ssh -i ~/.ssh/oracle_mapillary_keys/[your private key (not .pub)] opc@[IP Address copied from Oracle]
14. Update pip and install mapillary tools. Limit to no cache due to low RAM on this configuration.
    • pip3 install –user –no-cache-dir –upgrade pip && pip3 install –user –no-cache-dir mapillary_tools
15. Add local bin to PATH.
    • echo ‘export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin’ >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc
16. Optionally: verify Mapillary is installed.
    • mapillaary_tools --version.
17. Authenticate your Mapillary account with your username, email, and password.
    • mapillary_tools authenticate
18. Create a Mapillary folder on your Oracle instance.
    • mkdir -p ~/mapillary

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 ecosystems. From the early days of GeoParquet 1.0 to today’s native Parquet support, this progress demonstrates the power of open-source community action.

What’s Changing with GeoParquet 2.0

The GeoParquet initiative has always aimed to make geospatial data “boringly interoperable.” With Parquet and Iceberg now supporting geometry types natively, GeoParquet is entering its next phase.

• GeoParquet 1.0/1.1: Parquet files with additional metadata to “label” geometries/geographies

• GeoParquet 2.0: Regular Parquet files utilizing native GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY data types

Recommendations for Implementation

While native support represents the future of geospatial data storage, adoption will take time. We recommend:

• Continuing with GeoParquet 1.1 for production systems until tools fully support Parquet’s native geospatial types. A few pioneer implementations have started.

• Planning for eventual migration to GeoParquet 2.0

• Following our upcoming migration guides and best practices and some discussions on exact differences between versions. In an ideal world we would make Geoparquet 2.0 files also be compatible with 1.1 and 1.0, stay tuned for that.

What’s Next for the Spec?

While achieving native geospatial type support is a significant milestone, our work isn’t finished. Our immediate focus areas include:

• Developing best practices for GeoParquet 2.0 implementation

• Creating clear transition guidelines from previous versions

• Establishing standards for CRS handling and performance optimization

• Continuing outreach and advocacy for widespread adoption

Beyond Vector Data

This is just the beginning of modernizing geospatial data storage. We’re already looking ahead to other types of geospatial data such as raster, point cloud, spatial indexes…

The journey to truly integrated geospatial analytics continues, but with GeoParquet 2.0, we’ve taken a major step forward. Stay tuned for more updates and guidance as we work toward making geospatial data a natural part of every analytics stack. And if you’d like to be more involved we’ll be working in the GeoParquet GitHub repo. We also run bi-weekly meetings on advancing geospatial in Parquet, Iceberg and Arrow, just join the geoparquet-community group and you’ll be added to the calendar. And we’re also starting up a meeting for implementors of geospatial in Iceberg to share best practices and work through any issues.

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.

Researchers used four years of measurements from a deep space satellite to calculate the average monthly heights of Saharan dust clouds.

The post Deep Space Mapping of Saharan Dust Height appeared first on Geography Realm.

So I recently started working on adding the features of a local high school into a relations group, but after looking at the docs, I’m not sure I’ve properly understood when or how relations should be used. Could somebody help clarify this?

Summary thread

Post by @[email protected]

View on Mastodon

When and where?

Geomob Berlin took place at 18:00 on Wednesday the 12th of February, 2025 at Fora - Pressehaus Podium, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 29A, 10178 Berlin (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap). Nearest stops are Alexanderplatz and Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.

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:

• Christian Wygoda, Sensor Tasking API Spec (at SatVu)

• Javier Jimenez Shaw, Measuring distances in maps.

• Henrik Schönemann, GIS meets Gedenkstätte

• Jonathan Gat, USE-IT maps

• Riccardo Klinger, The Great German Data Treasure Hunt

Want to speak at a future event? Volunteers needed.

The organizers:

Geomob Berlin is organized by Peter Rose and Ed Freyfogle

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Well, I’ve just discovered that anybody can edit like it’s wikipedia. So instead of doing homework, I’ve spent several hours fixing little things in my hometown. This is fun.

npm install leaflet react-leaflet @types/leaflet import ‘leaflet/dist/leaflet.css’; import { MapContainer, TileLayer, GeoJSON } from ‘react-leaflet’;

<MapContainer center={[39.8283, -98.5795]} zoom={4} style={{ height: ‘400px’, width: ‘100%’ }} >

<GeoJSON data={stateGeoJSON} style={stateStyle} onEachFeature={onEachFeature} /> </MapContainer>

I used this query in overpass turbo:

[out:xml][timeout:25];
// fetch area “Kildare” to search in
{{geocodeArea:County Kildare}}->.searchArea;
// gather results
(way["highway"="tertiary"]["maxspeed"="80"](area.searchArea);
way["highway"="unclassified"]["maxspeed"="80"](area.searchArea);)->.roads;

// print results
(.roads;>;); out meta;

and loaded it directly into Josm, then replaced 80 with 60, and added maxspeed:type=IE:rural as suggested on the talk-ie list, which I hope will make the difference between “rural” local roads, and those at the edge of urban areas, obvious.

I couldn’t find any exceptions listed by Kildare County Council, so I’m reasonably confident I shouldn’t have scooped up any inappropriately, but do shout if I’m wrong.

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

Hydroclimate whiplash - the rapid swing between drought and heavy precipitation - plays a role in the increasing intensity of California wildfires.

The post Hydroclimate Whiplash: the Impact on California Wildfires appeared first on Geography Realm.

Nesse video venho mostrar como instalar um novo estilo de pintura chamado coloured street e suburb.

Estilo de Pintura Coloured_Suburb; https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Styles/Coloured_Suburb

Estilo de Pintura Coloured_Streets: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Styles/Coloured_Streets

Link do Video.

https://youtu.be/PvxDmmCBr5Y

Contato por E-mail: [email protected]

UMBRAOSM - UNião dos Mapeadores Brasileiro do Openstreetmap www.umbraosm.com.br

Veja nesse video como instalar um plugin no Editor Josm e começar a mepear Edificações de forma muito mais rapida e facil.

link do Video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6vVhAC4BKo

UMBRAOSM - União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap www.umbraosm.com.br

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.

Mapeando um limite de bairro no Openstreetmap com dados do Senso-2022.

Como mapear um limite de Bairro no Openstreetmap com a camada personalizada de fundo do senso2022.

O IBGE disponibilizou os dados de limites de bairros que pode ser usado para o mapeamento no openstreetmap, porem precisamos primeiro personalizar a camada de limite de Bairros do IBGE para que possa mapear no openstreetmap.

nesse video mostro como criar uma camada personalizada com os dados do senso-2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKytB2F28A

Para baixar a camada de fundo personaliza que foi usada nesse video, você pode baixar nesse link. https://projeto.softwarelivre.tec.br/s/jdoPGWyTysPGyFa

Link do Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTe-1N2QvLY&t=16s

UMBRAOSM

União dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap

para entrar em contato conosco, nosso e-mail: [email protected] , nosso site: www.umbraosm.com.br

My End Goal: Have all the ferries in the world listed in the best possible way on Openstreetmaps!

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 UC and GeoINT. Both are incredible events, but Esri UC controls their guest list (as they should…) and GeoINT is very focused on defense and intel (as it should…). I think a third would go beyond ‘GIS’ and beyond the strong core military-oriented use cases that do provide the core economic engine for the industry today. It’d be a big tent that is welcoming of anyone working with geospatial data on any use case, at any scale, with any tool.

The first CNG Conference will be the biggest Cloud Native Geo event ever, but it will not be a huge affair, and it’s really important that we ‘sell it out’ and demonstrate the momentum to get to larger venues and larger sponsors for the next few years. And I believe it’s going to be an awesome gathering of all types of people who like to nerd out on solving real world challenges with geospatial data and insights. You’ll certainly learn some new stuff, and make connections that you’ll likely reap rewards from for years. The cloud-native communities are a collection of tribes working on related problems, and this is going to be the first true in person gathering that combines the different tribes, to borrow from how FOSS4G is often described. FOSS4G is one of my favorite conferences, and my hope is we can get that same energy, but expand from open source software to be inclusive of any commercial software, and also to be more centered around data (and standards).

So please, buy your ticket soon and join us! And don’t worry if you’re not already deep in Cloud-Native Geospatial, or even barely know what it is, as a major goal is to help everyone learn. One of the three primary tracks is ‘On-ramp to Cloud-Native Geospatial Data’.

There’s a great line-up of speakers, with more coming. And if you want to give back ‘more’ than just attending, please apply to present and share successes you’ve had with Cloud Native Geo. If you work for or lead in an organization that has benefitted from CNG then please try get them to sponsor. There are a number of benefits your organization gets from sponsoring, and not just at the event — it also comes with commercial membership to Cloud Native Geo Forum. This gets 8 individual memberships to CNG, plus a blog post on CNG website, and a speaking slot at an event. And I’m pretty sure if they come in as sponsors soon then that spot will be at the CNG Conference. It will be a great opportunity for your products/work to reach an influential audience, in a vendor-neutral environment. If you need any help convincing your organization to sponsor feel free to get in touch — I’m happy to help.

I’m excited about how this event will build momentum for the CNG Forum. It’s a consolidation of this movement into a bit more of a formal structure, with a great mission:

The vision is to make geospatial data easier to access to use, and to grow the resources being invested to make that happen. It’s all under the Radiant Earth non-profit (501(c)3), which means that all revenue from membership and the conference (after covering costs) goes back into strengthening the community, bringing people together more, and fulfilling the vision.

So please buy your ticket, join the CNG forum, present and/or sponsor. It will make a real difference, and I promise it will be a valuable and fun time in Utah.

Aggiunte:

• le nuove corse della linea 19 prolungate da piazza della Libertà a Barcola

• linea 19/ tra largo Barriera e Barcola

• rimossa la 20 (sperimentazione precedente)

per maggiori informazioni visita il sito tpltrieste.it

Exploring the Capabilities of NLT's IMPACT Platform

New Light Technologies (NLT) is on its way to attend  Geo Week 2025 at the Denver Colorado Convention Center from February 10th through 12th. As an exhibitor, NLT will showcase its cutting-edge IMPACT platform—a robust tool designed to enhance disaster management and incident response. Visitors to Geo Week can find NLT at booth 507, where they’ll have the opportunity to explore the platform's capabilities firsthand.

30/01/2025-05/02/2025

Mapping

• Requests for comments have been made on this proposal:
  • traffic_sign:id=* to explicitly reference official traffic sign identifiers, improving data accuracy and interoperability with external databases.

Mapping campaigns

• AE35 has announced that OpenStreetMap Denmark’s Mapping Project of the Month for February 2025 will focus on bench mapping. To support participants, 15 grants of 100 DKK are available for refreshments on a first-come, first-served basis. To claim a grant, mappers can email soren DOT johannessen AT gmail DOT com with their MobilePay number and OpenStreetMap username.
• After five years of work, OSM mapper Ottwiz has completed mapping West Virginia’s forest landcover and is now shifting focus to Pennsylvania.

Community

• YouthMappers UFRJ Chapter (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) highlighted their main achievements since its creation and extended an invitation to participate with its vibrant mapper community.
• Anne-Karoline Distel recapped her mapping contributions made while touring the Netherlands with a band (we reported earlier). Using a GoPro Max, she captured 360° imagery along motorways and concert venues, significantly improving the coverage on Panoramax. She also mapped thatched buildings, defibrillators, and backstage amenities in theatres, adding missing shops, streetlights, and other details. Despite the limited daylight, Anne-Karoline ranked number 56 in Dutch OSM contributions.
• Anne-Karoline also announced that the OpenStreetMap Ireland community has successfully completed the Dundalk mapping project.

Local chapter news

• Matthew Whilden has released his candidate statement for the upcoming OSM US Board 2025 election.

Events

• You can participate in the selection of a SotM LatAm2025 logo by participating in the OSM Community forum survey before Wednesday 12 February.

Education

• Emilie Lerigoleur, from the Géographie de l’Environnement research group at the Université de Toulouse II (France), highlighted ► the potential of uMap in the training of geographers and the visualisation of scientific data. You can access some learning resources and start to map with uMap.

OSM research

• Zhang and other authors published a paper in the International Journal of Digital Earth, tracking individual OSM mappers’ trajectories of editing behaviour. The paper concluded that OSM has been self-sustaining so far and does not yet show any signs of decline, along with the finding that most contributors transition to a higher career stage within a month, a conclusion that may cause more than one raised eyebrow.
• Scholz and other authors have written a paper on investigating the potential of using OpenStreetMap data to understand exposure and vulnerabilities to climate-related hazards of Sudan’s most vulnerable populations, such as internally displaced persons or refugees displaced by violent conflict.

Maps

• Cayenne has tooted a map illustrating the percentage of fibre to the home eligibility coverage by department in metropolitan France for the third quarter of 2024. The map was created using QGIS, combining data from ARCEP, France’s telecommunications and postal regulator, with a basemap from OpenStreetMap.
• The eu citizen science has an interactive map, developed using OSM, Mapbox and Leaflet, showing research groups and related citizen science initiatives around the world.
• You can see an interesting uMap, created by Alan Grunitzki, showing Xanxerê City’s (Santa Catarina, Brazil) emergency escape routes.
• The United Nations office in Brazil has created ► a map showing its initiatives related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030, using OpenStreetMap data, Mapbox and Leaflet, a powerful JavaScript Library for web map interactivity.

OSM in action

• ^[1] Open Seneca has launched an interactive air quality map for Kigali, Rwanda, providing a visual representation of air pollution levels across the city, with OpenStreetMap data as its basemap. The data was gathered in 2021 through a network of 16 sensors mounted on electric delivery motorbikes, capturing pollution levels during their daily travels.

Software

• The Agence Nationale de la cohésion des territoires has published ► a newsletter describing the advances in using uMap (OSM-fr tool) in the development of a map tool for the French administration. You can also access ► a website to explore the maps generated by the community.
• HeiGIT has recently expanded the ohsome Quality API and its dashboard, adding a new indicator to assess attribute completeness in OpenStreetMap and introducing major upgrades to the functionalities of this Indicator:
  • Multi-Attribute Queries: Assess the completeness of multiple attributes simultaneously, such as comprehensive address information.
  • Custom Attribute Filters: Define complex key-value combinations using and/or logic for more advanced data analysis.

  The code is available on GitHub.

Programming

• Savaş Altürk published on using Panel, DuckDB, and MapLibre for data analytics.
• The OpenStreetMap Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 committee is seeking project ideas and mentors for this year’s event. GSoC provides stipends for students and new open-source contributors to develop OSM-related software. Interested mentors and project contributors can submit their ideas on the OSM Wiki.
• Along with the usual charts, the Plotly library lets you create interactive maps with OSM. The open source graphing library is available for both Python and Javascript and has moved from Mapbox to Maplibre as the rendering engine, while still providing various OSM styles. There is also a tutorial that shows how to render OpenStreetMap tile layers using the Maplibre library.

Releases

• Version 1.5.1 of Baba for Android has been released. It is used to contribute to the Panoramax project and new features include the resumption of recordings interrupted by calls and setting the image orientation.
• Yohan Boniface listed the improvements made to the user experience in the pre-release version of uMap (2.9.0b0).
• TrickyFoxy outlined the new features of their better-osm-org browser userscript, for adding additional functionality to the OpenStreetMap website. This update implements the display of photos associated with StreetComplete notes, and the panoramax=* and wikimedia_commons=* tags. Also added are the display of users’ GPS tracks on the map and when opening notes from StreetComplete. The changesets history page now displays the first comment to a changeset. You can read about the other functions of the script in their other diary entries.

Did you know that …

• … OSM has a feature to allow you to follow other mappers’ edits? The edits of the mappers you are following will appear as a list in your OSM user dashboard.
• … there is a Wiki OSM page that lists some websites and services that use OpenStreetMap, clustered by countries, companies and thematic categories? And that you can help to improve it?

OSM in the media

• The Sydney Morning Herald has highlighted Jake Coppinger’s Better Intersections project (we reported earlier) in a recent article on pedestrian-friendly traffic reforms. Anthony Segaert’s article notes that the push for improved walking spaces gained momentum in 2023 when Coppinger began crowdsourcing a survey to identify the local intersections with the longest pedestrian wait times.
• Les Petites Affiches has published ► an article about OSM, highlighting its advantages and collaborative nature.

Other “geo” things

• Pablo Sanxiao has written [gl] Fina e os mapas, a children’s book about cartography and collaborative maps, with OpenStreetMap being mentioned as an example. The book, currently available in Galician and Spanish, can be translated into other languages from its GitHub repository.
• PetaPixel reported on safety concerns surrounding GeoSpy, an AI tool capable of pinpointing a photo’s location by analysing its visual elements.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Wien	73. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2025-02-06
Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris		2025-02-06
Guadalajara	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise and Fernando Feria		2025-02-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-02-07
København	OSMmapperCPH		2025-02-09
Grenoble	Atelier de février du groupe local de Grenoble		2025-02-10
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #73		2025-02-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2025-02-11
	Meeting preparing the creation of the Catalan Association of the OSM		2025-02-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2025-02-12
	Mappy Hour: State of the Map US Info Session		2025-02-13
Richmond	MapRVA Meetup		2025-02-14
Bochum	Bochumer OSM-Treffen		2025-02-13
Moers	I Love Free Software Day Community-Hackday vom 14. – 16. Februar 2025 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2025-02-14 – 2025-02-16
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2025-02-15 – 2025-02-16
東区	State of the Map Japan 2024		2025-02-14
	Panoramax monthly international meeting		2025-02-17
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng]		2025-02-18
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2025-02-18
Arlon	Réunion Province de Luxembourg		2025-02-18
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-02-19
Bonn	185. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2025-02-18
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	✓	2025-02-18
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2025-02-19
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-02-19
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2025-02-19

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

La France est un des rares pays dans le monde à utiliser les relations associatedStreet. Utiliser les relations nécessite de mettre en place des règles de contrôles qualité pour assurer un fonctionnement optimal lors de la réutilisation des données par des outils tiers notamment les GPS.

Des contrôles existent déjà dans JOSM, Osmose et Pifomètre:

• https://osmose.openstreetmap.fr/fr/issues/open?item=xxxx&source=409876
• https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Help/Preferences/Validator
• https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Rules/FranceSpecificRules
• https://bano.openstreetmap.fr/pifometre/adresses_osm_sans_rue.html

Je vous propose quelques requêtes Overpass qui vous permettront d’améliorer les relations associatedStreet dans votre région (les requêtes sont compatibles avec le chargement de données dans JOSM depuis Overpass Turbo):

• Rechercher toutes les relations associatedstreet (au lieu d’associatedStreet)

[out:xml][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:Ain}}->.searchArea;
relation["type"="associatedstreet"](area.searchArea);
(._;>;);
out meta;

Lien Overpass Turbo

• Rechercher toutes les relations associatedStreet sans tag name

[out:xml][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:Ain}}->.searchArea;
relation["type"="associatedStreet"][!"name"](area.searchArea);
(._;>;);
out meta;

Lien Overpass Turbo

• Rechercher toutes les relations associatedStreet qui ont un rôle spécifique (potentiellement une faute de frappe ou un rôle invalide, à récupérer dans la liste disponible sur taginfo)

[out:xml][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:Ain}}->.searchArea;
relation["type"="associatedStreet"](if:count_by_role("strteet") > 0)(area.searchArea);
(._;>;);
out meta;

Lien Overpass Turbo

• Rechercher toutes les relations associatedStreet dont au moins un membre n’a pas de rôle

[out:xml][timeout:25];
{{geocodeArea:Ain}}->.searchArea;
relation["type"="associatedStreet"](if:count_by_role("") > 0)(area.searchArea);
(._;>;);
out meta;

Lien Overpass Turbo

Bon jardinage

About Me

I have been a member of OpenStreetMap US for five years, engaged in fostering open data and community collaboration. My first experience with OpenStreetMap was while working in emergency management in 2010 when the Haiti earthquake occurred. As someone trained in disaster response, I watched the events in Haiti unfold and looked for ways to contribute. It was also my gateway into other open data & software communities, such as QGIS and OSGeo, which informed my educational approach during my time at the University of Arizona Libraries.

I helped host the first MappingUSA virtual conference and, in 2022, hosted the State of the Map US conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson, marking the first in-person gathering post-COVID. I currently work at Development Seed, an organization with a long-standing commitment to OpenStreetMap. I drive our team’s community strategy by supporting OpenStreetMap events and engaging with other open geo communities. My background in geospatial technology, open data advocacy, and community engagement equips me with a unique perspective to support and strengthen OSM US.

Advancing OSM US

OpenStreetMap is more than just a map—it is a platform for civic engagement, education, and open collaboration. As a board member, I would focus on:

• Strengthening Educational Initiatives: While I was at the University of Arizona, I benefitted from the work of people who are part of TeachOSM and YouthMappers. I was the only geospatial specialist at the Library, where I taught workshops, developed learning materials, and consulted with researchers on geospatial data and tools. OSM is a fantastic resource for engaging students in geography, technology, and their local communities. I want to see OSM US build more tools and resources that make it easier for educators to bring OSM into the classroom and would work to implement a plan for growth in this area.

• Expanding Government Engagement: OpenStreetMap is gaining traction among state and local governments for data use and contributions, particularly through the Public Domain Map initiative. I want to strengthen these partnerships to ensure OSM continues to serve as a critical public resource. I would work with the OSM US team to further develop the strategy around government engagement.

• Connecting with the Global OSM Community: As one of the larger local OSM chapters, it is essential for OSM US to engage meaningfully with the global OpenStreetMap community. Strengthening these ties will allow us to learn from and contribute to the broader OSM ecosystem. I have existing connections to active contributors in Latin America and Europe.

• Exploring Opportunities with Other Open Data Communities: I am particularly interested in how OSM US can collaborate with other open data initiatives to build a stronger, more resilient network. We can ensure mutual benefit, reinforce shared values, and create a more impactful open data ecosystem by working together.

What I Bring to the Board

My career has been dedicated to making geospatial data more accessible and actionable. As the Technical Communications Lead at Development Seed, I help translate complex geospatial technology and tools into information that empowers users. Previously, I worked in academia, leading geospatial literacy initiatives and organizing GIS-focused events to connect students, researchers, and practitioners. I have also worked in emergency management and disaster response, where I saw firsthand the importance of open data in crisis situations. My strengths lie at the intersection of technology, community, and communication. I love helping non-technical users engage with geospatial data and believe that OSM US should continue to invest in making OpenStreetMap as accessible and inclusive as possible. If elected to the board, I will advocate for OSM US to grow as a leader in open data, education, and government engagement, ensuring our map remains a dynamic and valuable public resource. I would be honored to serve and look forward to collaborating with the OSM community to build a stronger, more connected, and impactful OpenStreetMap US.

More about me on LinkedIn

Como criar uma camada de fundo personalizada de limite de bairro para o mapeamento no openstreetmap em qualquer estado do Brasil com os dados do Senso-2022 que o IBGE disponibilizou recentemente.

