GPS reimagined? Why do we need to reimagine GPS? ... Is it broken? Recommended Podcast Episodes How Google Calculates Your Location https://mapscaping.com/podcast/how-google-calculates-your-location/ From GNSS To VPS https://mapscaping.com/podcast/from-gnss-to-vps/ Navigating The Past Present and Future of GNSS https://mapscaping.com/podcast/navigating-the-past-present-and-future-of-gnss/ SatelliteBased Augmentation System - A Base Station In The Sky https://mapscaping.com/podcast/satellite-base...
Dec 27, 2023•46 min•Ep. 220
Nyall Dawson is a QGIS developer, cartographer, and owner and founder of North Road, a company specializing in open-source geospatial software. His journey into geospatial began with personal interests in mapping and cartography, which later evolved into a business called North Road. But that's not why I wanted to make this episode for you, I wanted to share this story with you because it could be your story too. You could decide to have a story that starts with contributing to something you car...
Dec 20, 2023•52 min•Ep. 219
This episode is all about making beautiful maps ... I am not a cartographer but my guest Mamata Akella is a professional cartographer at Felt! So today on the podcast we are talking about Essential Elements of Map Design: Which of course starts with questions like - who is it for, what is it for and how do we get it to them? And then moves on to Visual Hierarchy, Zoom-Based Styling, Color Palettes, and Interpretation We discuss a few practical examples during the conversation and you can find li...
Dec 14, 2023•53 min•Ep. 218
Planet manufactures and manages the world’s largest constellation of earth observation satellites! Imaging “Just about everywhere on earth just about every day – Making change visible, accessible, and actionable” … and the hope of this episode is to help you understand how they do that – along the way you will hear about their two constellations and how they work together Learn the difference between ghost ships and dark ships and find out that there are very few ground control points in the oce...
Dec 06, 2023•45 min•Ep. 217
This episode is a story about wide-angle imaging for fire mapping and maritime search but it's also a story about changing the culture and getting people to trust a new way of doing things. My guest today is Alison Harrod - mission success manager at a start-up called Overwatch imaging Whenever I work with a company like Overwatch Imaging it is hard to know which story to tell, we could just as easily have made an episode about AI and object detection or about smart sensors because they do those...
Nov 30, 2023•46 min•Ep. 216
It's not about becoming an influencer it's about creating opportunities for yourself In this episode, we tackle the common misconception that personal branding is solely for influencers, revealing how it's actually about creating the right visibility and opportunities in your professional sphere. Helena Merschdorf shares her unique insights, drawing from her rich background in GIS and marketing, and discusses: Solving the Obscurity Problem: Discover how personal branding can help you get noticed...
Nov 22, 2023•50 min•Ep. 215
Entity resolution is the process of matching and merging records from different sources that refer to the same entity. today's episode is about entity resolution for place data, why you might want to do that, and what any of this has to do with the dollar, Unix time and the idea that If data is really driving innovation, join keys are going to become more valuable. Today's guest is Auren Hoffman https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/ https://twitter.com/auren https://www.youtube.com/@worldofdaas If ...
Nov 15, 2023•40 min•Ep. 214
Embracing Open-Source Geospatial Technology is easy as an individual but what if you want your organization to use FOSS4G How do you get strategic buy-in? It turns out that the software does not sell itself and that even in the age of AI we still have to convince a human if we want organizational change to to happen. I think the temptation is to say hey look at this long list of specifications and notice how FOSS4G is often better or equal to the close source equivalent. Or hey look at the price...
Oct 04, 2023•46 min•Ep. 213
** Warning** Consuming this content may lead to educated opinions and or a better understanding of the future of location technology! ** Proceed with caution!! ** If are curious about any of the following topics this episode is for you! Evolution of Positioning Systems Terrestrial-based Positioning: The role of Wi-Fi positioning and the potential of 5G in positioning. Visual Positioning Systems (VPS) GNSS Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites: The potential of LEO satellites in enhancing positioning ...
Sep 19, 2023•55 min•Ep. 212
In this podcast episode, Jennings Anderson, a research scientist at Meta, discusses the Overture Maps Foundation , a downstream product of OpenStreetMap. He explains his background in open map data and his interest in studying collaboration within the OpenStreetMap community. Jennings then dives into the Daylight Distribution , an open data product produced by Meta, and how it combines building data sets from various sources into one unified theme. Jennings emphasizes the importance of a stable ...