Link do Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKytB2F28A

link para baixar o arquivo de limite de bairro, site do IBGE. https://www.ibge.gov.br/geociencias/downloads-geociencias.html?caminho=organizacao_do_territorio/malhas_territoriais/malhas_de_setores_censitarios__divisoes_intramunicipais/censo_2022/bairros/shp/UF

2023年から主に埼玉県をマッピングをしています大山かなめといいます。

はじめての投稿がこのような話題で気が引けるのですが、ある編集者がミスや誤情報の追加を複数回している場合、どのような対処があるでしょうか。

• 2年以上前に解体され、Esriで更地が確認できる建物を描画している
• ウェイにタグが無いまま送信を行っている（JOSMではバリデーションされない？）
• 変更セットのコメントに誤った市名を書いている（坂戸市や川越市にも関わらず、川口市と書いているなど）

問題のある変更セットには議論機能で指摘を行っていますが、古いため通知が行かないのか反応されないことがしばしばあります。

メッセージを送る機能を使うのが最善でしょうか？

About Me

Hey folks! I’m Gregory Power (they/them) and I’ve been a part of the map since November 2023. I am currently a Data Scientist (Contractor) for Cary, North Carolina—where I manage Cary’s Open Data Portal and other analytics infrastructure. In my spare time I enjoy learning about urban planning and equitable, multimodal infrastructure. I’m also involved with the Pedestrian Working Group, Government Working Group, and my community’s Strong Towns chapter. I enjoy contributing to the open source geospatial software community, with a soft spot for GDAL, QGIS, GRASS GIS, and DuckDB—so everyone can have the tools to understand the world around them. Even though there’s a great set of tools for us to use, it’s nothing without having an open ecosystem of data.

My Mapping

My first project in OpenStreetMap was tracing plans for Cary’s Downtown Park into OpenStreetMap. With the updated layout, Cary’s Integration and Development Team could have a basemap to put our sensor data on. Once I realized OpenStreetMap data was used by all of our applications across the town and beyond, I was hooked. I enjoy mapping multimodal transportation infrastructure, handicapped parking, and restaurants. I’ve trained team members on conducting field surveys with StreetComplete and captured street imagery with Mapillary.

As a Board Member

It’s important that communities have access to data and the ability to make changes to increase the fidelity of the data. These are the objectives I’d prioritize:

• Outreach to disenfranchised communities. I think this is important, because the OpenStreetMap project and ecosystem gives folks the opportunity to map what is important to them. Its barrier to entry is lower than any desktop geospatial software can provide through its rich ecosystem of tooling and sister projects like OpenHistoricalMap.
• Outreach to government organizations. OpenStreetMap has become the de facto source of geospatial data for many applications and data products. Geospatial departments and their communities can work together to increase the quality of the map. Over the past year I’ve enjoyed seeing municipalities such as Kendall County, Illinois be a model of what data stewardship looks like. Sharing that story with other municipalities may inspire others to do the same. Providing an on-ramp for organizations on how to be team players in the OpenStreetMap community would be beneficial.
• Encourage collaboration across working groups. I’ve enjoyed participating across the Pedestrian and Government working groups. However, the most enriching conversations I’ve had are when I get to hear updates and presentations from members of other working groups. I think it’s worth investing time to share approaches to building communities and engagement amongst working groups.

Empowering others to find solutions to their problems fills my cup. OpenStreetMap provides an ecosystem where we can form mutually beneficial relationships. If anyone has any questions or comments, I’d enjoy hearing from you.

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.

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.

The number of OSM-using companies joining the OSM Foundation Corporate Membership program has increased significantly in recent months.

In all, eight new companies joined and five increased their giving levels in 2024.

>> Read more about becoming a Corporate Member of OpenStreetMap

Starting from the top: Long-time OSM supporters, ESRI, Meta and Microsoft have joined TomTom at the Platinum giving level. The Platinum tier is suggested for companies for which map applications are core to their business; and/or they have a product that depends on OSM data and/or revenue in the hundreds of millions.

>> Read more about Meta’s recent generous donation and partnership

Five new names now appear as supporters at the Silver giving level: global gaming and AR company Niantic, QGIS, calimoto, Mapy.cz, and ioki. Silver is recommended for companies who use OSM data in a product or service and have revenue in the millions.

“OpenStreetMap Foundation’s community-driven approach helps keep the map of the world as accurate as possible. As map lovers and builders ourselves, we are excited to help support the OSMF mission” – Yennie Solheim, Niantic Director of Social Impact

E–Smart, which specializes in dynamic speed management, and LANDCLAN, offering location intelligence data and tools, are new joiners at the Bronze level. Interline, a transportation network consultancy, and Verso, a maker of wearable technology both upgraded their membership from Supporter to Bronze.

And Infrageomatics, offering location intelligence derived from open source infrastructure data, has joined as new Supporting member.

The success of OpenStreetMap depends on organizations that make financial contributions, donations “in kind” such as hosting services and other resources, and hardware. These philanthropic investments help ensure site stability, support the maintenance of technical infrastructure, and help sustain OSM’s volunteer community.

The OSM community and the OSMF are extraordinarily grateful for the sustaining contributions of Corporate Members.

The Bhuvan portal, developed by the Indian Space Research Organization’s National Remote Sensing Centre, is powered by OGC Standards and caters to 150,000 unique users per day, achieving an impressive 20 million hits daily.

The post Bhuvan: Transforming India’s Governance with Geospatial Insights appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

This was harder than I thought it would be. The lesson for re-drawing a road was drag-and-drop. I could not insert an extra node in the Administrative Boundary in order to truncate the triangle.

I had to create a new Administrative Boundary and relate it to the existing boundary. Then delete the node at the top of the old boundary.

Requested review as I’m not sure that is the correct or accurate way to perform the task.

Covering an area of about 400 square miles, Tampa Bay is Florida's largest open water estuary.

The post Florida’s Largest Open Water Estuary appeared first on Geography Realm.

We are happy to announce the release of Nominatim 5.0.0. This major release marks the end of a 4-year journey to modernize and modularize the Nominatim codebase in order to make it easier to use and maintain.

This release finishes the mutation of Nominatim into a Python package. The PHP frontend, bundled osm2pgsql and cmake build scripts have now been removed for good. If you are still using one of these features, then you should update your software to Nominatim 4.5 and then move to the new Python frontend and pip installation. Once done, you can easily update to the latest version 5 release.

Also in this release, the osm2pgsql import style configuration has been largely be rewritten. If you are using one of the built-in styles, this will not make much of a difference. If you are maintaining your own custom style, however, this should become much easier. Most notable, it is now possible to start with one of the existing styles and add your customizations on top. That should make it much easier to keep in sync with the latest changes in Nominatim. Have a look at the updated documentation for details. The new implementation is largely backwards compatible, so your old scripts will keep working for now.

With the new osm2pgsql style implementation comes the ability to use Nominatim together with osm2pgsql-themepark. This comes in handy when you want to combine Nominatim with other osm2pgsql flex styles in order to host OSM data for different purposes in the same database. Check out the updated cookbook about how to run Nominatim with osm-carto to learn how to use this feature.

Finally, Nominatim has a new hook for adding pre-processing functions for incoming search queries, allowing to apply custom filtering. The first filter to use this new functionality breaks up Japanese addresses into their parts.

A full list of changes can as always be found in the Changelog.

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 vaccinations both in newspapers and personal narratives from interviews, and compare the (spatial) convergences and divergences between them. 

Abstract:

In the face of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, various government-led initiatives and individual actions (e.g., lockdowns, social distancing, and masking) have resulted in diverse pandemic experiences. This study aims to explore these varied experiences to inform more proactive responses for future public health crises. Employing a novel “big-thick” data approach, we analyze and compare key pandemic-related topics that have been disseminated to the public through newspapers with those collected from the public via interviews. Specifically, we utilized 82,533 U.S. newspaper articles from January 2020 to December 2021 and supplemented this “big” dataset with “thick” data from interviews and focus groups for topic modeling. Identified key topics were contextualized, compared and visualized at different scales to reveal areas of convergence and divergence. We found seven key topics from the “big” newspaper dataset, providing a macro-level view that covers public health, policies and economics. Conversely, three divergent topics were derived from the “thick” interview data, offering a micro-level view that focuses more on individuals’ experiences, emotions and concerns. A notable finding is the public’s concern about the reliability of news information, suggesting the need for further investigation on the impacts of mass media in shaping the public’s perception and behavior. Overall, by exploring the convergence and divergence in identified topics, our study offers new insights into the complex impacts of the pandemic and enhances our understanding of key issues both disseminated to and resonating with the public, paving the way for further health communication and policy-making.

An overview of the research workflow.

The monthly distribution of collected articles in the United States from January 2020 to December 2021.

An example of identified entities labeled with predefined entity types.

The spatial distribution of newspaper articles by different scales.

The spatial distribution of identified newspaper topics across different regions in New York State.

Ordered rank of identified topics by percentage from interviews.

Hello!

I’ve just found out that ~2k out of ~13M relations have no type tag, ~220 of which have the type tag with lifecycle prefix or date namespace suffix, so I’ve decided to review them manually, with the ones with no tags containing the word “type” being the first, correct some mistakes (e.g. missing type=multipolygon) and delete the unnecessary relations (e.g. with duplicate tags). In case I make a mistake, please point it out on OSM Community topic or comment my changesets.

Regards

Kamil Kalata

In the February 2025 edition of our interview series with OpenStreetMap communities around the world, we speak with open source geospatial software and OpenStreetMap veteran Just van den Broecke about the OpenStreetMap Alpumapa Workshop.

1. Who are you and what do you do? What got you into OpenStreetMap?

Just van den Broecke from The Netherlands, a long-time open source geospatial professional. I wrangle geospatial data, a.k.a. ETL, work on geospatial web services like OGC REST APIs, and make maps like map5topo.nl, a topographic map of The Netherlands.

Registered my OSM account ‘justb’ in 2005. Was then mapping inline skate-routes and contributed to hiking for years. Though I was not a very active mapper, I recently revived, also through this project and joining OSM-ES.

2. What is “Mapas y Tapas” in Alpujarra and why did you create it? Who participates?

“Mapas y Tapas” is a free Spanish translation of “Mapping Party”. We are a group, now mainly around Ugíjar, that started from a few workshops. The idea is getting together in any Alpujarra village bar, go out mapping, the “Mapas”. Then reconvene at the bar, discussing results with drinks and “Tapas” (free with every drink in Andalusia).

Why? Several reasons: the Alpujarra or “Las Alpujarras”, a hidden gem in Spain!, is sparsely mapped in OpenStreetMap. Municipalities are attracting digital nomads as one way to counter depopulation. For this, Alpujarra Knowmads was established. Then at least the area needs to be mapped, in particular amenities (bars, shops, opening times…) . Also the well-known commercial map providers have sparse and outdated maps. Another reason is that just after I joined OSM-ES (Telegram) in oct 2024, the DANA storm in Valencia broke out. It appeared that most of the small villages, “pueblos”, around Valencia were poorly mapped, hindering navigation for aid workers. Quickly the OSM-ES community established a HOT project where 100s of mappers worldwide mapped the areas the best they could. DANA hit Málaga and mostly Valencia, the Alpujarra is in between, was lucky this time…And more recently: OSM is a perfect alternative for “Big Tech” maps. I try to convince folks, also non-mappers, to use OSM-based apps like Organic Maps.

Basically anyone participates, young & old, both local Spanish and what we could call immigrants or expats, mostly from Northern Europe, like UK, Denmark, The Netherlands.

3. What are the unique challenges and pleasures of mapping in this region of Spain? What aspects of the projects should the rest of the world be aware of?

There are many pleasures first: being outdoor in magnificent landscapes and lovely, mostly former Moorish, whitewashed villages. Also the fact that there is so much to map makes, let’s say mapping amenities with EveryDoor, you feel accomplishing a lot. I showed before/after maps and results are staggering. Also we have some remote Spanish “armchair mappers” helping out. Also the support from the Spanish OSM community is warm.

Challenges? Well, speaking a bit of Spanish helps. Also convincing older local people. Some areas are really remote, hard to drive with regular cars. And off course: beware of getting burnt from the sun! And please: use the Buildings and Addresses Import Spain procedures to import, i.s.o. drawing buildings on aerial imagery, however tempting. Spanish Cadastre provides open (INSPIRE) data!

The greatest challenge is marketing and communication: how/where to announce, how to keep in touch. Within the region Facebook and Instagram are still a major communication channel for villages. Challenge is also to explain what OSM is about, why it matters for the region. Communication is also often with leaflets and cars with speakers driving around.

4. What have you learned? What is the best way for people to do something similar in their region?

Start super-simple: only with the EveryDoor app. Maybe StreetComplete, though Android-only. Leave Id, JOSM etc for much later. Advantage is: no need to bring a laptop. Also let them install Organic Maps (OM) and do some navigation, share a GPX file and hike together. Record the track with OM.

Also hold regular meetups, maybe once a week, on a fixed time/place, it is very hard to remain momentum. There are many distractions here as the area is also well-known for its informal social networks and every week there is some “fiesta”. But to be honest, “distractions”, is not the right word: the local communities of both Spanish and non-Spanish blend well together, giving experience to a warm and richer social life than many of the big cities and coastal towns.

5. What steps could the global OpenStreetMap community take to help support local mapping like this?

Somehow to have a platform where smaller groups can gather, and where announcements can be made. The OSM-ES Telegram (OSM Forum is hardly used in Spain) group is very welcoming but overwhelming in messages in a single thread, especially to newcomers.

6. Last year OpenStreetMap celebrated 20 years. As someone who has been very active in OSM in many ways for a long time, where do you think the project will be in another 20 years?

That is a very tough question. What we now see is the advance of AI, often uncontrolled. For good and bad this will influence the way we will be mapping. Also the expanding effect of Overture Maps may be beneficial for OSM, but at the same time we need to hold on that OSM remains the central source/project. The last few months, at least within The Netherlands, there is an enormous movement to “Big Tech Alternatives”, like X to Mastodon etc. In this OSM is always touted as the alternative for the well-known proprietary providers with apps like Organic Maps, OSMAnd, MagicEarth. If folks figure out: “hey I can add stuff myself”, that may increase the number of mappers. At the same time, we already experience this in Open Source GitHub repos, often AI-driven “vandalism” should be guarded for. But overall, if the OSM Community sticks together, I foresee a bright future ahead!

Thank you, Just! Great work with the mapping and with the community building. Stay up to date on the project and Just by following him on Mastodon, or of course on the Alpumapa site.

Happy mapping,

Ed

Please let us know if your community would like to be part of our interview series here on our blog. If you are or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to promote people doing interesting things with open geo data.

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 scalability, flexibility, and integration with modern cloud ecosystems to meet the growing demands for processing and analyzing spatial data. By adopting cloud-native principles, geospatial applications can take advantage of distributed computing, serverless architectures, high-capacity storage, and managed services offered by cloud providers, reducing operational overhead while improving performance.

Cloud-native geospatial enables the efficient use of large datasets by providing direct access to the section of the data you need without expensive clip operations. Additionally, complex geospatial processes can take advantage of distributed computing architectures, reducing the linear nature of traditional GIS workflows.

Examples of Cloud-Native Geospatial Data Formats

One prominent example of a cloud-native geospatial data format is Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG). COGs are specifically designed for efficient access and use in a cloud environment, allowing users to retrieve only the portions of data they need rather than downloading entire files. This makes them ideal for handling large raster datasets, such as satellite imagery or digital elevation models.

Another widely adopted format is Zarr, which is commonly used for multidimensional array data. Zarr enables parallel and random-access data reading, making it particularly suitable for large-scale climate and weather datasets. Combined with cloud storage, Zarr allows researchers and professionals to collaborate on complex analyses without managing extensive, localized data copies. Parquet and GeoParquet are examples of cloud-native formats that simplify working with tabular geospatial data. Column-based storage - instead of the row-based approach of traditional GIS file formats - provides efficient compression, and these formats are well-suited for fast access and analysis of large vector datasets, including geometries and attribute tables. These formats, among others, help to optimize geospatial workflows for cloud architectures, promoting efficiency, interoperability, and innovation.

How to use Cloud-native geospatial formats in your GIS solution.

Integrating cloud-native geospatial formats into your GIS solution starts with selecting the appropriate tools and frameworks that align with your needs. Fortunately, many widely-used GIS platforms like ArcGIS and QGIS already support cloud-native formats because core geospatial libraries such as GDAL, geopandas, and R’s raster package support COG, Zarr, and GeoParquet. As support for cloud-native formats continues to grow, more GIS platforms will likely adopt these formats, allowing seamless integration of cloud-based data into your workflows, enabling you to take full advantage of the scalability and accessibility provided by cloud storage.

For example, when working with COGs, GDAL can access only the required portions of the images for your workflow rather than downloading full images, significantly reducing bandwidth and computation costs. Similarly, tools like Zarr-Python or xarray are excellent options for handling Zarr-formatted multidimensional datasets, offering powerful data analysis and visualization capabilities in cloud-centric environments. Zarr is also supported as a multi-dimensional raster format in ArcGIS.

Another critical step is configuring your GIS infrastructure to use cloud storage services effectively, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. These platforms offer APIs and SDKs for streamlined integration, making it easier to incorporate them into geospatial workflows to manage and process large datasets in real-time. Using cloud-based object storage enables the use of compute resources in the cloud, which can decentralize your geospatial workflows and offload complex processing that can tax traditional desktop and server resources.

Adopting these practices enables you to fully leverage the capabilities of cloud-native geospatial formats, ensuring that your GIS solution remains well-positioned to meet the dynamic requirements of modern geospatial applications.

What database technology supports Cloud-Native Geospatial formats?

Several database technologies are well-suited for supporting cloud-native geospatial formats, providing efficient querying, storage, and spatial data analysis. PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extension is a widely recognized solution, offering robust support for geospatial data types, functions, and compatibility with formats such as GeoJSON and WKT. While GeoPackage can be imported and exported using tools integrated with PostGIS, full compatibility may require additional processing. The Crunchy Bridge for Analytics also enables direct access to cloud-native formats using PostgreSQL.

Cloud-native query platforms such as Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL-compatible), Google BigQuery, Snowflake, and Azure Cosmos DB deliver scalable solutions for analyzing geospatial data, often integrating seamlessly with cloud storage systems. These platforms offer native support for specific geospatial data types and functions, making them particularly suitable for modern geospatial applications.

For large-scale geospatial data processing, joins, and operations in distributed environments, technologies like Apache Spark, with geospatial add-ons such as Apache Sedona (formerly GeoSpark), are highly effective. Apache Sedona enables parallel processing and advanced spatial analysis, ensuring 10X higher performance for complex queries. Similarly, cloud-native data warehouses or lakehouses such as Databricks (which uses Apache Spark) provide geospatial SQL capabilities, facilitating the analysis of formats like WKT and WKB alongside traditional datasets. The team behind Apache Sedona also offers Wherobots for serverless data warehouse/lakehouse compute built with a distributed computing architecture (Spark+Sedona) for highly optimized geospatial data workloads. DuckDB, while optimized for single-node analytics, also supports geospatial extensions and is ideal for high-performance local analysis.

Selecting the appropriate database technology depends on the application’s specific requirements, including data volume, query complexity, and whether real-time or batch processing is needed. Organizations can build a robust and future-ready foundation for modern geospatial applications by integrating scalable database technologies with cloud-native geospatial formats.

Can Cloud-Native Geospatial Support GeoAI?

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are integral components of the cloud-native geospatial ecosystem. Frameworks such as PyTorch (most popular) and TensorFlow are widely used for geospatial applications, enabling tasks such as predictive modeling, object detection, and land cover classification. These capabilities can provide accurate automated insights, supporting applications in fields like precision agriculture, disaster response, and climate change mitigation.

The diversity and volume of geospatial data products and GeoAI models derived from them can make it challenging to find relevant data products and reproduce model predictions. To address this problem, the cloud-native geospatial community is defining cloud-native data formats and taking the next step to create cloud-native standards for data catalogs and collections. These standards make it easier to search and associate geospatial data and models. The Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification is an industry standard for describing satellite imagery, aerial imagery, lidar, and other types of geospatial data. This standard includes extensions for describing different kinds of assets, including the Machine Learning Model (MLM) specification. The MLM provides searchable metadata that links model artifact files, model input requirements, hardware and runtime requirements, and associations to published STAC datasets to make it easy for machine learning frameworks to reproduce model inference and to make models searchable in model catalogs. You can learn more about the STAC ecosystem of standard and tooling at https://stacspec.org/en.

Cloud-native infrastructure is crucial in advancing GeoAI by enabling scalable and efficient data processing. Platforms such as AWS SageMaker, Google Cloud AI, and Azure Machine Learning facilitate seamless integration of ML workflows with geospatial data. Additionally, cloud-native geospatial formats, such as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) and Zarr, ensure fast and efficient access to large geospatial datasets, reducing the latency associated with traditional data handling, especially when stored in cloud-native object storage.

Beyond predictive modeling and classification, GeoAI is relevant to a wide range of analytical capabilities, including spatial clustering, route optimization, spatial interpolation, viewshed analysis, hot spot analysis, and spatial regression. These capabilities are further enhanced by the parallel processing power and distributed architecture offered by cloud-native technologies, making it possible to handle complex and large-scale geospatial data and workloads efficiently.

Organizations can build robust GeoAI solutions that address diverse and evolving geospatial challenges by leveraging cloud-native geospatial technologies and ML frameworks3.

Get started with Cloud-Native Geospatial.

Cloud-Native Geospatial represents a transformative approach to managing, analyzing, and sharing geospatial data. Geospatial practitioners can achieve greater scalability, efficiency, and collaboration with cloud-based storage, computing, and modern data formats such as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG), Zarr, and GeoParquet. Integrating cloud-native geospatial formats into GIS workflows helps organizations remain flexible and capable of handling the growing demands of modern geospatial applications. With the right tools, infrastructure, and database technologies, cloud-native geospatial enables organizations to streamline operations and drive innovation in the geospatial field.

You can learn about cloud-native geospatial by exploring the Guide to Cloud-Optimized Geospatial Formats. Discover the essentials of cloud-native geo data formats and standards by watching the CNG 101 webinar—an excellent resource for an overview of CNG.

Want to get involved? Join the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) community and become part of the team pushing the envelope to bring cloud-native standards and technology to geospatial!

We are happy to announce that osm2pgsql maintainer Sarah has been selected as one of the fellows for the one-year pilot of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship programme of the Sovereign Tech Agency. The programme recognises and financially supports the significant amount of time that goes into the daily maintenance of an open-source project. Read more about the fellowship in Sarah’s post over at nominatim.org.

I’m happy to announce that I have been selected for the one-year pilot of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship programme of the Sovereign Tech Agency. The fellowship programme will support maintenance of Nominatim, Photon, osm2pgsql and pyosmium over the next year.

Participating in an open-source software project like Nominatim or Photon is not just about the implementation of fancy new features or clever algorithms to improve performance or the user experience. A lot of work happens quietly behind the scene: user questions need to be answered and bug reports followed up. Dependent software needs to be monitored and updated as necessary. The own code needs to be reviewed and polished regularly to prevent it from ageing and slowly falling apart. CI pipelines are a great tool for a maintainer but they do break with an astonishing regularity and therefore need regular attention. Not to mention that a CI is useless without a set of well-maintained tests.

With its new Sovereign Tech Fellowship programme, the Sovereign Tech Agency recognises the importance of this maintenance work for the general functioning of the open source ecosystem. The programme will financially support my day-to-day tasks of software maintainership: responding to issues on Github, reviewing and merging pull requests, fixing reported bugs and addressing security issues, improving documentation and tests, preparing releases etc. On top of that there are some other not so glorious maintenance tasks that are planned for this year.

Nominatim’s import module relies on a datrie library, which has been unmaintained for some years and no longer compiles with the newest GCC compilers. We need to find a solution to that by either switching to a new library or taking over maintenance. A similar fate is likely in store for the testing library behave. With the latest stable release from 2018 and very few activity since, it is unclear how long it will remain functional with new versions of Python.