Aug 30, 2023•52 min•Ep. 211
100 billion Points Every Day 100 billion is a very large number, let's say that I gave you a spreadsheet with 100 billion rows in it, each row consisted of five columns Latitude, Longitude, Device ID, A Timestamp, and a column telling the name of the data provider What would you do with that? How would you clean it? Make sense of it? Extract value from it? What would people use it for? And how would you do this in a way that could be systematized? FourSquare does this every day with the help of ...
Aug 16, 2023•49 min•Ep. 210
Computer vision is everywhere! But teaching an algorithm to identify objects requires a lot of data and this is definitely the case when we think about GeoAI But it is not enough to have a lot of data we also need data that is labeled If we are looking for cars in images we need a lot of images of cars and we need to know which pixels are the car! Of course, I am oversimplifying but I hope you get the idea, Now imagine that you can automatically generate a large labeled data set of realistic ima...
Aug 09, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 209
This is an interview with a senior data scientist from Hub Ocean , a platform that aims to unlock and unite ocean data. Hub Ocean - as the name suggests is a hub for ocean data Now we have talked about these kinds of data hubs before on the podcast - Sentinal Hub - a data hub for earth observation data, Microsoft Planetary Computer , Google Earth Engine , Open Topography is data but for topography data …. The concept is not new but also not easy to implement and if they work, these types of data...
Aug 03, 2023•39 min•Ep. 208
felt.com is a browser-based mapping tool and its also a reminder that just because we have always done web mapping one way it doesn’t mean it always has to be done that way. For example, Felt lets you upload anything! That's a bold promise, you can upload anything you want and we will figure it out on the back end. Felt is also the first and only flagship sustaining member of the QGIS project, they are supporting the development of an open-source tiling engine, called Tippecanoe. They also suppo...
Jul 19, 2023•40 min•Ep. 207
Rapid is a free open-source web-based editor for an OpenStreetMap. In the past the focus was on conflating AI-generated datasets with OpenStreetMap data but the future for this editor is conflating authoritative datasets with OpenStreetMap. Humans are in the loop, people reviewing data authoritative datasets and adding them to OpenStreetMap with a few clicks! So you might be wondering, what is Authoritative data? And perhaps it doesn’t even matter what authoritative means maybe the most importan...
Jul 05, 2023•52 min•Ep. 206
The promise of digital mapping is to provide a shared and real-time view of the state of the underlying system. pg_eventserv is a free and open-source component that helps fulfill the promise of real-time event modeling and shared views in PostgreSQL. By connecting to PostgreSQL and listening on specified channels, pg_eventserv captures database notifications and forwards them to web clients, enabling real-time updates and synchronization of data displayed on maps or other web interfaces. pg_eve...
Jun 28, 2023•26 min•Ep. 205
You guessed it this episode is all about recruitment! Who is this episode for? Well if you have a career in geospatial … it's for you! Getting the job you want, changing your career path, or deciding whether to work at a start-up or a more established company. Once you have made these decisions, how do you stand out from the crowd? What is it the recruiters are looking for? And if you do get offered a contract should you negotiate and what is negotiable? Jett Metcalf has worked as a geospatial r...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 204
How do we get data from a satellite down to Earth? How do we task a satellite? Today the answer is likely to be via radios and a system of downlink sites or ground stations. As the satellites pass overhead or within “line of sight” data can be sent via radio from the satellite to the receiver on the ground. If you don’t want to wait until the satellite can see the ground station, you can send your data to a geostationary satellite that can always see a ground station and let it send the data bac...
Jun 14, 2023•45 min•Ep. 203
There is a general understanding that it is becoming increasingly difficult to extract meaning from all the data we are collecting without using AI. But what is AI, and how did we end up in a situation where it is identifying wolves from dogs based on the presence of snow in the background of images? What does this mean for spatial analysis using tabular data? What is explainability? This is not a "how-to" do spatial analysis using an AI episode, it is an overview of AI in spatial analysis episo...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 202
PYGEOAPI is a Python server implementation of the OGC API suite of standards ... which might be really useful if you are thinking about upgrading from the first-generation OGC standards to the second-generation OGC standards ... or if need to implement a custom data source or custom functionality to your web services. https://pygeoapi.io If you are using MapServer , Geoserver, Mapproxy , QGIS server , or Deegree you might find this episode interesting! Relevant previous episodes Cloud-native Geo...