Photon has seen the move to OpenSearch 8 last year. This transition is far from finished. For example, there is still no proper support for using an external instance of OpenSearch instead of the embedded one. And ElasticSearch/OpenSearch itself has also seen some improvements in the last three versions we have skipped. It’s well worth investigating how geocoding can benefit from them.

These will, of course, not be the only things happening in 2025 for Nominatim and Photon. There will also be shiny new features and I have some ideas for improving performance and how to better handle the increasing complexity of OSM data. However, none of this can really happen, if the basis isn’t there and the general maintenance isn’t cared for.

Many thanks to the Sovereign Tech Agency for this great opportunity and the recognition of the importance of maintenance work for software.

If you want to support development and maintenance of Nominatim, too, please consider becoming a Github sponsor.

Panoramax is a rising star at the moment, for OSM, but not only; while Mapillary goes down, sold to Facebook. In my old www.OSMgo.org, the key P showed a Mapillary picture near the actual position in the 3D rendered OSM world. As the API is gone, I replaced it with Panoramax. OSMgo was abandoned by me years ago but the server is still running. As I read more and more about Panoramax, I decided to dig out the old code and use it. First I asked in the Fediverse for help with the API and got a great and fast response, even a good example, thank you all!



There are almost to much pages about it. The real API was a bit hidden but well documented at last. The Idea of decentralised servers but a central directory is great, the Web-UI to see all pictures to. And the API got me a json list of the closest pictures, including a link to the pictures. After researching to define the radius (place_distance) and get the direction of the “shot” (feature.properties[“view:azimuth”]) my old Mapillary could be modified to show the picture in the 3D view and move the camera to see it.

Try it out

You may note, the controls of OSMgo are nasty. The whole project is outdated and incomplete. I consider to redo it, may be in Rust or Zig; someone interested to join in? One missing feature in OSMgo is roof-types like gabled. There are more OSM 3D renderers and I started to investigate how they solve my obstacles. A compact one is this building viewer Example: US Capitol

Before I will start with a new code, I want to have a detailed definition of how 3D rendering is done in the open source projects: OSMBuilding, OSM2World, plugins for JOSM and Blender. Do you know more There are some points to talk about in the OSM forum, like how to render a dome or an onion, circular or according to the way nodes it is tagged in. The OSM Wiki may get more details/pages. With this knowledge, OSMgo could get some improvements to.

A rust crate may be the next goal. It would take an area of OSM data and create a 3D scene, rather simple or good looking will be controlled by options. That Scene could be send directly to the GPU or stored in GLT-file


Cartopareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing people and animals in maps.

The post Cartopareidolia: Seeing People and Animals in Maps appeared first on Geography Realm.

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.

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 trying to solve. I could never follow those tutorials about ‘making a e-commerce store’ since I just don’t care about making an e-commerce store. I could follow the instructions, and get a generic thing, but I wouldn’t actually learn much. But when I’m trying to solve something specific that I care about it becomes much easier, because I really want the result.

I’m guessing you have some interest in geospatial in general and likely QGIS specifically if you’re reading this post. So the top thing I’d encourage you to do is to think about something you’d like QGIS to do that it doesn’t do for you today. This could just be a common workflow that you do all the time, or it could be some cool new functionality you always wish it had. And if you want to start even easier than just think about some processing of files that doesn’t even use QGIS — doing a basic python program that processes geospatial data with GDAL/OGR or GeoPandas can be even easier than a QGIS plugin.

After I made the GeoParquet downloader QGIS plug-in I had one of the best developers I know reply with a post on bluesky:

I responded that 99.5% was AI-coded — so Matthias still has to believe me when I downplay my coding skills :) I don’t actually write the code, I just instruct the AI what I want it to do. I am learning more, and at this point I perhaps could write more of the code, but I’d rather just get it right the first time than try to memorize the syntax or struggle when I mistype something.

Now, I am not without any coding experience, and I’ll share my background a bit below, so I’m not yet ready to say ‘anyone can make a QGIS plugin’. I do think there is a decent chance that the process of breaking problems down and iterating through debugging is likely a skill I retain that may not come instantly to someone with no coding experience. But I do think if you have a problem you want to solve and you are resilient then you can just use the chat interface to teach you everything you need to know — you just need to keep asking and aim to really understand it. No matter what you’ll learn something, and if it doesn’t work out today I’m confident that it won’t be long until anyone who is motivated can do it.

Since I started writing this article I did get a great proof point on how easy it can be:

My Background

I wanted to share a bit more about my background, and how I have recently started programming again thanks to the power of AI tools. I started my career coding, serving as the first lead developer of GeoServer for a couple of years in 2002, learning a ton from a number of great early members of the GeoTools community — shout outs to Ian Schneider, Gabriel Roldan and Andrea Aime! But after less than two years I realized they were all better software engineers than me, so I (eventually) recruited all of them to work on GeoServer at OpenGeo, and I focused on community building (the fun part) and bringing in money to support the software (the less fun part, but a really essential one).

I found it really hard to do ‘both’, as coding was too fun and satisfying — I know of few other things you can get paid for where the day just flies by. So I cut myself from coding in order to figure out all the other things needed to turn a growing open source project into a successful ‘business’. It ended up being a lot of fun, and I learned a ton, but I did miss the act of creating software. After a few years, when I felt confident in things like ‘product management’, ‘business development’ and ‘managing’, I’d periodically try to code and it’d just be too frustrating. It’d take a couple hours just to get a few lines of barely working code down, as I’d first need to get my coding environment all set up, and then would struggle to remember basic syntax and would need to look up almost every call.

When ChatGPT came out it had been over 20 years since I’d seriously programmed, and I had under two years of total experience coding professionally. My first couple of attempts to use ChatGPT to code didn’t quite work, as it’d just get too much wrong to be worth it. But sometime around GPT-3 I wanted to explore Google Open Buildings & GeoParquet and had my first success. As long as I gave it small, constrained tasks to process the data with GDAL/OGR or GeoPandas it’d do amazing. 75% of the time it’d give me a perfect result, 20% it’d get a bug but you could feed it the error and in 2–3 iterations it’d fix it. And 5% of the time it’d get stuck in a loop, trying to fix things but going back to the previous bad way, which was frustrating. But overall it felt ‘worth it’ and I was able to make far faster progress using it than not. Since then I’ve been taking on more ambitious projects as the LLM’s and tooling around them has improved, and this year I’m aiming to spend at least 50% of my time doing AI-assisted software development.

My Set Up

Before I dig into my experiences building the plugin I first want to share a bit about what tools are working for me, and some ideas and recommendations for how to think about what to use. The first thing I will say is that if you’re coding you should absolutely pay instead of using the free versions. If you’re less experienced with coding then it’s harder to work through things when the LLM doesn’t get things right. And the latest models that you get from paying absolutely get things right more often. It’s hard to put a number on how much better they are, but my feeling is that even if it’s only 10–20% better then it can easily save you hours of frustration, and that having that frustration when you’re getting started can easily turn you off from pushing further. And in my experience it’s more than 20% better.

My primary tool for these types of projects is Cursor. I only discovered it after a number of months successfully coding with ChatGPT, but a number of great coders I work with said it was amazing, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I believe it’s the fastest I’ve gone from starting a free trial to deciding ‘yup, I’m absolutely going to pay for this’ — it was maybe 15–20 minutes. The key feature that moved me to buy is actually different than the one more advanced coders love. It’s the ability to generate ‘diffs’ on the code that is generated by the LLM.

You can see in the right side panel the code that gets generated by an LLM. It’s totally fine if you just take that code and use it, but if there’s a problem or if you want to add something to the code then it gets challenging to use the whole set of code. You either have to copy and paste the entire file each time, or you have to successfully spot every difference and copy over each line right. And in this example the LLM isn’t even generating the full file, you can see it says // ... existing code ... so when that happens you’d need to figure out the right place to insert your new code. Before cursor I had that go wrong enough times that I’d ask the LLM to always generate the entire code, and then would paste the whole thing in each time. But then it’d get unweildly if you had a larger file, and also would slow things down since it’d spend a lot of time reprinting things.

This ability to apply diffs was an absolute game changer in my productivity — you can have confidence that every difference between the new code and the current code is addressed. Now, this isn’t to say that the diffs are always great. Sometimes it messes things up, or redoes things that you don’t want it to redo. But the UI of cursor is such that you can go through each of the diffs and say hit ‘y’ or ’n’ to accept it.

I often will scan each diff to make sure it’s doing what I thought it would. Though often I’ll just apply the whole thing, run the file, see the results, and then just go back to examine the diffs if things didn’t work.

The other killer feature of Cursor, that expert coders love, is the ability to give the LLM the context of your entire codebase, not just the file you’re looking at. The QGIS plugin I made is a single file, so for this project that feature doesn’t matter much, but for my geoparquet-tools project I’m trying to do some better programming practices of splitting things up, and it’s been great for that.

Cursor lets you select from different models, and it’s got access to most of the latest. It doesn’t have the most expensive ones, like o1, and you have some limit for how many calls you get to the latest. But you can enter an API key for your own LLM account if you want to have it use truly the latest models. I actually switched for this project to Claude Sonnet 3.5, and it’s now my go to within Cursor. I can’t say that it’s definitely better — it’s just that 4o was frustrating me and getting things wrong, and when I tried switching the model to Claude it nailed it, and I’ve just stuck with it since. The ‘best’ here is constantly changing, so it’s worth checking out leaderboards (like aider.chat or https://livebench.ai).

And I also will use ChatGPT Plus occasionally. I don’t think it’s essential — if you want to stick with one tool I’d go with Cursor (or Windsurf, which Evan found great success with and it may be even better for those with little experience coding). You can use it’s chat interface to ask questions, just like you would with ChatGPT — you don’t have to have it give you code responses, you can just ask for background, how to do things, etc. For coding stuff I tend to use the o1 model, and I mostly just use it for things were the other models just are looped in bad answers (more about that later). And it can be useful for planning things out and suggesting an overall approach to things.

The explosion of useful tools in this space is incredible, so I imagine there will be some new tool set that’s even better before too long. I plan to re-evaluate every six months or so, but encourage you to just try things out. Just do please pay for one, and you’ll likely have a better experience. Perhaps in a couple years maybe the free tools will be more than sufficient, but that’s not the case right now.

Coding the geoparquet downloader plugin

To be honest my successful coding of this plugin was a bit of a lark. As I mentioned in the previous post I’d been intimidated by QGIS coding — I think I looked into it once before and it was just too many things to learn. So I really wasn’t expecting it to work, as my AI successes in the past had all been on very discrete things, and when I tried to get too ambitious it’d get challenging. But I just asked it to make a plugin, and then asked how I run it to try it out, and it started working.

The key is to never ask for too much — always start small, and just ask for one more thing each time. Sometimes I’d try to ask for many things at once, and it’d get some of them, but then it was a lot more difficult to try to fix the one thing that was wrong, since too many things were introduced at once. So it’s best to just keep asking for tiny little improvements.

To start I just asked for a plugin that popped up a dialog to make sure that worked. I had to ask how to actually install it — you just zip it up and then you can ‘install zip file’ from the extensions folder, or you can copy it directly into the plugins folder. Then I just added more and more — first I hardcoded a specific Overture file to download, and got it so DuckDB ran the query to get it. I had experience with DuckDB so I knew what I wanted from the query, but LLM’s are really great at SQL, so it’s easy to have it form the query for you.

One thing I have learned is that the LLM’s do much, much better on well-established, well-documented tools. SQL is just incredible — I like SQL, but was never great at it, and now I feel like it’s a super power. I can just ask the LLM for all kinds of crazy analysis and it’ll make these complicated joins that do exactly what I want. GDAL/OGR and GeoPandas are both quite good. But often newer features aren’t as solid, as the LLM may have been trained before they became widely documented and used. But you can instruct it about them, usually I just paste the documentation in directly. So if you want to use some totally obscure tool then it can struggle — though always with a positive helpful and confident attitude, it just makes up whatever you want.

But I was pleasantly surprised to find the QGIS plugins is something they all know well. Which makes a lot of sense, as there is a very large ecosystem, so lots of code and documentation for it to learn from. Through out the process it’d come through with good answers to things that I thought it might struggle with. One example was that it become clear that my plugin was taking over the whole program, and QGIS would just stop doing anything else. So I just asked if there was a way to make it so that didn’t happen, and it said that I could run worker threads and then came up with all the code needed for that. I also wanted to open multiple dialogs, links you could click on, and reporting errors out in different ways, and it did all that well. Overall it handled most everything QGIS related with ease.

I will admit that I definitely do not understand most of what’s going on. With my smaller python programs I’d always have a good sense of what was happening in most lines, but the structure of these is more complicated. But the cool thing is that you can just highlight code and ask it to explain it if you want to understand more.

The struggles

My biggest struggles came with getting the dependencies right. DuckDB is essential for everything to work, but it’s not installed in QGIS by default. The QDuckDB plugin did an amazing job packaging things for Windows, so for those users I recommended that they just install QDuckDB, and then I linked to their instructions for other users. For the next release we tried to make it so the plugin would automatically install DuckDB using PIP, and that was definitely my single biggest struggle. Matt Travis, the first outside contributor to the project, coded what looked like a great way to do it. But then it didn’t work on one operating system, so I tried another way, and that didn’t work on mine, and it was just a pain. I’m still not sure what is the ‘ideal’ route for QGIS plugins to get dependencies in, it seems to be that users are asked to manually get their python environments updated.

I would occasionally have the LLM get stuck in a frustrating loop. Usually it’d get the code right immediately, but about 15% of the time it’d generate an error. But the awesome thing is that usually you can just paste in the error that results back into the chat and it’ll realize what is wrong and fix it. But occasionally it’ll give you a fix that won’t work, and you paste the error back in and then its next fix will suggest something different that also doesn’t work. And when you paste those results back in it’ll give you the first fix again. And then it’ll just loop between the two things, getting it wrong each time. I’ve found the best thing to do in this situation is to try another LLM. Cursor makes it easy to just swap in a different model, going between Claude and OpenAI. These days I usually just jump to o1 through ChatGPT Plus, as it very often gets it right — I just paste in my full code and the problem (and right before publishing: o3-mini-high seems even better, and can be called directly from Cursor).

The other way to get out of the loop is to to suggest different approaches to the problem. Sometimes that means going back a few steps and directing it in a different way. Sometimes it means reading up online on other options that people use (I suppose you could also try to ask the LLM for other approaches, I think sometimes that has worked for me). Occasionally I will bug my coder friends, and the nice thing is that usually you just need the name of a different approach from them and the LLM will take it from there.

Come on in, the water’s fine!

So overall the experience of coding my first QGIS plugin was incredibly pleasant. It didn’t all happen ‘automatically’, we’re not (yet) there with these tools, and I suspect they’re most always going to require some guidance and iteration. But the challenges were all surmountable. I think the biggest thing these tools do is really make the learning curve a lot less steep. You’re still going to have to dig in and learn quite a bit, but you get much more immediate positive feedback. More recently I started another plugin and I will admit that it was more of a challenge, and I got seriously stuck for more than two hours, so I suspect there’s still some luck involved to have it be easy.

In the time between writing this and actually posting it I have hit bigger bugs than I have before — one took almost 4 hours to resolve, and the other was almost two hours. It reminded me of the frustrating parts of coding, and is proof that it’s all not magical. But it is so satisfying when you get past one of these bugs. I hope everyone finds early success without hitting frustrating bugs, but at some point you will hit frustrations, and I encourage you to be hard headed and just keep on trying until you get it working.

So I do want to encourage everyone who has read this far to at least try. Get a trial of Cursor or Windsurf and set some time aside. Be sure to start with a problem you actually want to solve, something that will make your life easier. And just keep trying even if at first you don’t succeed, it is currentlye easier than it’s ever been, and that will only improve. It doesn’t have to be QGIS, but it’s a nice platform to build upon. I’m also going to try to record some videos of building a plugin, to help demystify things even more.

If you do build something that’s useful to you then please share the code on GitHub and publish to the QGIS plugin repository. Chances are it might be useful to someone else. I know it can be scary, I still remember the first time my boss told me I needed to push my code to be open source. But honestly no one is looking at your code and judging it — they’re just psyched to have something potentially useful, and psyched that you contributed something positive to the world.

Good luck! And if you want to dive in but don’t have a project that immediatly jumps to mind I do welcome all AI-assisted contributions to my QGIS plugin. I tagged a number of ‘good first issues’ and can easily add more, and am more than happy to offer advice & help to anyone looking to contribute.

Also, if you’re not signed up already do come to the Cloud Native Geo conference in Utah. It’s going to be awesome.

– In English

Trajetória do YouthMappers UFRJ

O capítulo YouthMappers UFRJ é coordenado pela Profa. Dra. Raquel Dezidério Souto (em estágio pós-doutoral) e pelo Prof. Dr. Manoel Fernandes, ambos do Laboratório de Cartografia, da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (GeoCart-UFRJ), tendo sido constituído para desenvolver pesquisas em mapeamento colaborativo com OpenStreetMap e programas relacionados, envolvendo a comunidade, com integrantes internos e externos à UFRJ, residentes no Brasil e no exterior.

A iniciativa faz parte da rede internacional YouthMappers, projeto de longo prazo e abrangência global, fundado por professoras das Universidades do Arizonas e do Texas, com o apoio do USAID (EUA). Atualmente, são mais de 400 grupos, em universidades públicas de todo o mundo.

A temática escolhida para início do desenvolvimento das atividades de mapeamento no estado do Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) é a redução dos riscos e desastres (RRD), com foco nas áreas de risco do estado. Outras temáticas, como o mapeamento de árvores, a avaliação das condições de habitações em áreas de especial interesse social ou o desenvolvimento de aplicações na Web, estão sendo contempladas por nós e nossos parceiros, ainda em estágio de desenvolvimento.

Nessa via, o capítulo YouthMappers UFRJ, em overview, visa desenvolver pesquisas, utilizando dados colaborativos e dados oficiais secundários, como meio de fornecer subsídio informacional para o estado do Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), contribuindo para a tomada de decisão e outras finalidades. E contribuir para o desenvolvimento de outros capítulos YouthMappers no estado do Rio de Janeiro e em outros estados do Brasil.

O capítulo YouthMappers UFRJ faz parte do HUB YouthMappers Rio de Janeiro, consórcio dos capítulos da rede internacional, presentes no estado: UFRJ - UFRRJ - UERJ - UFF Niterói - UFF Campos (situação em: 31-01-2024), coordenado tecnicamente pelo IVIDES.orgⓇ.

🗺 Primeiro projeto de mapeamento: infraestrutura para RRD em áreas de risco do município de Maricá, RJ, Brasil

Mapa das áreas de interesse (AOI) do projeto de mapeamento da infraestrutura para redução de riscos e desastres em Maricá, RJ Brasil. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap. Áreas delimitadas pela Profa. Dra. Alessandra de Freitas (POLI-UFRJ).

Nosso primeiro projeto é voltado ao mapeamento da infraestrutura para redução de riscos e desastres (RRD) no município de Maricá (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil). O município vem sofrendo com episódios de enchentes, movimentos de massa e erosão costeira, devido à ocupação irregular, o avanço em áreas pouco adequadas para localização das moradias, além do aumento da frequência e da intensidade dos eventos desastrosos na região.

No projeto, são utilizadas estratégias colaborativas, como o mapeamento com OpenStreetMap e a criação de mapas Web interativos com uMap, um projeto francês que mantém uma plataforma aberta, on-line, para o desenvolvimento de mapas Web interativos, com hospedagem em nuvem. Sem cobrança de anuidade, sem pedido para incluir add-ons, sem rastreamento do seu IP… utilizando o uMap!

Em pouco tempo… resultados significativos

Captura de tela do MapRoulette. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap.

Para apoiar tecnicamente o capítulo YouthMappers UFRJ, o Instituto Virtual para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável - IVIDES.orgⓇ está incumbido da elaboração de material pedagógico em mapeamento com OpenStreetMap e a realização de treinamentos, além da criação de projetos de mapeamento colaborativo, que permitem o controle das atividades, de modo que não haja mais de um(a) mapeador(a) na mesma área, a fim de preservar os dados, que não são corrompidos. Adicionalmente, os dados são validados, no mesmo projeto disponibilizado, podendo ser configurados níveis de acesso, segundo a experiência dos(as) mapeadores(as): iniciante, intermediário ou avançado, o que evita erros comumente cometidos por iniciantes.

💻 Curso de capacitação em mapeamento com OSM

Captura do mapa do osm.org, com o Brasil no centro. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap.

Um curso completo de Capacitação em mapeamento com OpenStreetMap foi realizado em agosto de 2023, sendo publicado on-line (para aumentar o acesso ao mesmo) e tornado curso de fluxo contínuo (entrada em qualquer época do ano), tendo alcançado 384 inscritos, até 31/01/2025, residentes no Brasil e em países do exterior. O curso permanece on-line, como plataforma de self learning, com a emissão de certificados, a cada seis meses, mediante avaliação satisfatória dos resultados enviados pelos participantes.

💻 Oficinas de mapeamento temático com OSM

Captura da tela do osm.org, mostrando a cobertura vegetal, mapeada no ambiente on-line. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap.

Em 2024, foram promovidas oficinas de mapeamento temático com OpenStreetMap, on-line, cobrindo o mapeamento em diferentes temas, como pontos de interesse (POI), hidrografia, cobertura vegetal, feições relacionadas à RRD, além da preparação e importação de dados oficiais, em pequenos lotes, para o OSM.

Somados o número de participantes das oficinas temáticas ao público das oficinas avulsas - aquelas realizadas com grupos locais, em diversas universidades, públicas e privadas, no Brasil e no exterior (México e Moçambique), cerca de 700 certificados foram emitidos pelo IVIDES.orgⓇ!

Para saber como agendar uma oficina avulsa na sua organização, entre em contato com [email protected].

🦒 Participação no State of the Map 2024

Primeira tela da breve comunicação, realizada no SotM 2024, Nairobi (Quênia), pela Dra. Raquel Dezidério Souto.

O projeto de mapa interativo desenvolvido com OSM, uMap e WordPress, para o mapeamento da infraestrutura para RRD no município de Maricá, RJ (Brasil), foi apresentado no State of the Map 2024, a principal conferência global da comunidade OpenStreetMap, realizada em Nairobi (Quênia), nessa edição.

Seminário científico pelo Rio Grande do Sul

© IVIDES.org

Em 2024, o Instituto IVIDES.orgⓇ conduziu o mapeamento colaborativo da região da bacia hidrográfica Taquari-Antas, Rio Grande do Sul (Brasil), como parte dos esforços brasileiros para produzir dados que apoiem nas fases de enfrentamento do desastre e de pós-desastre.

Para divulgar os resultados e promover o intercâmbio de informações entre os cientistas (todos com nível de doutorado), em setembro de 2024, o Instituto IVIDES.orgⓇ realizou o Seminário Científico pelo Rio Grande do Sul, em parceria com os capítulos YouthMappers UFRJ, UERGS e Unipampa; além do apoio do Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB), na realização das transmissões ao vivo e no patrocínio dos brindes sorteados.

Na página do evento, encontrará os resultados do Seminário, em arquivos PDF e em vídeo, das palestras com professores de três universidades públicas do estado - UERGS, UFRGS e FURG. Ou diretamente na Wikimedia. E também, alguns mapas Web, que foram gerados rapidamente com uMap, a fim de apoiar as ações humanitárias e de governo, durante o desastre.

20 Anos de OpenStreetMap!

© OpenStreetMap

O Instituto IVIDES.orgⓇ promoveu um evento para comemorar os 20 Anos de OpenStreetMap, em parceria com os capítulos do HUB YouthMappers Rio de Janeiro e apoio para a distribuição de brindes, da Tom Tom. Como parte da programação, foram realizadas cinco oficinas de mapeamento colaborativo com OpenStreetMap, com diversas temáticas, com a Unipar (Paraná), Unipampa (Rio Grande do Sul), COPPE-UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro) e UFF Campos (inauguração do capítulo YouthMappers da UFF, em Campos dos Goytacazes).

🌍 Conecte-se a esta iniciativa!

Para conhecer mais sobre o nosso trabalho, visite o portal do projeto YouthMappers UFRJ.

– Com informações da coordenação do YouthMappers UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 01 de fevereiro de 2025. IVIDES.orgⓇ is a registered trademark. [email protected] | https://ivides.org/

– Em Português

YouthMappers UFRJ Trajectory

The YouthMappers UFRJ is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto (in post doctoral internship), and Prof. Dr. Manoel Fernandes, both from the Laboratory of Cartography, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (GeoCart-UFRJ, Brazil), and was set up to prepare new mappers and develop collaborative mapping research with OpenStreetMap and related programs, involving the community, with members from inside and outside UFRJ, residing in Brazil and in other countries.

The initiative is part of the international YouthMappers network, a project founded by professors from the Universities of Arizona and Texas, with sponsor and support of the USAID (USA). There are currently more than 400 groups in public universities around the world.

The theme chosen to begin the development of mapping activities in the state of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) is Disaster disaster reduction (DRR), with the risk areas in the state of Rio de Janeiro as areas of interest. Other themes, such as mapping trees, evaluation of housing conditions in areas of special social interest or developing web applications, are being considered by us and our partners, who are still at the development stage.

In this way, the YouthMappers UFRJ chapter aims to develop research using collaborative data and secondary official data, as a means of providing informational support for the state of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), contributing to decision-making and other purposes. And to contribute to the development of other YouthMappers chapters in the state of Rio de Janeiro and other states in Brazil.

🗺 The first collaborative mapping project: infrastructure for DRR in risk areas in the municipality of Maricá, RJ, Brazil

Map of the areas of interest (AOI) of the infrastructure mapping project for disaster risk reduction in Maricá, RJ Brazil. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Areas delimited by Prof. Dr. Alessandra de Freitas (POLI-UFRJ).

Our initial collaborative project is focused on mapping infrastructure for disaster risk reduction (DRR) in the municipality of Maricá (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The municipality has been suffering from episodes of flooding, landslides and coastal erosion, due to irregular occupation, spreading to areas that are unsuitable for housing, as well as an increase in the frequency and intensity of disastrous events in the region.

The project adopts collaborative techniques such as mapping with OpenStreetMap and interactive mapping with uMap, a French project that provides a platform for developing interactive web maps, free of charge and hosted in the cloud. It also makes its source code available. No annual fees, no requests for add-ons, no IP tracking… using uMap!

In a short time… significant results

MapRoulette screenshot. Data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

To provide technical support to the YouthMappers UFRJ chapter, the Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development - IVIDES.orgⓇ is preparing educational material on mapping with OpenStreetMap, carrying out training sessions, creating collaborative mapping projects, which allows the control of mapping activities, e.g., impeding more than one mapper editing the same area. This arrangement makes it possible to organize the tasks, and therefore the mapping project as a whole, and to preserve the data, which is not corrupted. In addition, the data can be validated, from the same project made available, and with the configuration of access levels, according with the mapper experience - beginner, intermediate, advanced mappers, avoiding mistakes commonly made by beginners.

💻 Mapping with OSM training course

Captura do mapa do osm.org com Brasil ao centro. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap.

A complete Mapping with OpenStreetMap training course was published in August 2023, having become a continuous flow course (entry at any time of the year), and having reached 384 participants (data 01/31/2025), residing in Brazil and other countries. The course remains online, as a self-learning platform, with certificates being issued every six months, based on an evaluation of the results of the participants.

💻 Thematic mapping workshops with OSM

osm.org screenshot, showing landcover features. Dados © contribuidores(as) do OpenStreetMap.

In 2024, thematic mapping workshops with OpenStreetMap were held online, covering the mapping of points of interest (POI), hydrography, landcover, features related to DRR, as well as importing official data into OSM.

Added to the participants of the thematic mapping workshops and the public of the individual workshops held with local groups at various public and private universities in Brazil and in other countries (Mexico and Mozambique), and nearly 700 certificates were issued by IVIDES.orgⓇ!

To find out how to schedule a one-day workshop at your organization, please,contact [email protected].

🦒 Participation in the State of the Map 2024

First slide of the lightning talk, realized in the SotM 2024, Nairobi (Kenya), by Dra. Raquel Dezidério Souto.

The interactive map project, developed with OSM, uMap and WordPress, for mapping the infrastructure for DRR in the municipality of Maricá, RJ, Brazil, was presented during the State of the Map 2024, the main global conference of the OpenStreetMap community, held in Nairobi, Kenya, in this edition.

Scientific seminar for supporting Rio Grande do Sul

© IVIDES.org

In 2024, the IVIDES.orgⓇ conducted a collaborative mapping campaign for the Taquari-Antas River Basin Region (RS), as part of Brazil’s efforts to produce data to support disaster response.

In order to disseminate scientific results, in September 2024, the Institute promoted the Scientific Seminar for Rio Grande do Sul, in partnership with the chapters YouthMappers UFRJ, UERGS and Unipampa; and technical and gift support from Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB).

On the event page, you’ll find the PDF and video files of the lectures with professors from three public universities in the State of Rio Grande do Sul - UERGS, UFRGS and FURG. Or directly on Wikimedia. Also, some Web maps were generated very quickly with uMap, in order to support humanitarian and government actions during the disaster and the post disaster activities.

20 Years of OpenStreetMap!

© OpenStreetMap

The IVIDES.orgⓇ held an event to celebrate 20 years of OpenStreetMap, in partnership with the HUB YouthMappers Rio de Janeiro and with the support of Tom Tom, for the distribution of gifts. As part of the Agenda, five workshops on collaborative mapping with OpenStreetMap were promoted, with different thematics, with partnership of the universities: Unipar (Paraná), Unipampa (Rio Grande do Sul), COPPE-UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro) and UFF Campos (inauguration of the UFF chapter in Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ).

🌍 Connect to this initiative!

To find out more about our work, visit the YouthMappers UFRJ project portal.

– With information from the coordination of YouthMappers UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, February 1st, 2025. Translated with Deepl (free version) and with human validation.
IVIDES.orgⓇ is a registered trademark. [email protected] | https://ivides.org/

Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) and JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) has completely transformed my perspective on places in Ghana. What used to be just names on a map are now vibrant locations I explore, analyze, and contribute to in meaningful ways.

With each mapping session, I am a digital explorer, uncovering hidden details about my country. While tracing highways, POIs, buildings, and rivers, to ensure that every corner of Ghana is well represented, I explore!. From the bustling streets of Accra to the serene landscapes of the Volta Region, my virtual travels take me everywhere without even leaving my seat.

As I explore and see places, I contribute data to solve real-world problems. Through OSM, I have contributed to flood risk assessments, improved accessibility to schools, and even helped emergency responders find critical locations. It’s amazing to know that my little edits can make a big difference in someone’s life.

Mapping is no longer just a hobby; it’s a passion, a responsibility, and a way to make a mark on the world.

One edit at a time! The journey continues!

Die Praxis der Sperren-Festsetzung ist eine Farce!

Was an meinem Profil auffallen könnte, ist die Tatsache, dass ich schon mal gesperrt war. Der elektronische Pranger von OSM vergisst das nicht. Ob meine Strafen berechtigt waren oder nicht, darum soll es hier nicht gehen. Sondern darum, dass OSM zwar vieles gut macht, eine Sache aber wirklich schlecht: die Sperren. Die sprechen allen ansonsten hochgehaltenen Prinzipien wie Fairness, Transparenz, Teilhabe Hohn.

Sie werden frei nach Gusto von einzelnen Mitgliedern der sogenannten Data Working Group wie von einem deus ex machina ohne Anhörung der Beschuldigten, ohne Einspruchs- oder Verteidigungsmöglichkeit und ohne begründende Antwort auf eine Nachfrage verhängt.

Damit ist potentieller Willkür ein scheunengroßes Einfallstor geöffnet. Selbstherrlich wird zudem ein exponentielles Wachstum künftiger Strafen angedroht. Das hieße im realen Leben etwa, dass ein Dieb mit ein paar Vorstrafen bei der nächsten Tat, auch wenn er nur eine Flasche Schnaps hat mitgehen lassen, für Jahre in Haft käme. Justizterror als Modell der Abschreckung, wie man es aus autoritär regierten Staaten kennt. Als (untauglicher) Versuch der Herstellung einer Scheinlegitimität darf mithin die Verwendung des Personalpronomens im Plural (“wir”) durch einen Verantwortlichen in seinem “Urteil” gelten.

Natürlich ist das Vorgehen bei OSM in seinen Konsequenzen unvergleichlich mit demjenigen in den erwähnten Tyranneien. Aber das zugrunde liegende Denkmodell ist eben sehr ähnlich. Witzigerweise in meinem Fall angewandt von jemandem, der nach seinen Blog-Äußerungen ein Verfechter woker Kultur zu sein scheint.

Es ist und bleibt jedenfalls die undurchschaubare Festsetzung von Sperren und ihrer Länge ein dicker Schandfleck für OSM.

Wikipedia macht übrigens vor, wie so ein Prozedere viel demokratischer, inklusiver, transparenter, schlicht um Längen besser ablaufen kann!

Another one got ignored today, another road left unmapped, another place erased because it wasn’t profitable enough to exist on a corporate map. No one noticed, because no one was supposed to.

They don’t talk about the missing footpaths, the streets that don’t appear because they aren’t in a government database, the communities left invisible because they don’t generate ad revenue. They don’t talk about how your map—your view of the world—is decided not by truth, but by business interests.

They call us idealists, hobbyists, dreamers. They say the world has already been mapped. But they are wrong.

We are the ones who see the gaps. We are the ones who refuse to let our neighborhoods, our histories, our stories be erased. We are the ones who put the world on the map—not for profit, but for people.

Yes, I am a mapper. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is refusing to accept a world where only what is profitable is visible. My crime is knowing that no company, no government, no algorithm should have the power to decide what exists.

You may ignore us. You may try to replace us with AI, to wall off geography behind paywalls, to tell people that their contributions don’t matter. But you can’t stop us all. Because the world is ours to map.

After all, we are all alike. We are OpenStreetMap.

🤣 with apologies ++The Mentor++ (8 January 1986). “The Conscience of a Hacker”. Phrack, Inc. 1 (7): 3 of 10 - wikipedia

Explore viewers for visualizing GIS vector data in shapefile format, available for both desktop and web browsers.

The post Shapefile Viewers appeared first on Geography Realm.

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 operations on it, eventually you will generate some empties.

Which means your software needs to know how to store and transmit them.

Which means you need to know how to encode them in WKB.

And the standard is no help.

But I am!

WKB Commonalities

All WKB geometries start with 1-byte “byte order flag” followed by a 4-byte “geometry type”.

enum wkbByteOrder  {
    wkbXDR = 0, // Big Endian
    wkbNDR = 1  // Little Endian
};

The byte order flag signals which “byte order” all the other numbers will be encoded with. Most modern hardware uses “least significant byte first” (aka “little endian”) ordering, so usually the value will be “1”, but readers must expect to occasionally get “big endian” encoded data.

enum wkbGeometryType {
    wkbPoint = 1,
    wkbLineString = 2,
    wkbPolygon = 3,
    wkbMultiPoint = 4,
    wkbMultiLineString = 5,
    wkbMultiPolygon = 6,
    wkbGeometryCollection = 7
};

The type number is an integer from 1 to 7, in the indicated byte order.

Collections

Collections are easy! GeometryCollection, MultiPolygon, MultiLineString and MultiPoint all have a WKB structure like this:

wkbCollection {
    byte    byteOrder;
    uint32  wkbType;
    uint32  numWkbSubGeometries;
    WKBGeometry wkbSubGeometries[numWkbSubGeometries];
}

The way to signal an empty collection is to set its numGeometries value to zero.

So for example, a MULTIPOLYGON EMPTY would look like this (all examples in little endian, spaces added between elements for legibility, using hex encoding).

01 06000000 00000000

The elements are:

• The byte order flag
• The geometry type (6 == MultiPolygon)
• The number of sub-geometries (zero)

Polygons and LineStrings

The Polygon and LineString types are also very easy, because after their type number they both have a count of sub-objects (rings in the case of Polygon, points in the case of LineString) which can be set to zero to indicate an empty geometry.

For a LineString:

01 02000000 00000000

For a Polygon:

01 03000000 00000000

It is possible to create a Polygon made up of a non-zero number of empty linear rings. Is this construction empty? Probably. Should you make one of them? Probably not, since POLYGON EMPTY describes the case much more simply.

Points

Saving the best for last!

One of the strange blind spots of the ISO/OGC standards is the WKB Point. There is an standard text representation for an empty point, POINT EMPTY. But there nowhere in the standard a description of a WKB empty point, and the WKB structure of a point doesn’t really leave any place to hide one.

WKBPoint {
    byte    byteOrder;
    uint32  wkbType; // 1
    double x;
    double y;
};

After the standard byte order flag and type number, the serialization goes directly into the coordinates. There’s no place to put in a zero.

In PostGIS we established our own add-on to the WKB standard, so we could successfully round-trip a POINT EMPTY through WKB – empty points are to be represented as a point with all coordinates set to the IEEE NaN value.

Here is a little-endian empty point.

01 01000000 000000000000F87F 000000000000F87F

And a big-endian one.

00 00000001 7FF8000000000000 7FF8000000000000

Most open source implementations of WKB have converged on this standardization of POINT EMPTY. The most common alternate behaviour is to convert POINT EMPTY object, which are not representable, into MULTIPOINT EMPTY objects, which are. This might be confusing (an empty point would round-trip back to something with a completely different type number).

In general, empty geometries create a lot of “angels dancing on the head of a pin” cases for functions that otherwise have very deterministic results.

• “What is the distance in meters between a point and an empty polygon?” Zero? Infinity? NULL? NaN?
• “What geometry type is the interesection of an empty polygon and empty line?” Do I care? I do if I am writing a database system and have to provide an answer.

Over time the PostGIS project collated our intuitions and implementations in this wiki page of empty geometry handling rules.

The trouble with empty handling is that there are simultaneously a million different combinations of possibilities, and extremely low numbers of people actually exercising that code line. So it’s a massive time suck. We have basically been handling them on an “as needed” basis, as people open tickets on them.

Other Databases

• SQL Server changes POINT EMPTY to MULTIPOINT EMPTY when generating WKB.

  SELECT Geometry::STGeomFromText('POINT EMPTY',4326).STAsBinary()
  
  0x010400000000000000
  

• MariaDB and SnowFlake return NULL for a POINT EMPTY WKB.

  SELECT ST_AsBinary(ST_GeomFromText('POINT EMPTY'))
  
  NULL
  

I’m back home! All the uploads done! Yeah!

Street-level imagery

As I had written about earlier, I was on tour with actually, to be precise, one of the bands I’m in under the title/ program “The Dubliners Experience” in the Netherlands from Jan 15th to Feb 1st. The GoPro Max was our constant companion on the roof of the tour bus. It covers mostly motorways and the areas around concert venues, of course. I also walked around the campsite we stayed at (band life isn’t as glamorous as they make it out to be in the movies after all) with it, but that imagery is not super useful, I’m afraid. How much can you map in a fen, when there are not even leaves on the trees to map species…But still, the area got covered.

I was especially keen to upload to Panoramax, because the coverage was quite poor which does not mean to discredit the people who have already contributed, of course!

I’ll give you some before and after screenshots, some of which I had already shared on Mastodon yesterday.

Before I started, this was the situation in the Netherlands for both flat and 360° images.

And this was yesterday:

This was the state of 360° coverage on Jan 14th 2025:

And this yesterday:

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I tracked where we were going and what I had captured using OSMAnd, so I could prevent duplicate sequences. There are still some duplicates, because of the foggy conditions during the first week and because I didn’t want to risk the camera turning off while inactive on a long drive.

As I had mentioned in the previous diary post, I “lost” (i.e. deleted) sequences where the camera had tilted, because I did not know how to correct that. Stupid me. If anyone knows how to or knows of a tutorial, please comment. I don’t even know what to search for.

Mapping

While on the way to concert venues, I added a couple of notes along the way to be resolved after the show. Some were resolved by other people in an amazingly short time. So, dankewell you to those folks!

Thatched buildings

I have an interest in thatched buildings, so that was something I mapped being driven and walking using roof:material=thatch. I added a couple more last night, bringing the total to 101. While mapping that, I noticed that many of the buildings are not squared off. Is there any good reason for that? It made adding building:part=yes for roof:material=thatch a bit awkward. Of course, I also added a couple of missing buildings (mostly sheds or maybe car ports, hard to tell) which had not been covered in the last import by the Dutch mapping community.

Defibrillators

Around the theatres, quite a few defibrillators were missing, even though the mapping density of them in general seems to be good in the Netherlands. Many a time, I got OSMAnd out to map one only to find that it was already mapped. But maybe mappers don’t go to the theatre much, so it’s good I came along. I added 25 in total, some also just spotted from the band bus.

Backstage prefix

I continued on with the backstage prefix to map amenities (showers, washing machine etc) for artists found backstage. I don’t expect this to take off in general, but we map amenities for babies, wheelchair users , why not also this. I know it’s not easily verifiable, but there is no harm in doing it imho. And to be fair, I added nappy changing tables wherever I saw them. I made a point using every bathroom I could to survey that. ;-)

Loading ramps and artists’ entrances (name=artiesteningang) into the venues were also added to make it easier in the future to know where to go, because there are a lot of one-way systems and pedestrianized areas around the venues.

Obviously, I added missing shops, pubs, street lights, street cabinets, details on restaurants and whatever else I fancied.

I must say, I really appreciate always having a mission, so the waiting around doesn’t get too draining and you “force” yourself to explore your surroundings, if time permits. I wish I had had more time during daylight, because we mostly played in small towns which probably don’t get too much attention from mappers on a regular basis, but we usually arrived for soundcheck at 16:00 with the sun setting around 17:00, so it was quite limiting.

And I made it to #56 in the statistics for the Netherlands on neis-one!

Hi OSM folks,

Yesterday I finished mapping West Virginia’s forest landcover for OSM in 5 years! It was a big project and definitely the next one will be a bigger one but because of that I’m gonna do it in a pace that I can maintain. If I have to stop, then I stop. Well, it’s just a hobby for me. As I announced on Mapping USA, I’m mapping Pennsylvania from now on. I’m really interested in the history of that state, The Keystone State.

And yes, I just wanted to try myself out how I could map forest landcover outside of Europe. It seems everyone seems hyped and I like this!

I’m not a robot so I can’t work on it 24/7 due to my personal life and I know i’m not making a 100% accurate landcover, but hey, I learnt some tricks which I’m taking advantage of! Sometimes I also criticise the quality I do but well people usually improve as time flies.

I’d like to thank everyone in the OSM community for giving me help and guidance, and I’m sure I’ll still have questions if it comes to specific areas. :)

23/01/2025-29/01/2025

railmap.gl [¹] |, a Web map that shows railway operators for the North America. © MapLibre, © Three.js | map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.

Mapping

• The following two proposals are up for voting until Friday 14 February:

  • pratictioners=* to tag the number and field of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, or therapists, available at facilities such as clinics, legal offices, or wellness centres, aiming to enhance the mapping of professional services.
  • sensory_friendly=* to indicate if a feature provides sensory accessibility for people with sensory processing sensitivity and if there are designated sensory friendly hours.

Mapping campaigns

• OSM France has organised a post-disaster mapping campaign (we reported earlier) to record the state of buildings in the area affected by Tropical Cyclone Chido, which struck in December 2024, reaching Mamoudzou’s coast, on Mayotte Island (Overseas France). Explanatory videos are available in the mapping instructions on the appropriate tags to be used, according to the level of visible damage to the building and the roof material. CNES/Airbus images are being used in this project.
• Frederik Ramm, from Geofabrik, is looking for mappers to help with a potential contract for mapping public transport infrastructure in OpenStreetMap. The task involves transferring data from on-site station surveys into OSM using JOSM while considering aerial imagery and existing data. Work is expected to start around Easter and could last several months. Geofabrik is open to hiring full-time, part-time, or freelance contributors, either remotely or from their office in Karlsruhe. Interested individuals should reach out before they decide on bidding for the project.
• Negreheb shared the progress being made on capturing Salzburg’s streets with 360° imagery for Mapillary and Panoramax. Challenges with route planning tools led to using OsmAnd for real-time GPX tracking and flexibility. They highlighted improvements using CLI tools for image uploads, ensuring efficiency and quality. Inspired by Detroit’s street coverage success, they aim to map all streets in Salzburg to improve OpenStreetMap and accessibility.

Community

• Dzertanoj published a method for verification of the results of a transformation of data from NAD83 to WGS84.
• While participating in Global Game Jam 2025, cyanohydr and their team developed ‘Bubble World Wanderer’, an OpenStreetMap-themed walking simulator web game.
• JPinAR highlighted various aspects of cycling mapping in the US, stressing that several categories beyond urban and suburban commuting remain underrepresented. These include cyclo-cross, cross-country, BMX, pump tracks, and gravel riding.
• Tex2002ans explained how to add fire hydrants and benches using the StreetComplete application.
• Unique Mappers Network Nigeria, an NGO based in Port Harcourt has updated its website, where you can access projects, events, and more. A newsletter is also available.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has announced its 2025 public board meeting dates, starting on Thursday 30 January, with monthly public meetings hosted online. These sessions allow OSMF members to observe and participate during comment sections, providing transparency on board activities.

Local chapter news

• The Swiss OpenStreetMap Association (SOSM) announced that Nine AG is a new colocation sponsor. As of December 2024, Nine AG is hosting one of SOSM’s servers in Zurich, following its relocation from Winterthur. This sponsorship helps SOSM maintain essential OpenStreetMap services, while their second server remains supported by Adfinis. SOSM expressed gratitude to both sponsors for their continued support.

Events

• You are invited to share your ideas and session proposals for the 2025 State of the Map US, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, 19 to 21 June. This year’s theme, Charting the Course, will celebrate OSM in mobility and look toward the next decade of OpenStreetMap US. The proposal deadline has been extended until Friday 14 February.

OSM research

• HeiGIT has developed a pipeline to evaluate the completeness of OSM building data by comparing it to the Overture Maps database.
• Pascal Neis explained ► how crime mapping research is being used to analyse spatial patterns in the occurrence of ATM explosion cases in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Maps

• After 16 years, the osm-wms.de map service will go offline on Monday 31 March. Originally launched in 2009 to provide OpenStreetMap data in OGC WMS format, the service became less essential as GIS software evolved to support tile maps directly. The team at HeiGIT will now focus on making OSM data more accessible for humanitarian and climate action efforts. Users looking for alternatives can find suitable WMS and raster tile providers in the OpenStreetMap Wiki.
• The dynamic maps published on the portal visitandorra.com, maintained by the public company Andorra Turisme, are made using OpenStreetMap and show information on activities, accommodation (hotels), and promotions. This is useful for those who are going to watch the competition in Andorra and you can even create a travel plan.

OSM in action

• Ronnie Aldrin Silva has created a Voronoi map of European capitals, showing each capital’s area of influence based on geographical proximity.