May 31, 2023•37 min•Ep. 201
So why would anyone want to put alot of data into a browser? Well, for a lot of the same reasons that edge computing and distributed computing have become so popular. You get the data a lot closer to the user and you don’t have to pay for the compute ;) … this sounds great but as I found out during this conversation it's not as easy as it might seem! There are a lot of trade-offs that need to be evaluated when moving data and analytics to the client. Nick Rabinowitz Senior Staff Software Enginee...
May 24, 2023•57 min•Ep. 200
Sounds like a great idea right? In this episode, Paul Ramsey explains why you shouldn't ... unless you want to ... and how you can ... if you have to. You can find Paul's blog here: http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/about Some more episodes you might enjoy ESRI , GIS careers , Geospatial Data Science QGIS , Geospatial Python , ArcGIS Pro Google Maps , Geomatics , Cartography Location Intelligence , Mapping Previous episodes with Paul Spatial SQL https://mapscaping.com/podcast/spatial-sql-gis-without...
May 17, 2023•34 min•Ep. 199
A knowledge graph is a network of relationships between real work entities and in this episode, you will learn how and why knowledge graphs might be a better choice than spatial joins! Further listening! The H3 Indexing System https://mapscaping.com/podcast/h3-geospatial-indexing-system/ Hex Tiles https://mapscaping.com/podcast/hex-tiles/ Points of Interest data https://mapscaping.com/podcast/all-of-the-places-in-the-world/ Dark Data https://mapscaping.com/podcast/unstructured-data-is-dark-data/...
May 12, 2023•32 min•Ep. 197
I am sure you have heard of ChatGPT by now so the hope of this episode is to give you some more context about what is it built on and how it works. To do that I invited Daniel Whitneck back on the podcast You can connect with Daniel here https://datadan.io/ and listen to his previous episode here: https://mapscaping.com/podcast/an-introduction-to-artificial-intelligence/ This is perhaps the quote for the episode that I have spent the most time thinking about "We always thought AI would be logica...
May 10, 2023•50 min•Ep. 198
Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers and systems to derive meaningful information from digital images. You might think that this is exactly what we are doing in earth observation but there are a few important differences between computer vision and what some people refer to as GeoAI. This week Jordi inglada is going to help you understand what those differences are and why it's not always possible to use Computer vision techniques in the field of Remo...
Apr 26, 2023•38 min•Ep. 196
Data is what data does - more about that later on ;) This episode focuses on designing for privacy, how do we create value from location data without sacrificing personal privacy? Well, you might start by adhering to the Enhanced Standards For Precise Location Information which means that information about sensitive places like churches, hospitals, military bases, and LGBTQ+ spaces isn't misused or sold. Plus, they protect our exact location from being shared with law enforcement or bounty hunte...
Apr 19, 2023•42 min•Ep. 195
When comparing multispectral and hyperspectral data it is not simply a case of “more data more better”! With hyperspectral you have “The curse of Dimensionality” but you also get more flexibility to pick exactly what bands you want to use! With multispectral you have less noise but you also have less data! This episode is designed to be a beginner's guide to the differences between hyperspectral and multispectral satellite data. You can reach out to Gordon Logie here: https://sparkgeo.com/blog/t...
Apr 13, 2023•39 min•Ep. 194
This week we are going to learn how Foursquare is trying to identify and map all of the places in the world! Foursquare uses a mixture of crowd source and data conflation to maintain a database of 205 million places ... and it's not easy! Each phone might see the world slightly differently in terms of location accuracies and crowdsourcing data means that people "check-in" at different locations. Kyle Fowler - Senior Director, Engineering at Foursquare Is going to give a behind-the-scenes look at...
Apr 02, 2023•42 min•Ep. 193
Protomaps is a serverless system for planet-scale maps, it's an umbrella project consisting of a few different components one of which is PMtiles. PMtiles is “Cloud Optimise Geotiff” for web mapping, what this means is that you can build a base map and host it without the need for a server! PMtiles is a single file that you can access via HTTP range requests in the same way that you can access data within a Cloud Optimised Geotiff with the important difference that PMtiles can also contain vecto...
Mar 22, 2023•38 min•Ep. 192
Storytelling with point clouds This is not your typical point clouds episode! Today we are talking about how to use point clouds to tell a story. During this episode, you will hear Benjamin Muller talk about using a point cloud to make a film about the city of St Gallen in Switzerland and you might be tempted to think … what a waste of time! Why not use the data to make better measurements that lead to better decisions? How many IT projects have failed, not because they were based on bad decisio...
Mar 15, 2023•40 min•Ep. 191