Software

• ^[1] railmapgl is working on an app focusing on the operators of railways, called railmap.gl. It uses MapLibre and Three.js. The map currently only covers North America.
• Protomaps tooted about some updates, including a revamped website with hosted API and FAQ sections, Maputnik editor support for PMTiles in MapLibre, and a new CLI release (v1.24.1) enhancing PMTiles archive management. Additionally, a blog post outlined the design goals for the basemaps, discussing the foundation of an effective map design.
• A new fork of the streets.gl website showcases OpenStreetMap data in 3D directly in the browser, now hosted with updated data by Alexandar Gyurov (GitHub). The site is accessible at streets-gl.onrender.com, improving upon the original project’s features, including rendering enhancements discussed in this pull request.

Releases

• OpenCage is pleased to announce that its spreadsheet geocoding service has now entered public beta.
• OSM2World version 0.4.0, an application for converting OpenStreetMap data into three-dimensional models, has been released.
• Every Door 5.4 introduced a number of improvements, including better conflict processing on way uploads, over-zoom for Esri tiles, fixes for editing at extreme latitudes, and enhanced handling of fax and mobile fields. New features include cadastre imagery layers, updated presets, and support for Hebrew and Tamil.
• Osmdiff version 0.5.0-beta.1 has been released, bringing improvements to testing, documentation, and configuration management.

Other “geo” things

• The e-book Research and Education in Geography: challenges of a changing world , written in Brazilian Portuguese, is the result ► of the V Scientific Conference of the PPGG-UFRJ, held in 2024, at the UFRJ Science and Culture Forum ►, in Rio de Janeiro. The book is a sample of the research carried out by the programme, with reports from its postgraduate students and their advisors on various themes and areas of interest.
• The proceedings of X SLBCH ►, the 10th Luso-Brazilian Symposium on Historical Cartography, have been published by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto.
• Google Maps has changed its pricing model, which could increase the costs to developers using their APIs. Higher fees may push businesses and app developers to seek alternatives, potentially benefiting OpenStreetMap, as a free and open-source mapping solution. Companies looking to reduce expenses may migrate to other solutions including MapLibre or Leaflet, further strengthening the OSM ecosystem.
• Dongdong Tian and others have published version 0.14.0 of PyGMT, updating the library for processing geospatial data and making publication-quality maps and figures. It provides a Pythonic interface to the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT), a command-line program widely used across the earth and planetary sciences and beyond. You can access the tutorials from the EGU22 PyGMT short course.
• Yandex talked ► about the architecture of its geocoder, using deep learning to quickly adapt the existing Russian language version for other languages ​​in different countries.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2025-02-05
Salzburg	OSM Treffen Salzburg		2025-02-04
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-02-05
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2025-02-04
London	London pub meet-up		2025-02-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2025-02-05
	iD Community Chat		2025-02-05
Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris		2025-02-06
Guadalajara	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise and Fernando Feria		2025-02-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-02-07
København	OSMmapperCPH		2025-02-09
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #73		2025-02-10
	Meeting preparing the creation of the Catalan Association of the OSM		2025-02-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2025-02-12
Bochum	Bochumer OSM-Treffen		2025-02-13
Moers	I Love Free Software Day Community-Hackday vom 14. – 16. Februar 2025 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2025-02-14 – 2025-02-16
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2025-02-15 – 2025-02-16
東区	State of the Map Japan 2024		2025-02-14
	Panoramax monthly international meeting		2025-02-17

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Jak už jsem napsal dříve, tak k mapování mého města jsem se dostal z konkrétních důvodů.

Online mapa OSM byla tenkrát nedostatečně zakreslená a mnoho informací bylo zastaralých nebo chybějících. Trápilo mne to. Druhý důvod byl, že jsem se opakovaně setkával s návštěvníky a turisty, kteří něco hledali a na jejich mapě to nemohli najít. Neuměl jsem jim to rychle ukázat. Bylo to pořád dokola.

Jiné mapy tu existovaly, ale kromě komerční varianty tištěných map, nebo mapových cedulí místního mapového vydavatele, nenabízely turistům dostatečně přesné informace. A to jsem chtěl zlepšit.

Rozhodl jsem se pro OSM.

Teď po několika letech by bylo fajn napsat, co se podle mé zkušenosti u uživatelů map změnilo a co ne. Nakonec pár slov, co by se dalo vylepšit.

Předně musím říci, že povědomí konkrétně o mapě OSM, je u bloudících turistů velmi slabé, protože znají a používají většinou jiné online mapy. Pokud je vůbec používají. Mají k tomu své důvody. Málokdy dokáží použít offline mapového klienta. Takže pro mapy musí mít aktivní datový tarif, což je pro cizince v ČR trochu drahá záležitost. A tak první co hledají, je free wifi.

Co dál víme

• turisté rádi používají Google maps, protože jsou trvale přihlášeni k účtu přes svůj Android mobil. Proto mají nejblíž k Google Maps a vůbec je nenapadá, že by mohli používat jinou mapu. Fajn. Když jsou zvyklí dívat se na slepou mapu, která ukazuje svévolně jen to, co se jí chce ukázat od platících zákazníků, tak budiž jim přáno. Ti, co neplatí, tak na mapě vidět nebudou. To je byznysmodel v kostce.

• anebo jsou z dalekých asijských zemí, kde by použili jejich mapy s jejich názvy míst, ale to se v Evropě moc nedá, tak druhou volbu zvolí Google Maps. Google před lety udělal silný marketing pro své produkty a těží z toho dodnes. Přestože se mnohé změnilo.

• Znají a používají mapy Apple, což je podobný případ. Apple je nabízí v základním vybavení telefonů iPhone, včetně integrace do dalších služeb telefonu s iOS. Zajímavou drobností je, že Apple začal používat základní mapová data od OSM, protože jsou globálně nejdetailnější. Apple na tuto vrstvu pouze umísťuje své POI.

• uživatelé automobilových navigací, tj, řidiči. Ve svých vozidlech mají integrované palubní počítače, které nabízejí buď vlastní navigaci (možná nějakou derivaci OSM přes podávané navigátory, nebo jiné zdroje) Nicméně auto-navigátor vyžaduje občas aktualizaci a tu řidiči někdy nedělají. Bez aktualizace základní mapy pak mnohdy nemá mapa přesné ulice, protože v ní prostě vůbec neexistují.

• Uživatelé Waze jsou tací zvláštní uživatelé, kteří se začali stoprocentně spoléhat pouze na Waze a dávají přednost především jejím dopravním funkcím. V těch skutečně může Waze navigátor dobře pomoci, ale řidiči si pak neuvědomí, že navigátor nedokáže zprostředkovat mapové informace, které s dopravní navigací nesouvisí. Jenže na tom právě uživatelé Waze ztroskotají a vůbec neví proč. Waze jim to totiž neřekne.

• Znají a používají Mapy.cz (jde především o Čechy, kteří Mapy.cz považují za jediné a nejlepší mapy) V Čechách Mapy.cz nabízí opravdu nejobsáhlejší mapová data, která pečlivě shromažďují, přibírají je i od jiných zdrojů (například zdroje studánek) a přidává ke geografii svůj obchodní model s komerčními objekty provázanými na Firmy.cz. Mezi námi, samozřejmě že Mapy.cz bývají někde i neaktuální. Nedokáží včas zachytit různé změny a stěhování firem, nebo dopravní situaci.

• Naprostá většina uživatelů netuší, že za hranicemi ČR používají Mapy.cz mapová data od OSM, která jen vykreslují ve svém mapovém stylu. Uživatelé si tedy myslí, že Mapy.cz umí v Austrálii zobrazit každou pěšinku v trávě. Ano, umí to právě díky OSM.

Právě z výše zmíněných důvodů se lidé rychle dostanou do situace, že něco někde nemohou najít, nebo realita není úplně taková, jak si jí ve své mapě našli.

Co v mapách nenašli

• proč nelze pár kroků přejít z této ulice do druhé ulice? No protože tudy žádná cesta nevede, je tam sráz, zeď a soukromá zahrada. Ale na mapě která takové věci ani nechce mít, to nikdy neobjeví.

• proč na ulici není restaurace XYZ, kterou si našel v mapě? Protože už se dávno odstěhovala a vložený bod na mapě nezanesl majitel, ani žádný místní mapovač, ale označili ho nějací náhodní lidé, kteří už nikdy tento bod zájmu opravovat nebudou.

• proč má podnik zavřeno? Protože nemusí mít otevřeno. Ale spíše je na místě se ptát, proč nemá bod na mapě viditelnou otevírací dobu, nebo odkaz na web firmy, která by poskytla dobrou odpověď.

• jakto že je tato ulice neprůjezdná, nebo zavřená? To se stává většinou, když jde o místní dopravní omezení, které je přechodné v řádu měsíců. Přesto na ně žádná mapa typu Waze, Google, nebo Apple nedokáže včas zareagovat a data o průjezdnosti doplnit. Ale řidiči na svou navigaci spoléhají a pak jsou překvapeni.

O co se tedy zajímat?

• kde jsou místní specifické body zájmu, které se na žádné mapě ani zaznamenat nedají. Například pěší průvodcovské trasy vedoucí cestou-necestou, propojující unikátní místní zajímavosti. To vědí právě místní průvodci a proto byste je měli následovat i bez mapy. Znají své město a krajinu opravdu dobře.

• možná citlivě zaznamenat do mapy i prvky, které místo dělají specifickým a zajímavým. Mohou to být domovní znamení, drobné památky, nebo nekomerční komunitní centra, přírodovědné zajímavosti v otevřené krajině.

Závěrem

Přes prakticky nepozorovatelné používání aktuálních map OSM zahraniční i tuzemskou turistickou veřejností, si myslím, že u některých jiných uživatelů mají dobrý smysl. Vlastně jsem přesvědčen, že výborně slouží u lidem, kteří se na cestu neptají a svůj cíl cesty, nebo turistickou zajímavost naleznou sami, i díky dobré mapě.

Informační zkušenost s OSM se dá vylepšit zpřesňováním dat. Hodnotný výstup pak dostanou prakticky skrz nabídku různých uživatelských aplikací, i mobilních klientů, které data od OSM přebírají. Mohou to být navigátory pro automobily, cyklisty, běžce, i pěší turisty. Nikdo z uživatelů vlastně neřeší, odkud se mapová data berou, chtějí je pouze hned a přesná.

No a tak je mapuji a nelituji.

Sado Island is an example of a landmass with tripartite physical geography.

The post Sado Island: An Example of Tripartite Geography appeared first on Geography Realm.

Penamaan Melayu

Kira-kira tag name:ms-Arab apakah harus sama dengan standar Bahasa Melayu Malaysia? masih bingung mau nambahin name:ms di tulisan-tulisan Arab Melayu di Pekanbaru, kaya danau kan di Bahasa Melayu Malaysia harusnya tasik ya, tapi overall lantak aja tulis Arab Melayu sesuai nama dalam B. Indonesia di Riau, kecuali memang ada nama lokalnya yang beda

Tapal Batas Desa antara Desa Mantangai Hilir dan Desa Mantangai Tengah adalah Jembatan Saka Diwung.

这次回美国, 我每处专门都用OSM比较, 发现即使在OSM的诞生地, 以及大量互联网使用者, GIS从业者的美国, 非盈利性质的OSM其细化也远远比不上商业化的谷歌地图. 之前我觉得OSM详细, 是因为目光都聚集在了主要公共设施, 比如广场, 公园, 车站, 知名景点. 这些地方OSM的编辑者自然多, 但是下至中小型乡镇, 其覆盖率是真不高. 不过话说回来我在之前看OSM的热点上, 美国也不是极高值. 绘制最多的那块在德国, 瑞士, 意大利, 法国, 波兰等中西欧国家, 不知道那里等实际情况如何.

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 that I could tackle something like a new QGIS plugin as a (long) weekend project. I started it just to see if I could, and things kept working, so I kept pushing on.

Motivations

One of my latest missions is to advance GeoParquet as a format to fulfill the promise of cloud-native vector data, enabling organizations to get most all the functionality of a Web Features Service like GeoServer by simply putting up their data as GeoParquet on a cloud bucket. I was so excited when Overture Maps embraced the format, but they also got a good bit of pushback for not having a ‘download’ button and using traditional data formats.

I was confident that if things evolved right it shouldn’t be hard to give traditional GIS users an even better experience of getting the data, since you can easily stream just what you need and transform it on the fly. A big shout out to Jake Wasserman and Overture for really stepping in to help push forward the evolution, proposing the key bbox covering and upgrading Overture to fully implement it.

A few months ago it became possible to use my favorite new geospatial tool, DuckDB (or a number of other tools), with any Overture data layer to select a spatial subset of the whole world and download just the area you cared about in tens of seconds and often faster.

Overture has great docs for using DuckDB, and they also built a nice command-line tool, but you still have to be tech-oriented and inclined to use a terminal. They did also build a nice Explorer app, that lets you download small amounts of data. But if you wanted more than a few megabytes worth of data to load up in QGIS there still weren’t great options for those who do want to learn to use a terminal and CLI tools.

So I decided to see how far the LLM coding tools had come and figure out if I’d be able to write a QGIS plugin. QGIS development had always intimidated me: I think I had one class in college that did desktop UI’s and I found it hard to grok. But my first attempt got something on my screen and within twenty minutes I had a reasonable kernel of functionality. I ended up able to get the vast majority of it working as I wanted to in a few days during the week of Thanksgiving — coding on the plane and sneaking in mini-sprints between family time.

So my goal was to make it as easy as possible for any QGIS user to download Overture, and indeed to not force GeoParquet on them: with the plugin you can easily request data as a GeoPackage. And I also wanted to make it easy to download any GeoParquet data, so that the tool isn’t just for Overture data, but enables anyone distributing their data as GeoParquet to easily enable QGIS users to get their data.

Plugin Overview

This animated gif probably gives the quickest overview to understand what the plugin enables:

The idea is to make it simple to just download GeoParquet data into a local copy in QGIS. It currently just uses the bounds of the viewport, but I hope a future version can give more options to draw a geometry or use other QGIS layers (contributors welcome!).

Currently there are a few pre-set layers. All of Overture is obviously available, and it’s got a dedicated button to open its panel. And Source Cooperative is easily the other largest single collection of GeoParquet files (and if you have open data you’d like to make available on Source then you can likely host it there for free — just reach out!). I still need to add more Source Cooperative files, indeed I hope to make a complete fiboa & Fields of The World section, as we’ve got a lot of data up there.

And after the initial release I added a Hugging Face section, which for now is just the Foursquare OS Places dataset, but it seems like more will be added (I contemplated adding the various embeddings datasets but wasn’t sure of the practical use case of making it easier to download). And you can also just enter any custom URL to a GeoParquet online.

Right now you can download data as GeoParquet, DuckDB and GeoPackage. GeoPackage will always work, as all QGIS installations support it. GeoParquet should work on most more recent installations, though OS/X is less straightforward (But I am working with opengis.ch to try to make this better!). DuckDB right now won’t load in QGIS, but I’m starting to collaborate with QDuckDB plugin team and I think I should be able to render the results of a DuckDB download if their plugin is installed.

And that team also deserves a shout-out. Their plugin was the one I looked at the most for how to structure things, and they are working to solve a core issue that I need for the plugin to work well — install DuckDB. DuckDB is the core engine that powers the entire thing, as everything I did was just wrappers to all of its amazing functionality.

Installing the plugin

If this seems like something that’s useful to you it should be pretty easy to install the plugin. Just open the plugin manager and search for ‘GeoParquet’.

I think the installation process is now pretty good. Matt Travis, the first outside contributor to the plugin, worked to get it to automatically install. I think it works most of the time, but I’m not 100% sure — it attempts to automatically use ‘pip’ to install DuckDB, but I’d guess that’s sometimes blocked. My hope is GDAL 3.11 with ADBC support will enable a more ‘native’ DuckDB experience in QGIS, and that we’ll be able to include it as a core dependency.

Future Features

It is on the list for the plugin to add support for more formats (which should be a great first issue for any potential contributors) — FlatGeobuf is the top of my list, and File Geodatabase also sounds interesting. If there’s other formats desired just add them to the issue. I’m pretty opposed to adding Shapefile since it comes with so many limitations that I think will get in the way of using Overture and other data, but if someone wants to make a PR and really needs it I’m sure I’d accept it.

I’ve got a number of ideas in the issue tracker, but I’d love to hear from others what they’d like to see. I don’t see this being a huge project, and indeed I could see one route of ‘success’ being that this type of functionality is more incorporated into the QGIS core. It’s a bit of a different workflow, that I actually think would also be interesting with traditional geospatial servers (WFS, ArcGIS Feature Service, etc). Instead of having QGIS try to stream data on each screen change just have the user manually ‘check out’ the data that they want — download it and then display / use that local version.

The top future ideas that I’m thinking about are:

• User configurable data sources, instead of me maintaining the list and manually updating when new ones come. I could see making it so an organization can make their own ‘tab’ and even button that has a bunch of layers that are relevant to their users. And to make it easy for a user to add their own layers, instead of having to enter each manually.
• More download options beyond just the viewport, as mentioned above.
• Better integration with STAC, though that will need data providers to implement. But ideally you could point at a STAC catalog and get the list of Geoparquet layers to download.
• Ability to point at a GeoParquet file and see how well it implements (in-progress) GeoParquet best practices. I started a library to help do this, so hope to finish that and wrap it in this QGIS plugin (or maybe it will be a standalone plugin).

What’s Next

I’d love more help on this project, and my hope is to make it an experiment of AI-enabled open source. Since I wrote 99% of it with AI coding tools I’m very happy to have all the contributions be similarly made, so if you’ve been wondering about how it all works and want a practical introduction that creates code for others to use then please take an issue!

I had thought I would also share more about my experience of using AI coding tools to create it, but since this post is already quite long I’ll break it up into its own. I’ve also got a number of insights into the state of public GeoParquet files and how we can improve the ecosystem of public data, but I’ll also save that for its own post. So stay tuned! I hope to publish both of those posts soon.

About me

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a former compiler engineer and bring a passion for great tooling. I love being able to work with others on an expansive, vivid, and important project.

My mapping

Mapping continues to provide joy and satisfaction. I am astounded by the number of passionate, clever, and kind mappers that I have had the pleasure of collaborating with over the last two years. Most of my editing remains in the United States but who doesn’t love a little “vacation” every once in a while?

As a board member

OSM-US has achieved so much in the past two years that it’s difficult to list everything. More conferences, expanding working groups, even more hiring and fundraising.

• 2 in-person State of the Map US conferences
• 2 virtual-only Mapping USA conferences
• 2 new working groups (Pedestrian and Imagery)
• 4 strategic level memberships
• 5 amazing staff members!!
• Continued the charter projects program (OSMCha, MapRoulette, OpenHistoricalMap)
• Started our community project program (OpenStreetMap Americana, OSM Slice, OSMMerge
• …and more!

It’s been an enormous pleasure to work with my fellow board members and our Executive Director to continue the upward trend of this amazing organization. I hope to continue that work.

I have learned so much over my two-year term but I remain committed to the principles in my original position statement:

Great organizing makes contributing easier and more engaging. The working group model continues to grow and pay dividends. It remains one of the best ways to identify, engage with, and solve some of our biggest issues. The Education Working Group will soon be able to roll out sandboxed instances of OSM so that our newest mappers can safely play and learn. Our newest working group is tackling pedestrian infrastructure and has been hugely successful at bringing together various parties to help us all move collectively forward.

I believe the most successful map is the one we ALL build together. I have continued to engage productively with folks across the OSM-US Slack, Mastodon, community board, Discord, etc. Over this time I was asked to be part of the moderation team for the OSM Mastodon instance and have taken on the “helper” role in the OSM Discord. We don’t all need to be in the same spaces to make great maps but it is often helpful in my role as board member to have an expansive view of the community, even those outside the US.

The map today is great but the map tomorrow will be even better. It can be intimidating and difficult to know what work “needs” to be done. There are a million things to do and lots of energy to do them. Over the past two years I have facilitated numerous efforts to help folks direct their energy.

• Created and coordinated on various tasking manager projects.
• Built SmallTownBot and analyzed the results. (HUGE success!!)
• Developed and maintained TIGERMap to help motivate folks to keep scrutinizing our roadways!

Some projects I will be working on this coming year to achieve a better map:

• Expand the tooling for SmallTownBot to generate awareness of more unmapped places.
• Continue to explore and evangelize vector-based QA maps like WAMap.
• Begin exploration of the high resolution waterway data from USGS for potential import/guided mapping.

Please reach out if you have questions/concerns/just want to chat, I love to collaborate with and support the goals of other mappers. Nothing is immovable when we all work together.

Read More

2025年1月自從參加完台灣維基媒體的年度大會後，我就想說找時間來完善馬祖的地理資訊和百科條目內容。

complete guide of uploader https://help.mapillary.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020825811-Mapillary-Desktop-Uploader-the-complete-guide

Insta 360 X3 (但我用X2) https://help.mapillary.com/hc/en-us/articles/11951588568604-Insta360-X3

Kartavoice https://voice.kartalink.com/WjekAMMTqpKjqgUL/

Today I will talk about the new version 0.8 of userscript that adds several useful features to osm.org.

You can view existing features of the script and install it on GitHub or in the OSM Wiki

⚡️ Faster rendering

My first PR was merged to openstreetmap-website code, and now the Map Data layer loads instantly. Be sure to try it. Thanks to the maintainers for help!

For the script, this means a huge acceleration in rendering large relations and GPS tracks (yes, tracks, read more!):

icon 👥 near relations is clickable 😉

📸 Photos from Panoramax, StreetComplete, Wikipedia Commons

Now they are displayed directly on the website. In notes, in tag history, and in changesets.

🏃‍♂️ Rendering of GPS tracks

Finally, by opening the starting coordinate of the track, you will be able to see the entire GPX track on the map:

Let me remind you that the Z key allows you to fit an object on the screen.

The track is also drawn when opening notes from StreetComplete

The rendering of tracks is still very simple, if you have any examples of successful visualizations, please share them.

💬 Comments on changesets

Now you don’t have to open the changesets to understand if there is an interesting discussion or if this is another revert of vandalism.

by the way, long links like *.openstreetmap.org replaced by *.osm.org

🫂 Edits of friends

upd: this feature was recently renamed to Followings. Now there are no friends in OSM (:

Did you know that OSM has a friends feature? You can even follow their edits here: https://osm.org/history/friends

better-osm-org can now filter changesets on this page. The script also tries to show around the username that it’s your friend.

Let’s be friends :) https://osm.org/user/TrickyFoxy/follow

🛰 Satellite image Switch (Firefox only)

Satellite images could be switched using the S key, or using the button on the side of the note. But what about Firefox for Android? And how do I find out about S? Now there is a button in the right panel for this.

Pressing the Shift key will show you the ESRI Beta images. But be patient, because they take longer to load.

📄 Experimental files viewer for geotagged photos, .gpx and .geojson files

If we can now quickly render data, then why not be able to open it from files? Just drag them onto the map:

p.s. for now, it’s more of a PoC, feel free to suggest your ideas.

⌨️ Hotkeys

Where without them? :)

• ` — hide the geometry of the changeset from the map
• T — toggle between compact and full tags diff mode
• F — filter changesets
• Hotkeys on user profile Page (H — user changesets history, T — tracks, D — Diary, C — comments, N — notes)
• U — open user profile from changeset, note, …
• Shift + U — open your profile

By the way, do you know about the new feature of the site? https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/changeset_comments

As well as about the previous versions that I wrote about on the forum.

v0.7: 📝 Templates for comments on changesets and notes

so that you have the necessary link from the wiki at hand:) Buttons for commenting on changeset will only add text to the input field, without submitting.

🔍 In the list of relation members, you can now see ways on the map

In order not to clutter the map, relations are shown only on hover. Now the relation can be pinned.

Other

• shift + Z to zoom to bbox without taking into account relations
• Q key to close the sidebar
• C key open changeset from object version
• In the settings, you can enable overzoom for the Map Data layer

0.6.1: ⏬ Display intermediate versions for ways

Now, when you click ⏬ on the way history page, all changes will be displayed, including in the tags and coordinates of nodes of the way

If there are too many versions, you will see the versions filter. The K/L combination also works, but I recommend you try it ScrollAnywhere to navigate through the map with the middle mouse button

⚠️ there may be problems if some nodes are hidden by moderators.

Other

• When you hover over the tag table, the number of tags is now displayed
• Improved HDYC colors in the user profile (thanks @LouisXIV)
• Fixing the color of human-readable wikidata extension cells in a dark theme
• More tooltips
• A small Easter egg. Try to find a New Year’s tree in your city (or map it!) (It’s open only on New Year’s holidays)

v0.5.7: 🔦 Dark theme for iD

⚔️ Edits wars detector

example

#️⃣ Clickable hashtags in comment of changesets

🔗 Clickable links to Panoramax and Mapillary, as well as highlighting fixme=

🔍 More Overpass links in Taginfo

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/relations/waterway#roles https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/reports/key_lengths#keys

p.s. The script also fixes broken links to Overpass Turbo on https://taginfo.geofabrik.de, if there is a space in the country or region name.

👁 Redactions bypass

Bypass Redactions (so far only tags) (even for edits before 2012! Data that is hidden is uploaded to GitHub https://github.com/deevroman/better-osm-org/issues/54

↩️ Shift+click for revert via JOSM. And clickable IDs in comments:

⌨️ New hotkeys:

• shift + L — go to your location
• shift + N — create new note (if some object was opened, his link wound prefilled in note text)

https://github.com/deevroman/better-osm-org/

Épicerie coopérative

When and where?

Geomob London took place at 6:00 PM on Thursday the 30th of January, 2025 at Geovation Hub at (Sutton Yard, 65 Goswell Rd, London EC1V 7EN)

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:

• Andy Ashburner, Pin Drop

• Maxime Lenormand, Fused.io

• Michael Dales, Geospatial to save the planet: assessing tropical forest restoration projects using all the data

• Helen Mazalon, Satellite and Seeds: Helping the most vulnerable in northern Uganda with GIS

• Marc Prioleau, Overture Maps Foundation

• Jack Maddalena, Naurt

Please volunteer to speak at future events.

The organizers:

Geomob London is organized by Ed Freyfogle and Steven Feldman

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Merhaba arkadaşlar, Antalya bölgesini düzenleyeceğim. Harita API’sinde koordinat ve isim ekleme özelliği var mı? Eğer varsa, çok basit bir şekilde tüm ülkeyi Google Places ile eşleştirebilirim.

Grounding lines are the boundaries where glaciers and ice sheets transition from resting on solid ground to floating on seawater.

The post Understanding Glacier Grounding Lines appeared first on Geography Realm.

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.

When and where?

Geomob Edinburgh was held at 6pm on Tuesday, January 28th, 2025.

at The Melting Pot at 15 Calton Rd, Edinburgh EH8 8DL (Google Map,OpenStreetMap)

Summary Thread

Post by @[email protected]

View on Mastodon

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 paid for by diagonalWorks and OpenCage.

The speakers:

• Ed Freyfogle - The Joy of Geocoding
• Gregory Marler - The Joy of Geo Socialising
• Nick Sutton - EmergencyLocate Location Data and the Emergency Services

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. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

The new Abstract Specification Topics define fundamental concepts and operations for Coverages, the digital representations of varying phenomena over a specific spatiotemporal extent.

The post OGC approves two new Abstract Specification Topics concerning Coverages appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

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 reporting a bit — I think the row group size in bytes is more important than the number of row groups, but I want to try to gather more information about what’s optimal there.

From there I made a utility to do the Hilbert ordering that DuckDB can do. This was initially just for conveinence, so I could just make a one line call instead of remembering the complex SQL statement. But then I realized that it has some real utility as DuckDB still doesn’t pass through projection information, so if you run the Hilbert DuckDB command on projected data the output isn’t so useful. So I made the output utilize the input parquet metadata. It also writes things out with the best practices I’m checking for, including adding a bbox column. I’m hoping to make it easier to turn that on/off, and to also pull out CLI commands that can run the full formatting or any part of it, but it’s proven a bit trickier than I was hoping.

The other main functionality I was to make it easier to create the ‘admin-partitioned’ GeoParquet distributions that I blogged about awhile ago. I got excited about these, but then they didn’t seem to go anywhere. But I think there are some places it can be quite nice, and I want to try it on this Planet dataset of ML generated field boundaries for all of Europe. So I decided to build a utility that’s a bit more generic.

Matthias Mohr and Ivor Bosloper put together this great administrative division extension for fiboa:

I’ve been thinking a lot about pulling things out of fiboa / STAC to just be a part of the general GeoParquet ecosystem, and this one seems like a perfect one to start with. It has a real practical utility, as once you add these codes you can then split your files by them to partition them spatially.

I did it as two commands, one to add the column (gt add admin-divisions) and then one to split based on the column (gt partition admin). It’s just countries for now, but I hope to add subdivision_code. And it’s just based on Overture, but I also hope to make it so the definition of the admin boundaries is flexible and configurable.

My hope is to add more partitions to the CLI, like the ones Dewey discussed in his post on Partitioning strategies for bigger than memory spatial data. And also hoping to get in more ‘sort’ options as well, and also expand the gt add sub-command to perhaps add h3, s2, geohash, etc. and to also add the bounding box column to any file (I built it into the hilbert sort, so just need to get it fully working and extract it out).

I was hoping to get to create my own first proper pypi package so I could let people pip install geoparquet-tools, but I ran out of time for this round. I hope to do it soon, and to also add proper tests. And then my further hope is to also distribute at least a subset of this functionality as a QGIS plugin, and/or incorporate in my geoparquet downloader plugin, so people can easily check out how well remote parquet files follow the best practices.

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 comparable to snappy.

COPY fields TO 'c-fields.parquet' (FORMAT 'parquet', COMPRESSION 'zstd')

Spatial Optimization

DuckDB’s GeoParquet writer always includes the new bounding box column, which enables much faster spatial filtering. If you are translating GIS data from any format with a spatial index (GeoPackage, FlatGeobuf, Shapefiles) into DuckDB then you don’t need to do anything additional. But sometimes you get data that is not spatially ordered at all. Previously I would write the data out from DuckDB and use another tool to order it, but now the ST_Hilbert function can be used to order your data.

I recently got help on the DuckDB Spatial discussions for how to properly do this, so wanted to write that up for everyone. I’ve been processing Planet metadata that gets served from Planet’s Data API, working to try to make a STAC-GeoParquet version of it. The data is ordered by time, so when you load the full dataset it just fills in everywhere.

I had a false start with the Hilbert curve function, which resulted in a cool pattern of loading the data.

Unfortunately the resulting ordering isn’t all that helpful to optimize spatial queries.

After Max, the author of the DuckDB spatial extension, explained the importance of the ‘bounds’ argument, I was able to get much better results:

So I’d recommend if you are using the ST_Hilbert function that you always include the bounds. For a global dataset like mine you can just do something like:

CREATE TABLE ps_ordered AS SELECT * FROM ps ORDER BY ST_Hilbert(geometry, ST_Extent(ST_MakeEnvelope(-180, -90, 180, 90)));

You can just order as you write the Parquet:

COPY (SELECT * FROM ps ORDER BY ST_Hilbert(geometry, ST_Extent(ST_MakeEnvelope(-180, -90, 180, 90)) TO 'ps-sorted.parquet' (FORMAT 'parquet', COMPRESSION 'zstd');

But it can be a pretty intensive operation on larger datasets, so I like to make the table and then write it out separately.

One cool thing is that proper ordering can help the size of the data, by enabling better compression. The original data was 1.37 gigabytes, and I believe was ordered by time. The badly ordered one was 2.21 gigabytes, and then the properly ordered one was only 1.24 gigabytes.

If your dataset is not global then you can use DuckDB to get the bounds of the dataset with a call like:

SELECT st_extent(ST_Extent_Agg(COLUMNS(geometry)))::BOX_2D

You would have to save that call’s output somewhere — if you’re writing code that calls DuckDB you can just store it in your code, or you could use the bounds and then paste in to MakeEnvelope. Or you can try to do it all in one call — I’ve not tested extensively, but I believe this call should work (credit due to ChatGPT for this one):

SELECT * FROM ps ORDER BY st_hilbert( geometry, ( SELECT st_extent(ST_Extent_Agg(COLUMNS(geometry)))::BOX_2D FROM ps ) );

You can use that to create the table, or to directly write the data out.

I hope this post helps others, and soon gets into the LLM’s. A big thanks to Max for all his amazing work on the spatial extension, and helping me figure out how to get the Hilbert curve working!

Exploring New Frontiers in Risk Management at the Geospatial Risk Summit

OGC invites developers and other contributors to the next Open Standards Code Sprint, to be held from March 25-27, 2025.

The post Registrations Open for the next OGC Code Sprint appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

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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.

• 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.

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

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This QGIS tutorial guides you through pan sharpening Landsat imagery by combining the 15-meter panchromatic band with lower-resolution multispectral bands.

The post Pan Sharpen Landsat Imagery in QGIS appeared first on Geography Realm.

Last December, the OGC@30 Anniversary Celebration and OGC Innovation Days DC 2024 brought together geospatial experts under the theme Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Futures.

The post Overture Maps Foundation at OGC Events 2024: Championing Open Data and Interoperability appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

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 of great reads. I am still mining it for recommendations, older and older entries.

Anyways, this modern day re-telling of Dicken’s David Copperfield is set in Apallacia, amid the height of the opiod crises. The book is tightly written, has some lovely turns of phrase, and a nice tight narrative push, thanks to the borrowed plot structure. I re-read the Dickens after, because it was so much fun to mark out the character borrowings and plot beats.

Master Slave, Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo

This non-fiction re-telling of an original slavery escape narrative is occasionally verbose, but an excellent entrant into a whole category of writing I did not know existed, the contemporaneous slavery escape narrative. For obvious reasons, abolitionists before the Civil War were keen to promote stories that humanized the people trapped in the south, who might otherwise be theoretical to Northern audiences.

The book re-tells the escape of Ellen and William Craft, and wraps that story in a lot of historical context about the millieu they were escaping from (Georgian slavery) and to (abolitionist circles in the North). The actual text of their story is liberally quoted from, but this is a re-telling. Frederick Douglass appears in their story, which gave me the excuse I have been waiting for a long time to read the next book in this list.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

It took me way too long to finally pick up this book, given that Douglass has showed up as such an important figure in the other historical books I have read: Team of Rivals, Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, And There Was Light.

One goes into books from the 1800s wondering just how punishing the language is going to be. Clauses upon subclauses upon subclauses? None of that here. Douglass writes wonderfully clean prose the modern mind can handle, and tells his story with economy but still enough context to make it powerful. Probably because as a master story teller, he was pitching for an audience much like the modern one – made up of people with little knowledge of the particulars of the slave system, just a broad and overly simple sense of the injustice. After 150 years, still devestating and accessible.

How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang

The Goodreads crew does not seem to think this book is as good as I do, but what strikes me about it and what makes me slot it into my “years best” is that I remember it so clearly. This is a historical novel of the California gold rush, from the eyes of children born to Chinese immigrants in the gold fields. It’s both an intense family drama, and an meditation on the power of place. It left me with a strongly remembered sense of the land, and the characters. Even though it covers a big swathe of years, the cast of characters remains small and their interactions meaningful. It’s memorable!

(Also, and this is no small thing, I read Into the Distance by Hernan Diaz this year too, which is set in the same time period and has some of the same beats… so maybe these books are a pairing.)

Julia, Sandra Newman

It’s a great time to be reading about authoritarianism! In the same spirit as pairing up Demon Copperhead with David Copperfield, I also paired up a reading of George Orwell’s 1984 with this retelling of the same story from the point of view of Julia, the love interest in Orwell’s book.

Newman takes the opportunity to flesh out Julia as a character and also the world of 1984 a little more, which makes the re-read of the original really fun. I do not think I noticed before just how much Winston Smith is a self-absorbed schmuck, but once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it.

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray

A tragedy told from the inter-leaved view points of four members of a family falling apart. Each chapter from a different character, each builds up the point of view narrator and also illuminates the others. Mostly the reveal is who these people are, bit by bit, but the plot also slowly clicks together like a puzzle until that last piece slides in, and oh boy.

An easy engaging read that gets more and more intense, but you cannot look away.

Yellowface, R F Huang

Written by an Asian-American author, about a white author appropriating the story of an Asian-American author, the story is gripping, snarky, and unblinking in its takedown of the publishing industry. Come for the plot, stay for the commentary on modern meme-making and self-promotion, the intersection between who we are and who we present ourselves as. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. Or everybody knows you are a dog and hates you for it.

The Librarianist, Patrick deWitt

I don’t think this book made many or any “best of” lists, so it is not clear to me what caused me to read it, but it was a treat. Just a very quiet story about an introverted retired librarian, finding his way as he transitions into retirement, and builds some new connections with his community. Sounds really boring, I know, but I hoovered it up and it still sticks with me. A good read if you need some optimism and calm in your life.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe

A history of the Troubles in Ireland, wrapped around the story of a particular murder, long unsolved, that slowly reveals itself over the decades, as the perpetrators come to terms with their part in that violent chapter of history. The Goodreaders really like this one and I agree. I knew the bare minimum of this chapter of world history (what I gleaned from CNN at the time, and from Derry Girls more recently) and this telling makes an easy introduction, covering a wide sweep of time and context.

Notes from the Burning Age, Claire North

Claire North remains a lesser-known science fiction author, despite her low-key hit The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (read it!), but I’m a convert, and this novel reminded me why. The world is a post-climate crisis culture that has achieved some spiritual and technological balance with the ecology, but is wrestling with the return of what we would describe as “business as usual” – the subjugation of the natural world to the needs of humans.

Following an ecological monk, turned spy, from inside the capital of the new humanists, through the other realms of this world is easy because the journey is wrapped in a high-stakes espionage story. Of all the climate stories I have read lately, this one taken from such a long distance in the future speaks to me most. I want to think we will build something new and better, and while I know our human nature can be malign, I also know it can be beautiful.

Trust, Hernan Diaz

Best for last. Told in multiple sections from multiple perspectives in multiple styles, every narrator is unreliable, each in their own way, but the idea that there is a kernel of truth lying beneath it all never goes away (and yet, is never truly revealed). Perhaps a perfect book club novel for that reason. (Not where I got it, it’s another Pullitzer winner.)

Some facts everyone agrees on. There is a very rich and powerful financier. He has a relationship with a woman who he marries who is very important to him. But in what way? Unclear. And man is malign, but in what ways? The usual mercenary ones you might expect of a Wall Street lion? Worse and additional ways? Unclear. The whole thing is a puzzle box, the language, the characters, the events. Read it. Read it again. Read it a third time.

The civil society organization AfroLeadership, based in Cameroon and serving a wide swath of sub-Saharan Africa, has become a member of OGC.

The post AfroLeadership Joins OGC to Support Advocacy for Transparency, Accountability, and Citizen Participation in Public Policies appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Enhance spatial detail in multispectral images with pan sharpening. Learn how this GIS technique combines data for sharper, more detailed satellite imagery.

The post Pan Sharpening in GIS appeared first on Geography Realm.

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When and where?

• Thursday, 20 February, the afternoon at 16:30–19:30

• Tampere University of Applied Science premises (Kuntokatu 3, Tampere)

• Sign up here by 17th of February

Agenda

Our format:

• Doors open at 16:30 for set up and general mingling over refreshments

• At 17:00 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction

• Each speaker will have slides and speak for 10-15 minutes. Talks will be in English. After each talk there will be time for 2-3 questions.

• After the presentations, the event continues with networking and mingling.

The speakers:

• Mikko Vesanen, Novatron – Use of geospatial data in Novatron applications

• Teijo Meriläinen, Kelluu – Redefining Geospatial Data with Kelluu Airships

• Markus Hohenthal, Lentola Logistcs - Using Location Information in Drone Logistics

• Ilpo Tammi, Ubigu – Power of GIS

The organizers:

Geomob Finland, Tampere is organized by Tampere University of Applied Science in co-operation with Location Innovation Hub and SIX.

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Isostatic rebound is the Earth's slow rise after glaciers melt, reshaping coastlines, revealing landforms, and altering sea levels globally.

The post Isostatic Rebound: How Earth’s Surface Rises after Glaciers Retreat appeared first on Geography Realm.

Transforming Data into Insights: New Light Technologies, Inc. (NLT) Advances Mental Health Research Through Remote Sensing and Data Science Visualization in a New Study Published in Nature Mental Health

A groundbreaking study recently published in Nature Mental Health conducted in collaboration with the TReNDS Center at Georgia State University, New Light Technologies, Inc. (NLT), and researchers from around the world reveals how urban features such as built environments, nighttime light emissions, and vegetation significantly influence children's brain development, cognition, and mental health. This pioneering research combines satellite-derived environmental data with advanced neuroimaging to provide novel insights into the intricate relationship between urban living and young minds. 

When and where?

Geomob Lisbon till take place on the evening of Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 at Startup Lisboa, Rua da Prata 80, 1100-420 Lisbon (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap). Doors open at 17:30 and talks will begin at 18:00 Doors open at 18:00 and talks will begin at 18:15.

Agenda

• Doors open at 18.00, set up and general mingling

• Talks begin at 18:15 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 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.

The speakers:

• Kateryna Konieva, GIS software engineer and 3D enthusiast.
• Mayte Toscano Domínguez, Standards geek and founder of Ping a Programadoras.
• Ana Bonifácio, Architect, urban planner and emotional researcher.

Speaker volunteers are always welcome

The organizers:

Geomob Lisbon (GeomobLX) is organized by Miguel Marques and Joana Simoes.

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Please share the event details with everyone you know who may find the evening interesting.

If you can’t attend (or even if you can) be sure to sign up fory the monthly Geomob mailing list, where we announce upcoming events.

When and where?

Geomob Edinburgh x Edinburgh Earth Observatory Seminars will be held at 5:30pm on Friday, March 28th, 2025.

at The ECCI at Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ (Google Map,OpenStreetMap)

Agenda

Our format for the evening will be:

• doors open at 17:30, set up and general mingling

• at 18:00 we begin the talks with a very brief introduction - some talks brought by Geomob some talks brought by EEO

• 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 and Other sponsor?!.

The speakers:

To be announced.

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. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

When and where?

Geomob Berlin will take place at 18:00 on Wednesday the 4th of June, 2025. Location to be announced.

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 geospatial services and tools

• Dr. Alana Belcon, Maps - Should we trust them?

• Maik Busch, VulkanMaps, a GPU based Rendering Engine for OpenStreetMap

More to be announced. Volunteers needed.

The organizers:

Geomob Berlin is organized by Peter Rose and Ed Freyfogle

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

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.

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.

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 growth.

Sponsorship for the CNG Conference 2025 requires a base sponsorship of $5,000. Then, sponsors can select add-ons to amplify their presence and demonstrate leadership in the geospatial community by offering targeted branding, speaking engagements, and direct engagement with attendees.

To learn more about sponsorship opportunities, please visit 2025-ut.cloudnativegeo.org/sponsor.

The post Taylor Geospatial Institute Announces Next Round of Planet Fellowship Program appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

Themed 'AI for Geo,' the meeting provided members with insights into what’s happening at OGC and how interoperable technologies are critical for tackling global challenges.

The post A Recap of the 130th OGC Member Meeting, Goyang, Korea appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

Census Bureau Releases Final 2020 Census Data Product

The U.S. Census Bureau has officially released its final data product from the 2020 Census: the Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC). This release marks a significant milestone, as it brings a wealth of detailed information about households and the people living in them across the United States, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

OGC’s newest Principal Member, BNETD, assists the Government of Côte d'Ivoire and other countries in eastern sub-Saharan Africa with major economic development projects.

The post Côte d’Ivoire’s BNETD, a Key Player in Economic Development, Joins the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Global Community of Experts appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

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The high-profile awards recognize outstanding individuals and organizations for their exceptional contributions to the community.

The post OGC Honors Geospatial Leaders and Dedicated Contributors at OGC@30 Anniversary Event appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

OGC API – Moving Features provides a standard way to manage and interact with geospatial data representing phenomena and objects that move and change over time.

The post OGC Membership approves OGC API – Moving Features – Part 1: Core as an official OGC Standard appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

The post TGI Challenge: Harnessing Geospatial Innovation for a more food secure future appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

The post  TGI is proud to join the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

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 of hiking, I had plenty of time for reflection and decided to try to switch to some sort of career in geospatial software or data analysis.

I didn’t particularly want to go back to school and had plenty of ideas to explore, so I decided to build a portfolio of projects and hopefully land a job directly. For seven months, my learning was self-directed in the process of making an interactive website dedicated to the Pacific Crest Trail. I learned core geospatial concepts like spatial reference systems and how to manage and join data in Python with GeoPandas and Shapely. I learned basic JavaScript, how to use and create vector tiles, and how to render basic maps online. All the content served from that website I figured out how to generate: OpenStreetMap-based vector tiles, a topographic map style, NAIP-based raster tiles, and USGS-based hillshade data and contour lines.

From the beginning, I was excited about the browser because of its broad accessibility. I wanted to share my passions with the non-technical general public. Everyone has access to a web browser while only domain specialists have access to ArcGIS or QGIS and know how to use them. Even today, if the Pacific Crest Trail comes up in conversation, I’ll pull up the website on my phone and show some of my photography on the map. Interactive web maps connect with the general public at a deeper level than any other medium.

These projects also led me to my first software job. As I was building my own applications, I also contributed bug fixes back to deck.gl and the recently-formed startup Unfolded offered me a job!

Let’s jump right into GeoParquet and GeoArrow. In layman’s terms, what are these tools, and why are they creating such a buzz in the geospatial data community?

GeoParquet and GeoArrow are both ways to speed up handling larger amounts of geospatial data. Let’s start first with GeoParquet since that’s a bit more approachable to understand.

GeoParquet is a file format to store geospatial vector data, as an alternative to options like Shapefile, GeoJSON, FlatGeobuf, or GeoPackage. Similar to how Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) builds upon the existing GeoTIFF and TIFF formats, GeoParquet builds upon the existing Parquet format for tabular data. This gives the GeoParquet format a head start because there are many existing libraries to read and write Parquet data that can be extended with geospatial support.

Three things excite me about GeoParquet: it’s cloud-native, so you can read relevant portions of the file directly from cloud storage, without downloading the entire file. It compresses very well and is fast to read and write, so even in non-cloud-native situations, it can speed up workflows. And it integrates well with other new technologies such as GeoArrow.

GeoParquet is cloud-native

GeoParquet 1.1 introduced support for spatial partitioning. This makes it possible to fetch only specific rows of a file according to a spatial filter.

Note that spatial partitioning is a slightly different concept to spatial indexing. In a format like FlatGeobuf or GeoPackage that performs spatial indexing, it records the position of every single row of your data. This is often useful when you want to quickly access individual rows of data, but it prevents effective compression and becomes harder to scale with large data because the index grows very large. In contrast, spatial partitioning uses chunking, where instead of indexing per row, it records the extent of a whole group of rows. This provides flexibility and scalability when writing GeoParquet data. By adjusting the chunk size, the writer can choose the tradeoff between index size and indexing efficiency.

The upside of spatial partitioning is that an entire group of data is indexed and compressed as a single unit. The downside is that if you do want to access only a single row, you’ll have to fetch extra data. The sweet spot is when you want to access a collection of data that’s co-located in one spatial region. (If your access patterns regularly care about single rows of data, a file format like FlatGeobuf or GeoPackage might be better suited to your needs. GeoParquet is tailored to bulk access to data.)

GeoParquet also lets you fetch only specific columns from a dataset. If the dataset contains 100 columns but your analysis only pertains to the geometry column plus 3 other columns, then you can avoid downloading most of the file. For example, with stac-geoparquet, a user might want to find URLs to the red, green, and blue bands of Landsat scenes within a specific spatial area, date range and cloud cover percentage. This query is much more efficient with GeoParquet because it only needs to fetch these six columns, not all of the dozens of attribute columns.

GeoParquet compresses effectively

GeoParquet also excels even when you don’t care about its cloud-native capabilities. It compresses extremely well on disk and is very fast to read and write. This leads GeoParquet to be used as an intermediate format for analysis, such as GeoPandas, where a user wants to back up and restore their data quickly.

For example, Lonboard, a Python geospatial visualization library I develop, uses GeoParquet under the hood to move data from Python to JavaScript. This isn’t a cloud-native use case, but GeoParquet is still the best format for the job because it compresses data so well and minimizes network data transfer.

GeoParquet’s integration with GeoArrow

GeoParquet is a file format; when you read or write GeoParquet you need to store it as some in-memory representation. This is where GeoArrow comes in. It’s a new way of representing geospatial vector data in memory and a way that’s efficient to operate on and fast to share between programs.

GeoParquet and GeoArrow are well integrated and have a symbiotic relationship, where the growing adoption of one makes the other more appealing. The fastest way to read and write GeoParquet is to and from GeoArrow. But GeoArrow is not strictly tied to GeoParquet: it can be paired with any file format.

For example, GDAL’s adoption of GeoArrow made it 23x faster to read FlatGeobuf and GeoPackage into GeoPandas. Historically, GeoPandas and GDAL didn’t have a way to share a collection of data at a binary level. So GDAL (via the fiona driver) would effectively create GeoJSON Python objects for GeoPandas to consume. This is horribly inefficient. Since GDAL 3.6, GDAL has supported reading into GeoArrow and since GDAL 3.8 it has supported writing from GeoArrow.

With the cloud playing a bigger role in data storage and processing, how can GeoParquet empower new users and unlock possibilities beyond traditional geospatial analysis?

I’m excited for the potential of GeoParquet and related technologies to replace or complement standalone databases. Existing collections of large geospatial data might use a database like PostGIS, which requires an always-on server to respond to user queries and a developer who knows how to maintain that system.

While Parquet itself is a read-only file format, there are newer technologies, like Apache Iceberg, that build on top of Parquet to enable adding, mutating, and removing data. People are discussing how to add geospatial support to Iceberg. In the medium term, Iceberg will be an attractive serverless method to store large, dynamic geospatial data that would be difficult or expensive to maintain in PostGIS.

We continue to see improved performance in both user devices and the cloud. How do you envision the future of geospatial data in web browsers? What kind of use cases would you like to see enabled?

Moving data is difficult and expensive and interacting with the cloud from browser applications presents interesting problems of data locality. Indeed, both user devices and the cloud are getting more powerful, but network connectivity, especially over the public internet, isn’t improving proportionally fast. That means there will continue to be a gulf between local, on-device compute, and cloud compute.

We’ve seen this phenomenon lead to the advent of hybrid data systems that span local and remote data stores. New analytical databases like DuckDB or DataFusion and new data frame libraries like Polars have the potential to work with data on the cloud in a hybrid approach, where only the portions of data required for a given query need to be fetched over the network.

I conclude that in the future there will be geospatial, browser-based hybrid systems. Non-technical users will navigate to a website and connect to all their local and cloud-based data sources. The system will intelligently decide which data sources to download and materialize into the browser. And it will connect to the tech underlying Lonboard, efficiently rendering that data on an interactive map.

I’ve been making steady progress towards this goal. Through the WebAssembly bindings of my geoarrow-rust project, I’ve been collaborating with engineers at Meta to access Overture GeoParquet data directly from the browser. Downloading an extract from the website will perform a spatial query of Overture GeoParquet data directly from S3 without any server involved.

In general, I find “data boundaries” to present fascinating problems. Both local and cloud devices are powerful, but moving data between those two domains is very slow. When do you need to move data across boundaries; how can you minimize what data you need to move, and how can you make the movement most efficient when you actually do need to move it?

Beyond technical expertise, what books, articles, podcasts, or even movies have significantly influenced your career path?

The specific experience with the largest non-technical influence on my career was my time hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It piqued my interest in thinking about data for the outdoors and climate and gave me a strong base of motivation for learning how to work with geospatial data. I consider having motivation and ideas around what to create much more important than learning how to do something. There’s enough technical material on the internet to learn whatever you want. But you need the motivation to push yourself over that initial hump, the period where things just don’t make sense. It’s been really useful for my learning to have an end goal in mind that keeps me motivated to press on through the “valley of despair” of new concepts.

I’d also point to a video by prolific YouTuber and science communicator Tom Scott: “The Greatest Title Sequence I’ve Ever Seen.” It discusses an introductory sequence to a British TV show and notes how much attention to detail there was, even when virtually no one would notice all those details. I love this quote:

“Sometimes, it’s worth doing things for your craft, just because you can. That sometimes it’s worth going above and beyond, and sweating the small stuff because someone else will notice what you’ve done.”

I tend to be a perfectionist and strive for the best because I want it, not because someone else is asking for it. In my own career, I’ve noticed how attention to detail came in handy in unexpected ways. Where by going above and beyond in one project I learned concepts that made later projects possible.

I should also note that a collection of people online have been really strong influences. There are too many to name them all, but Vincent Sarago and Jeff Albrecht were two of the first people I met in the geospatial community and they’ve been incredible mentors. And the writings and code of people like Tom MacWright and Volodymyr Agafonkin have taught me so much.

Spotlight on Success: University of Maryland Alumni at New Light Technologies

Introduction

Discover the inspiring stories of University of Maryland alumni who are now key players at New Light Technologies (NLT). This article celebrates their contributions to our projects and showcases the real-world impact of their academic training.

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 spread across ~500,000 netCDF files. Presented by Thomas Nicholas from Worthy, LLC. Learn more.

Supporting Open Science with the CF Metadata Conventions for NetCDF: This talk highlights the Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions, a critical standard for sharing and processing Earth science data in netCDF format and in Zarr/GeoZarr. Presented by Ethan Davis from NSF Unidata. Learn more.

Thursday Dec 12

Integrating Zarr with netCDF: Advancing Cloud-Native Scientific Data Interoperability with ncZar: This paper explores the integration of ncZarr with the netCDF ecosystem. The authors will discuss the current state of this effort, and what can be expected in upcoming netCDF releases. They will outline use cases, and discuss, in practical terms, how to use ncZarr as part of a cloud-based workflow which assumes the involvement of the netCDF data model. Presented by Ward Fisher from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Learn more.

Transforming NASA Earth Observation Data With POWER: This paper explores NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project and its utilization of cloud-optimized formats like Zarr for delivering Earth observation data. Presented by Nikhil Aluru from ORCID, Inc, NASA Langley Research Center. Learn more.

A new sub-chunking strategy for fast netCDF-4 access in local, remote and cloud infrastructures: This paper presents a new strategy for faster access to netCDF-4 data in various environments. A comparison with the cloud-oriented formats Zarr and NCZarr is conducted. Presented by Pierre-Marie Brunet from Centre National d’Études Spatiales. Learn more.

Seamless Arrays - A Full Stack, Cloud-Native Architecture for Fast, Scalable Data Access: This talk will introduce a new approach to accessing Earth systems data called “Seamless Arrays,” which is the ability to easily query a data cube across both spatial and temporal dimensions with consistent low latency. The author will showcase their prototype implementation of Seamless arrays, inspired by cloud-native database systems like Snowflake, consisting of two primary components - a Zarr-based schema and an API layer. Presented by Joseph Hamman from Earthmover. Learn more.

Cubed - Bounded-Memory Serverless Array Processing in Xarray Cubed is a framework for processing large arrays, designed to be memory-efficient and scalable. It uses Zarr as a persistent storage layer and can run on various cloud platforms. The authors will demonstrate running Cubed in the cloud for various common geoscience analytics workloads. Presented by Tom White from Tom White Consulting. Learn more.

Friday Dec 13

Pangeo-ESGF CMIP6 Zarr Data 2.0 - Streaming Access to CMIP6 data in the cloud that rocks!: This talk will introduce the new data, describe the ingestion architecture, reflect on both successes and challenges of this approach, and elaborate on future directions for Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6+ and CMIP7). You will be convinced to use the cloud data for research! Presented by Julius Johannes Marian Busecke from LDEO/Columbia University. Learn more.

Leveraging GPU Acceleration for High-Resolution 3D Visualization of Earth Observation Data: This paper explores a workflow for leveraging GPUs to visualize Earth observation data in 3D, enabling rapid rendering and enhanced analysis capabilities. Presented by Navaneeth Rangaswamy Selvaraj from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Learn more.

Earth Science Data Access and Discovery and the Cloud: Past, Present, and Future II: This poster explores the evolution of cloud computing for Earth science data access and discovery, along with best practices for maximizing cloud investment. Presented by Douglas J Newman from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Learn more.

How can we make cloud computing actually accessible to all scientists?: This talk explores the barriers hindering wider adoption of cloud computing in scientific research and proposes solutions for overcoming them. Presented by Ryan Abernathey from Earthmover. Learn more.

High-Performance Access to Archival Data Stored in HDF4 and HDF5 on Cloud Object Stores Without Reformatting the Files: This paper explores a NASA-sponsored technology, DMR++, which is designed to enhance access to large, historical datasets stored in older formats like HDF4 and HDF5. By leveraging cloud object stores, DMR++ enables efficient data access without the need for time-consuming reformatting. This technology optimizes data storage and access, particularly for massive datasets, and can even store calculated values directly within the data structure, eliminating the need for specialized software tools. Presented by James H R Gallagher from OPeNDAP, Inc. Learn more.

Exploring Innovation in Biodiversity Conservation Decision-Making Through Open Science and Generative AI: This talk explores how recent innovations in open science overcomes these barriers and creates opportunities to advance decision-making. The authors introduce a cloud-native geospatial visualization tool with chat-driven interfaces, showcasing how it leverages open data layers and generative AI. Presented by Cassidy Buhler from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Learn more.

iPoster Gallery

TensorLakeHouse: A High-Performance, Open-Source Platform for Accelerated Geospatial Data Management with Hierarchical Statistical Indices This online poster introduces TensorLakeHouse, an open-source platform designed for high-performance geospatial data management and processing. Presenting author: Naomi Simumba from IBM Research. Learn more.

This list provides a starting point for exploring the exciting world of cloud-native geospatial at AGU 2024. Our blog is open source. If we are missing any talks or posters, you can suggest edits on GitHub.

Remember to check the conference website for the latest schedule and additional details. Happy exploring!

Initiative aimed at identifying and addressing critical problems in food security calls for subject matter and geospatial experts to shape its activities and collaborate on innovation projects.

The post Generative AI and the Geospatial Renaissance: A Call to Innovate appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

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.

As Geography Awareness Month 2024 has wrapped up, we reflect on the overwhelming success of DMV GIS Day, held on November 20. This inaugural virtual event brought together a dynamic and engaged audience to celebrate the transformative power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the innovation driving progress across the District, Maryland, and Virginia. DMV GIS Day was a standout moment for the geospatial community with world-class speakers, thought-provoking panels, and an impressive turnout.

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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.

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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 workshops.

Interested in attending? Let us know if you want to attend by completing the form below:

Summary Thread

When and where?

The event’s venue is at Gaston Crommenlaan 4, 9000 Gent, at the TomTom offices. The exact entrance of the building is here. You take elevator 4s to the 5th floor, there the door should be open.

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.

• We head to a nearby pub for discussion and #geobeers paid for by the sponsors.

The speakers:

• Britt Lonneville, VLIZ, Barbie, Blackpink and Maritime Boundaries.
• Kevin Baker, RouteYou, The perks of a route-sharing platform: piggybacking on others’ journeys.
• Rein Debrulle, Gent Gemapt, Ghent Mapped, a map to bridge collections.
• Salim Baidoun, TomTom, TomTom and the OpenStreetMap story.

For this Geomob, we have our speakers. Would you like to speak on the next Geomob Belgium? Volunteer here

The organizers:

Geomob Belgium is organized by Ben Abelshausen and Han Tambuyzer

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

DMV GIS Day 2024 – Celebrating Geospatial Excellence with a Special Proclamation from Mayor Bowser

As we count down to the inaugural DMV GIS Day on November 20, 2024, we are thrilled to announce that this event is not just about celebrating the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but also recognizing the vital role GIS plays in transforming our communities. This year, DMV GIS Day has received a special proclamation from Mayor Muriel Bowser, honoring the event’s significance and acknowledging the profound impact of geospatial technologies on the Washington, D.C. , and the DMV region.

Every year, on November 11th, we come together as a nation to celebrate Veterans Day, honoring the brave men and women who have served in the United States Armed Forces. This day is more than just a holiday; it's an opportunity to recognize the sacrifices these individuals have made to protect our freedoms and ensure our safety. It's a time to express our deepest gratitude and reflect on the enduring values they bring back to our communities.

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 shift is driving innovation across the industry.

Support Industry Adoption

Your participation is important as we strive to help more data users adopt a cloud-native geospatial approach. By attending, you’re contributing to a growing movement to make geospatial data more accessible and useful for data users.

Connect with the Community

This conference offers a vendor-neutral space for practitioners across sectors to collaborate and exchange ideas. Whether you’re interested in learning or networking, this is the place to connect with other geospatial professionals.

Help Shape the Future

Beyond learning, this event is about building a community dedicated to advancing geospatial data accessibility and usability. Join us and be part of a community-driven effort to innovate and improve geospatial technology.

Sessions and Topics

We have a range of sessions lined up, covering both foundational and technical topics, organized into three key sections throughout the day:

Section 1: Foundations of Cloud-Native Geospatial

We will begin the day with foundational topics, including a keynote from Javier de la Torre on breaking down GIS data silos with cloud-native technology. There will also be insights into how the U.S. government implements cloud-native geospatial solutions and demos of featured cloud-native datasets hosted on Source Cooperative.

Section 2: Technology Deep Dive and Live Demos

The second session takes a closer look at the technical side of cloud-native formats with live demonstrations. Dr. Qiusheng Wu’s keynote will explore the transformative role of cloud-native technologies in modern GIS curricula, followed by demos from experts showcasing cloud-native geo solutions like VirtualiZarr, PMTiles, GeoParquet, and Icechunk.

Section 3: The Future of Cloud-Native Geospatial

The conference wraps up with a forward-looking session on the power of community in cloud-native geospatial. Dr. Brianna Rita Pagán’s keynote will address the importance of a strong CNG community, and Dana Bauer will lead a discussion on building and sustaining this community over time.

Register Today!

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to connect, learn, and contribute to the future of geospatial technology. Secure your spot today and be part of the growing cloud-native geospatial community. Explore the agenda and purchase tickets here.

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors

A special thank you to our sponsors for their support in making the CNG Virtual Conference 2024 possible.

Stay Connected

Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates, and use #CloudNativeGeo2024 to join the conversation. For any conference-related questions, feel free to reach out at [email protected].

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 of 330,526,186 individuals representing America's 50 states and Washington D.C.. Each individual has a set of geographical locations that represent their home, work or school addresses. Additionally, these individuals are not isolated, they are embedded in a larger social setting based on their household, working and studying relationships (i.e., social networks).

The work (e.g., data collection, data preprocessing and generation processes) was coded using Python 3.12 and all the scripts used are available at: https://github.com/njiang8/geo-synthetic-pop-usa while the resulting datasets (85 GB uncompressed) are available at OSF: https://osf.io/fpnc2/.  

To give you a sense of the paper, below we provide the abstract to it, along with  some results and our efforts to validate the synthetic population. While at the full reference and link to the paper can be found at the bottom of the post. 

Abstract:

Within the geo-simulation research domain, micro-simulation and agent-based modeling often require the creation of synthetic populations. Creating such data is a time-consuming task and often lacks social networks, which are crucial for studying human interactions (e.g., disease spread, disaster response) while at the same time impacting decision-making. We address these challenges by introducing a Python based method that uses the open data including that from 2020 U.S. Census data to generate a large-scale realistic geographically explicit synthetic population for America's 50 states and Washington D.C. along with the stylized social networks (e.g., home, work and schools). The resulting synthetic population can be utilized within various geo-simulation approaches (e.g., agent-based modeling), exploring the emergence of complex phenomena through human interactions and further fostering the study of urban digital twins.

Keywords: Synthetic Population, U.S. Census 2020, Agent-Based Modeling, Geo-Simulation, Social Networks.

Data Generation Workflow and Resulting Datasets.

A Sample of a Social Networks for one Household and their Home, Work and Educational Social Networks from the Generated Data.

Sample of Generated Social Networks Extracted from the City of Buffalo, New York: (a) Household; (b) Work; (c) School; (d) Daycare.

Validation of the Synthetic Population at Different Levels: (a) Population under Different 18 Age Groups; (b) Household under Different Household Types.

Full Referece: 

Jiang, N., Yin, F., Wang., B. and Crooks, A.T., (2024), A Large-Scale Geographically Explicit Synthetic Population with Social Networks for the United States, Scientific Data, 11, 1204. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03970-1 (pdf)

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.

New Light Technologies (NLT) is excited to continue our long-standing support of So Others Might Eat (SOME) by sponsoring this year’s Trot for Hunger event at an increased Advocate Sponsor level. This marks over a decade of partnership with SOME, during which we've been proud to contribute to their mission of providing essential services, including food, housing, healthcare, and job training, to those in need in Washington, DC.

OGC API – EDR – Part 2 defines a web interface for efficient event-driven data updates, employing a Publish-Subscribe Workflow for real-time notifications.

The post OGC Membership approves OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval – Part 2: Publish-Subscribe Workflow as an official OGC Standard appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

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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: 

1. How to run the Patterns of Life Simulation with the graphical user interface (GUI) to visually explore the mobility patterns of a region.
2. How to run the Patterns of Life Simulation headless (without GUI) for large-scale data generation.
3. How to adapt the simulation to any region in the world using OpenStreetMap data,
4. 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 trajectory dataset or a new map for the simulation. At the bottom of the post you can actually see the papers full reference and a link to download it. While at https://github.com/onspatial/generate-mobility-dataset you can find the source code for the enhanced simulation and data-processing tools for you to experiment with.

Abstract: 

We demonstrate the Patterns of Life Simulation to create realistic simulations of human mobility in a city. This simulation has recently been used to generate massive amounts of trajectory and check-in data. Our demonstration focuses on using the simulation twofold: (1) using the graphical user interface (GUI), and (2) running the simulation headless by disabling the GUI for faster data generation. We further demonstrate how the Patterns of Life simulation can be used to simulate any region on Earth by using publicly available data from OpenStreetMap. Finally, we also demonstrate recent improvements to the scalability of the simulation allows simulating up to 100,000 individual agents for years of simulation time. During our demonstration, as well as offline using our guides on GitHub, participants will learn: (1) The theories of human behavior driving the Patters of Life simulation, (2) how to simulate to generate massive amounts of synthetic yet realistic trajectory data, (3) running the simulation for a region of interest chosen by participants using OSM data, (4) learn the scalability of the simulation and understand the properties of generated data, and (5) manage thousands of parallel simulation instances running concurrently.

Keywords: Patterns of Life, Simulation, Trajectory, Dataset, Customization

A screenshot of the graphical user interface of the Patterns of Life Simulation. The GUI shows the map and the movements of agents on the left side and the social network of agents and their statistical properties on the right side.

Steps to generate the one trajectory dataset.

Steps to generate a new map for the simulation.

Full referece: 

Amiri, H., Kohn, W., Ruan, S., Kim, J-S., Kavak, H., Crooks, A.T., Pfoser, D., Wenk, C. and Zufle, A. (2024) The Pattern of Life Human Mobility Simulation (Demo Paper), ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, Atlanta, GA. (pdf)

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. While the model itself and the data needed to run it is available at https://osf.io/zrtuj/

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped societies and brought to the forefront simulation as a tool to explore the spread of the diseases including that of agent-based modeling. Efforts have been made to ground these models on the world around us using synthetic populations that attempt to mimic the population at large. However, we would argue that many of these synthetic populations and therefore the models using them, miss the social connections which were paramount to the spread of the pandemic. Our argument being is that contagious diseases mainly spread through people interacting with each other and therefore the social connections need to be captured. To address this, we create a geographically-explicit synthetic population along with its social network for the Western New York (WNY) Area. This synthetic population is then used to build a framework to explore a hypothetical contagious disease inspired by various of COVID-19. We show simulation results from two scenarios utilizing this framework, which demonstrates the utility of our approach capturing the disease dynamics. As such we show how basic patterns of life along with interactions driven by social networks can lead to the emergence of disease outbreaks and pave the way for researchers to explore the next pandemic utilizing agent-based modeling with geographically explicit social networks.

Keywords: Agent-based Modeling, Synthetic Populations, Social Networks, COVID-19, Disease Modeling.

Single Lineage Results: (a) Overall SEIR Dynamic; (b) Contact Tracing Example.

Western New York Commuting Pattern.

Disease Dynamics when Two Lineages are Introduced.

Reference: 

Jiang N., Crooks, A.T. (2024), Studying Contagious Disease Spread Utilizing Synthetic Populations Inspired by COVID-19: An Agent-based Modeling Framework, Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024), Atlanta, GA., pp. 29-32. (pdf)

When and where?

The first Geomob Netherlands took place in Utrecht on the evening of Thursday, October 31st, 2024 at the NOVI University of Applied Sciences: Newton House, 4th floor, Newtonlaan 247, 2584 BH Utrecht OpenStreetMap, Google Maps

Summary thread

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.

• We vote by 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:

• Ed Freyfogle, Looking back at 15+ years of Geomob

• Leonardo Mauri, T(w)o tree(s) or not to tree: the 3+30+300 rule

• Petra Schoon, Spatial Autocorrelation

• JP Mens, OwnTracks

• Edward Betts, Tools for linking Wikidata and OpenStreetMap

Would you like to speak at a future event? Speaker volunteers are always welcome

The organizers:

Geomob Netherlands (GeomobNL) is organized by Dirk Voets, Leonardo Mauri, and Melissa Kwakernaak.

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Please share the event details with everyone you know who may find the evening interesting.

If you can’t attend (or even if you can) be sure to sign up fory the monthly Geomob mailing list, where we announce upcoming events.

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/

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.

On October 2-3, 2024, New Light Technologies (NLT) participated for the fourth time in the Innovation Summit for Preparedness & Resilience (InSPIRE), organized by the NAPSG Foundation. Held at Indiana University in Indianapolis, the event brought together leaders in geospatial technology, public safety, and emergency management to explore cutting-edge geospatial solutions for disaster management. NLT proudly served as a Platinum sponsor, underscoring our commitment to enhancing the safety, resilience, and well-being of communities. NLT has long been dedicated to fostering partnerships between public and private sectors and academia in the field of disaster management, advancing public safety technologies that make communities more resilient.

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.

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

Matt Forrest
Director of Customer Engineering & Product Led Growth
Wherobots

Matthew Hanson
Director of Aerospace
Element 84

Chris Holmes
Product Architect
Planet

Max Jones
Cloud Engineer
Development Seed

Stephanie May
Founder
Geocentric Minds

Dr. Brianna R. Pagán
Deputy Manager
NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center

Amy Rose
Technical Director
Overture Maps Foundation

Qiusheng Wu
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Deptartment of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Zhuangfang NaNa Yi
Principal Machine Learning Scientist
Regrow

---

When and where?

Geomob Barcelona took place at 6:00 PM on Wednesday the 16th of October, 2024 at CoWorkIdea, at Carrer de Torres i Amat, 21, First Floor.

The goal of Geomob is to provide a forum to learn and exchange ideas about any interesting services and projects that deal with location. Everyone working in or curious about the location space or with location services is welcome. You absolutely do not need to be some sort of GIS expert (though GIS experts are of course welcome as well).

Summary Thread

Agenda

• 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:

• Alexander Kamenev, aino.world

• Dan Hirst, Geospatial for Carbon Offsets

• Marc Solé, Indra

• Joel Grau Bellet, Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya

• Alexander Semenov, Geosemantica: introduction to our geospatial use cases

Want to speak at a future event? Please volunteer.

The organizer:

GeomobBCN is organized by Ed Freyfogle

Thanks

Geomob would not be possible without speakers and sponsors. Over the years we have had so many fantastic talks, spanning the range from inspirational to informative to weird and wacky. See the list of all the past speakers. Please get in touch if you would like to speak at a future Geomob.

Please share the event details with everyone you know who may find the evening interesting.

If you can’t attend (or even if you can) be sure to sign up fory the monthly Geomob mailing list, where we announce upcoming events.

Read More

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.

The post TGI Connect Newsletter: September 2024 appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

The post Geo-Resolution 2024 Showcased a Thriving Geospatial Ecosystem appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

The post TGI Spotlight – Shaowen Wang, TGI Research Associate and Research Council member appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

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.

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 travelled the particular path of colorectal cancer treatment. Some of them I knew from meetings and events, some from their own footprint on the internet, some of them were new to me. But they were all kind and supportive and it really helped, in the dark and down times.

From my work on the University of Victoria Board of Governors, I have come to know a lot of people in the community there, and they were so kind to me when I shared my diagnosis. My fellow board members stepped in and took on the tasks I have not been able to do the past few months, and the members of the executive and their teams were so generous in sending their well-wishes.

And finally, my employers at Crunchy Data were the best. Like above and beyond. When I told them the news they just said “take as much time as you need and get better”. And they held to that. My family doctor asked “do you need me to write you a letter for your employer” and I said “no, they’re good”, and he said, “wow! don’t see that very often”. You don’t. I’m so glad Crunchy Data is still small enough that it can be run ethically by ethical people. Not having to worry about employment on top of all the other worries that a cancer diagnosis brings, that was a huge gift, and not one I will soon forget.

I think people (and Canadians to a fault, but probably people in general) worry about imposing, that communicating their good thoughts and prayers could be just another thing for the cancer patient to deal with, and my personal experience was: no, it wasn’t. Saying “thanks, I appreciate it” takes almost no energy, and the boost of hearing from someone is real. I think as long as the patient doesn’t sweat it, as long as they recognize that “ackknowledged! thanks!” is a sufficient response, it’s all great.

Fortunately, I am not a princess, so the volume was not insuperable. Anyways, thank you to everyone who reached out over the past 6 months, and also to all those who just read and nodded, and maybe shared with a friend, maybe got someone to take a trip to the gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy.

Talk to you all again soon, inshala.

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 time

Abstract: 

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted an unprecedented global effort to understand and mitigate the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this study, we present a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 in Western New York (WNY), integrating individual patient-level genomic sequencing data with a spatially informed agent-based disease Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) computational model. The integration of genomic and spatial data enables a multi-faceted exploration of the factors influencing the transmission patterns of COVID-19, including genetic variations in the viral genomes, population density, and movement dynamics in New York State (NYS). Our genomic analyses provide insights into the genetic heterogeneity of SARS-CoV-2 within a single lineage, at region-specific resolutions, while our population analyses provide models for SARS-CoV-2 lineage transmission. Together, our findings shed light on localized dynamics of the pandemic, revealing potential cross-county transmission networks. This interdisciplinary approach, bridging genomics and spatial modeling, contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of COVID-19 dynamics. The results of this study have implications for future public health strategies, including guiding targeted interventions and resource allocations to control the spread of similar viruses.

Phylogenetic and spatial–temporal distribution of omicron BA.2.12.1. (A) Geographic introduction and organization of BA.2.12.1 lineage from February 2022 to November 2022, by percentage of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in each county per month. N/A represents counties with no BA.2.12.1 cases sequenced. (B) Phylogenetic clustering of jukes-cantor distance estimations between consensus sequences of 2,737 samples. Lineages on the phylogenetic tree are color-coded by county; Erie County (pink), Monroe County (green), Onondaga County (blue), and Westchester County (chartreuse). (C) Hierarchical clustering of sample-to-sample distance estimation of 2,737 BA.2.12.1 lineages in four counties across NYS, with k-means clustering k = 4.

SEIR model schematic and dynamics. (A) Schematics of SEIR model including general parameter and synthetic population parameter sets, and model initialization and function (B) R0 = 3 Susceptibility, Exposed, Infectious, and Recovered curves based on the introduction of two infected agents, monitored over time. (C) R0 = 5, (D) R0 = 8.

Commuter behavior dynamics in WNY. Estimated commuter populations originating in a specific county. (A) Commuter behavior with Erie County origins. (B) Commuter behavior from Niagara County origin. (C) Commuter behavior from Monroe County origin. (D) Composite Commuter behavior network.

Full Reference: 

Bard, J.E., Jiang, N., Emerson, J., Bartz, M., Lamb, N.A., Marzullo, B.J., Pohlman, A., Boccolucci, A., Nowak, N.J., Yergeau, D.A., Crooks, A.T. and Surtees, J. (2024), Genomic Profiling and Spatial SEIR Modeling of COVID-19 Transmission in Western New York, Frontiers in Microbiology, 15. Available at  https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2024.1416580  (pdf)

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.

• 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.

As the digital transformation of industries accelerates, the management of Digital Twins and Building Information Models (BIM) has emerged as a critical challenge. These models are fundamental in sectors such as construction, urban planning, and facility management, providing detailed representations of physical assets and enabling advanced simulations and analyses. However, the complexity of these models, coupled with the involvement of multiple stakeholders, presents significant challenges in maintaining data integrity, managing derivative works, and ensuring the enforcement of contracts.

Blockchain technology offers a powerful solution to these challenges by providing a secure, decentralized, and transparent system for managing Digital Twins and BIM models. Here’s how blockchain can revolutionize this space: Data Integrity and Security: - Example: Consider a large-scale infrastructure project involving a Digital Twin of a smart city. The model needs to be frequently updated with data from various sensors, construction teams, and urban planners. With blockchain, every update to the Digital Twin is recorded on an immutable ledger, ensuring that the data remains consistent and secure over time. This prevents unauthorized changes, ensuring that all stakeholders can trust the data’s accuracy and reliability. - Benefit: Blockchain’s decentralized ledger makes it nearly impossible for any single entity to alter the data without detection, significantly reducing the risk of data tampering and ensuring that the Digital Twin remains a trustworthy source of information throughout the project lifecycle. Provenance and Traceability: - Example: In the development of a new commercial building, the BIM model undergoes multiple iterations, with contributions from architects, engineers, and contractors. Blockchain enables each modification to the model to be logged with a timestamp and the identity of the contributor. If a design flaw is later discovered, stakeholders can trace back through the blockchain to identify who made each change, when it was made, and the rationale behind it. - Benefit: This level of traceability ensures accountability and transparency, allowing project managers to easily audit the development process and maintain a clear history of the model’s evolution. It also simplifies the process of compliance with regulatory requirements by providing an unalterable record of the model’s development. Smart Contracts and Licensing: - Example: Imagine a scenario where a BIM model is used by multiple subcontractors for different aspects of a construction project. Each contractor needs access to specific parts of the model under certain licensing agreements. With blockchain, smart contracts can automatically enforce these agreements—granting access only to authorized users and ensuring that usage complies with the predefined terms. For instance, a smart contract could be set to automatically release payment when a subcontractor completes a specific task using the BIM model, and this action would be recorded on the blockchain. - Benefit: Smart contracts streamline the enforcement of licensing and usage agreements, reducing the administrative burden on project managers and ensuring compliance without the need for manual oversight. This automation also reduces the risk of legal disputes by ensuring that all parties adhere to the agreed-upon terms. Collaboration and Version Control: - Example: In a complex project like the construction of a new transportation hub, multiple teams—ranging from civil engineers to environmental consultants—need to collaborate on the BIM model. Blockchain facilitates this by providing a single, shared ledger where every change to the model is recorded and visible to all authorized parties. If an engineer updates the model with new structural data, this update is immediately available to the entire team, and the blockchain ensures that the change is properly recorded and cannot be overwritten without consensus. - Benefit: This approach eliminates version conflicts and ensures that all stakeholders are working from the most up-to-date data. It fosters a more collaborative environment by enabling secure, transparent sharing of information across teams, reducing the likelihood of errors and rework. Conclusion: The integration of blockchain technology into the management of Digital Twins and BIM models provides a robust solution to some of the most pressing challenges in the construction and infrastructure sectors. By ensuring data integrity, enhancing traceability, automating contract enforcement, and improving collaboration, blockchain not only addresses current challenges but also paves the way for new opportunities in project management and digital asset management. As industries continue to adopt digital technologies, blockchain’s role in managing the complex lifecycle of Digital Twins and BIM models will become increasingly vital.

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 c.diff.

Let me tell you, finding you have a “superbug” is a real bummer, and c.diff lives up to its reputation. Like cancer, it is hard to kill, it does quite a bit of damage while it’s in you, and the things that kill it also do a lot of damage to your body.

Killing my c.diff required a couple of courses of specialized antibiotics (vancomycin), that in addition to killing the c.diff also killed all the other beneficial bacteria in my lower intestine.

So, two months after surgery, I was recovering from:

• having my lower intestine handled and sliced in a major surgery
• having that same intestine populated with c.diff and covered in c.diff toxins
• having the microbiotic population living in my intestine nuked with a modern antibiotic developed to kill resistant superbugs

Not surprisingly, having all those things at once makes for a much longer recovery, and a pretty up-and-down one. My slowly recovering microbiota is in constant flux, which results in some really surprising symptoms.

• highly variable stomach discomfort (ok)
• highly variable appetite (makes sense)
• random days of fatigue (really?)
• random days of anxiety (what?!?)

I had not really understood the implications of gut/brain connection, until this journey showed me just how tightly bound my mental state was to the current condition of my guts. The anxiety I have experienced as a result of my c.diff exposure has been worse, amazingly, than what I felt after my initial cancer diagnosis. One was in my head, but the other was in my gut.

I have also developed a much more acute sympathy for people suffering from long Covid and other chronic diseases. The actual symptoms are bad enough, but the psychological effect of the symptom variability is really hard to deal with. Bad days follow good days, with no warning. I have mostly stopped voicing any optimism about my condition, because who knows what tomorrow will bring.

When people ask me how I’m doing, I shrug.

One thing I have got going for me, that chronic disease sufferers do not, is a sense that I am in fact improving. I started journaling my symptoms early in the recovery process, and I can look back and see definitively that while things are unpredictable day to day, or even week to week, the long term trajectory is one of improvement.

Without that, I think I’d go loopy.

Anyways, I am now rougly three months out from my last course of antibiotics, and I expect it will be at least another three months before I’m firing on all cylinders again, thanks mostly to the surgical complication of acquiring c.diff. If I was just recovering from the surgery, I imagine I would be much closer to full recovery.

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 advantage of the explosion of data and computational power. It will showcase a selection of applications of agent-based models and how they can be used to explore the world from the bottom up and with a specific emphasis on cities and regions. Through examples, I will demonstrate how GIS can be used to build agent-based models ranging from using spatial data to create the artificial worlds that the agents inhabit to utilizing demographic data to build synthetic populations. However, it is not just data that is important when building agent-based models but also how do we incorporate human behavior and theory into such models along with considerations of connecting agents through various types of social and spatial networks. While this might appear simple, there are many challenges associated with this which will be discussed using representative examples ranging from basic patterns of life to vaccination uptake. The talk will conclude with what opportunities are emerging in light of the recent growth in artificial intelligence (AI) with respect to building agent-based models. 

 Keywords: Agent-based modeling, AI, GIS, Social Networks, Cities.

Types of Problems Agent-Based Models have Explored

Growth of Geographical Agent-based models.

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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.

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 geospatial communities remain siloed by industry or domain, limiting knowledge sharing across the community. CNG bridges this gap by creating opportunities for government agencies, academic institutions, nonprofits, international organizations, commercial enterprises, and startups to connect and collaborate.

The membership program was created in this spirit.

Why Join?

CNG membership supports a community that is at the forefront of geospatial innovation. Members benefit from:

• Free or discounted events: Enjoy discounted rates on CNG-hosted conferences and workshops, including our upcoming CNG Virtual Conference (free for members!)
• Members Slack workspace: Join our members-only Slack for real-time discussions, idea sharing, and problem-solving with fellow geospatial data users.
• Mentorship opportunities: Become a mentor or mentee, connect with members who can offer guidance or support in your professional journey or help new community members find ways to grow and learn.
• Community recognition: Earn a member badge in our open Discourse forum to show your membership status and commitment to making geospatial data easier to access and use.

Over time, we hope to provide more benefits to CNG members.

Become a member today

We believe knowledge and collaboration should be accessible to everyone, and we believe the best way to make this possible is with support from our community. Your membership fees allow us to convene our community and create and share as much free content as possible.

Membership tiers and pricing are designed to be accessible to all with options for commercial organizations, academic institutions, professionals, and students. We also waive membership fees for individuals who can’t afford them. For more information on membership tiers and benefits, visit cloudnativegeo.org/join.

Join us today and help create the future of geospatial data.

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 people to cloud-native concepts, including a series made specifically for the Kenyan Space Agency. More virtual events are scheduled for this October and November.

Our team is rightfully proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we’ve learned a lot about our community, what they need from us, and what we have to offer. Today we are renaming the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation to the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG). Here’s why:

There’s a clear need for vendor-agnostic sources of expertise and guidance on innovations in geospatial technology. Massive cloud providers, new startups, and the open-source community are all relentlessly creating new technologies and capabilities that benefit geospatial data users. We are uniquely positioned to provide a neutral forum in which geospatial data users can teach each other how to benefit from these advances.

In far too many instances, our community is segregated by industry or domain. CNG deliberately convenes community members from a diverse set of organizations including government agencies, academic institutions, international organizations, nonprofits, commercial enterprises, and startups. While we all work with geospatial data, we benefit from learning from peers who have different perspectives, priorities, constraints, and capabilities. This subtle name change will make it explicit that our primary role is as a convener and enabler of conversations for our community members.

Here’s how we’re going to do it:

We will continue to create as much free content as possible and put it on the open web. We will maintain the CNG blog and continue to produce webinars.

We are launching a paid membership program to directly raise funds from our community. This initiative will enable us to create free content that can engage a broader group of geospatial data users. Membership is designed to be affordable, accessible, and truly beneficial to our members. Membership tiers, their costs, and benefits are available at cloudnativegeo.org/join.

We have started an open Discourse forum to ensure that community discussions are available on the open Internet.

We are organizing our own conferences. A virtual conference will be held on November 13 this year and an in-person conference is planned for May 2025 somewhere in the US. We believe there’s a gap in the market for events of this type. Our goal is to make these conferences profitable, enabling us to offer subsidies or scholarships to welcome new members into our community. Look for opportunities to sponsor and exhibit at these events.

We are assembling an editorial board. We have learned there’s no easy definition of “cloud-native.” Instead of coming up with hardened definitions and rubrics, we will convene a board of leaders in our community to continually discuss ways we should pursue our mission of continually making data easier to access and use. Editorial board members will provide feedback on the agendas for our events and provide reviews of blog posts published on the CNG Blog.

(As an aside, the difficulty of defining “cloud-native” is part of the reason why we’ll usually refer to ourselves as CNG. The other reason is because Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum is simply too much of a mouthful.)

As before, Radiant Earth can provide fiscal sponsorship for initiatives important to our community, as we did with STAC. We will continue to collaborate with the Open Geospatial Consortium and any other standards bodies to identify emerging patterns and best practices that are candidates for standardization.

There’s much more we want to do (such as creating a job board, running regular surveys of our community, and formalizing our process of organizing development sprints) but the activities listed here are where we’re going to start.

If you’ve made it this far, please consider joining the CNG forum, either as an individual or for your organization. We can use your help to grow our community and unlock the potential of geospatial data.

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.

• 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.

• 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)

The Taylor Geospatial Institute (TGI), in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Taylor Geospatial Engine, and the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), announces a sneak peek of, “The 2024 Commercial Remote Sensing Global Rankings,” an assessment of the world’s leading commercial space-based remote sensing systems.

The post The 2024 Commercial Remote Sensing Global Rankings appeared first on Taylor Geospatial Institute.

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 then funded by the STAC PSC to finalize the work. Thank you to everyone who made this possible.

The changes since v1.1.0-beta.1 are minor. We added media types to the best practices, clarified that item_assets in Collections are not required and better describe the Statistics Object in common metadata.

Please read the release notes for all changes that have been made to the specification since v1.0.0. In the following sections, we’ll highlight the most important changes in the specification with some JSON snippets.

Note: The following information is the very similar to the information provided in the v1.1.0-beta.1 blog post.

Bands

As of STAC 1.1, the bands array merges the similar but separate fields eo:bands and raster:bands, which was probably one of the most annoying things in STAC for historical reasons. The new bands field can be used in combination with property inheritance to provide users with more flexibility.

It should be relatively simple to migrate from STAC 1.0 (i.e. from eo:bands and/or raster:bands) to the new bands array. Usually, you can merge each object on a by-index basis. For some fields, you need to add the extension prefix of the eo or raster extension to the property name. Nevertheless, you should consider deduplicating properties with the same values across all bands to the Asset. Please also consider the Bands best practices when migrating from eo:bands and raster:bands. It also provides more specific examples.

STAC 1.0 example:

{
  "assets": {
    "example": {
      "href": "example.tif",
      "eo:bands": [
        {
          "name": "r",
          "common_name": "red"
        },
        {
          "name": "g",
          "common_name": "green"
        },
        {
          "name": "b",
          "common_name": "blue"
        },
        {
          "name": "nir",
          "common_name": "nir"
        }
      ],
      "raster:bands": [
        {
          "data_type": "uint16",
          "spatial_resolution": 10,
          "sampling": "area"
        },
        {
          "data_type": "uint16",
          "spatial_resolution": 10,
          "sampling": "area"
        },
        {
          "data_type": "uint16",
          "spatial_resolution": 10,
          "sampling": "area"
        },
        {
          "data_type": "uint16",
          "spatial_resolution": 30,
          "sampling": "area"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

After migrating to STAC 1.1 this is ideally provided as follows:

{
  "assets": {
    "example": {
      "href": "example.tif",
      "data_type": "uint16",
      "raster:sampling": "area",
      "raster:spatial_resolution": 10,
      "bands": [
        {
          "name": "r",
          "eo:common_name": "red",
        },
        {
          "name": "g",
          "eo:common_name": "green"
        },
        {
          "name": "b",
          "eo:common_name": "blue"
        },
        {
          "name": "nir",
          "eo:common_name": "nir",
          "raster:spatial_resolution": 30
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Apart from a much shorter and more readable list of bands, you’ll notice the following:

• The arrays have been merged into a single property bands.
• The properties common_name and spatial_resolution were renamed to include the extension prefixes.
• The properties data_type and raster:sampling (renamed from sampling) were deduplicated to the Asset as the values were the same across all bands.
• The spatial_resolution was also deduplicated, i.e. 10 is provided on the asset level, which is inherited by the bands unless explicitly overridden. Therefore, the nir band overrides the value 10 with a value of 30.

As a result, the new bands array is more lightweight and easier to handle.

To make all this possible there were corresponding changes and releases for the following two extensions:

• The Electro Optical (EO) extension was updated to v2.0.0
• The Raster extension was also updated to v2.0.0

License

To better align with OGC API - Records, we slightly changed the license field. The license field additionally supports SPDX expressions and the value other. At the same time, the values proprietary and various were deprecated in favor of SPDX expressions and other. The new value other also solves an issue many data providers reported with the term proprietary, which was misleading for open licenses that were just not listed in the SPDX database.

Common Metadata

The list of fields in the STAC common metadata model was extended, which partially was a result of the changes to the bands mentioned above.

The following fields were added:

• bands (see above)
• keywords (as formerly defined in Collections)
• roles (as formerly defined in Assets)
• data_type, nodata, statistics and unit (as formerly defined in the Raster extension)

Please also note that the specification was restructured a bit so that common elements such as Assets and Links are not defined in each specification (Catalog, Collection, Item) anymore, but instead, they are separately defined once in the commons folder.

Links

The Link Object used for the links field, has been extended to support more HTTP mechanisms. The additions were already specified in STAC API 1.0.0 but were forgotten to be added to STAC 1.0.0, so we are catching up now.

The following additional fields are available for links:

• method: The HTTP method (e.g. POST) to use for the links (defaults to GET)
• headers: The HTTP headers to send alongside the link request
• body: The request body to send for the link request (usually only applies to POST, PUT and PATCH methods)

In addition to the extended Link Object, various smaller changes were made to link-related subjects:

• Links with the relation type self are now validated and as such are required to be absolute.
• The best practice recommends that link titles should exactly reflect the title of the corresponding entity
• It was clarified how URL resolving mechanics (for links and assets) work, i.e. that trailing slashes in URLs are significant

For links with relation type parent and root a clarification was issued: Conceptually, STAC entities shall have no more than one parent entity. As such, STAC entities also can have no more than one root entity. So there’s usually just one link with root or parent relationship unless different variations of the same conceptual entity exist (identified by the ID). Different variations could be:

• a different encoding (see the type property), e.g. a HTML version in addition to JSON
• a different language (see the hreflang property). e.g. a German version in addition to English

Similarly, it was clarified that multiple collections can point to an Item, but an Item can only point back to a single collection.

Item Asset Defintions

The item_assets field that was previously an extension is now part of the STAC specification. It was probably the most commonly used extension and many extensions were defining schemas for it, so it is simpler to have it in the core specification.

No changes are required in the migration, although you can remove the schema URI of the extension (i.e. https://stac-extensions.github.io/item-assets/v1.0.0/schema.json) from the stac_extensions property. It doesn’t hurt to keep the schema URI though and although the extension was deprecated, the extension can still be used in STAC 1.0.0. It just won’t get any updates in the future, because any changes will be directly integrated into STAC itself.

Best Practices

The following best practices were introduced or have changed:

• Link titles should exactly reflect the title of the corresponding entity
• Explained URL resolving mechanics, e.g. that trailing slashes in URLs are significant
• Collection IDs should be unique across all collections in the corresponding root catalog and Item IDs should be unique per collection
• Subdirectories are not recommended for Items without sidecar files any longer
• Clarified the use of the roles thumbnail, overview and visual