Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
Last week, I was talking with a colleague about how AI is changing software development and what that means for people entering the field. We're both fairly deep into our careers and have our own perspectives on development processes. He's a seasoned agile practitioner, and he wondered aloud whether the skills he's spent years developing … Continue reading Does AI Make Waterfall Affordable Again?
Where It Diverges From, and Could Complement, Embedding Fields and Agentic Orchestration Geospatial analysis has long relied on symbolic representations and formal operations. A geographic information system stores typed geometries, associates them with coordinate reference systems, computes topological predicates, and executes workflows with defined inputs and outputs. The GIS analyst's expertise consists, in part, of … Continue reading Neuro-Symbolic AI and the Geospatial Workload
Abstract From 2011 to 2026, organizations outside the traditional geospatial industry became major developers of geographic data and technology. Ride-hailing firms built spatial indexes to price and dispatch trips. Social networks and cloud providers generated building and road data with machine learning and released it openly. Automakers bought a map company to keep it out … Continue reading External Innovation and the Diffusion of Geospatial Capability Across Technology Verticals, 2011–2026
I've spent all of my professional life working in geospatial technology. During that time, I've watched the industry move from specialized workstations and expensive proprietary software to web services, the cloud, and open-source software. I've also watched geospatial capabilities become embedded in nearly every corner of the modern economy. Yet, despite all of that, geospatial … Continue reading The Indispensable Backwater
If you're reading this blog, you probably know I use self-hosted WordPress and have for many years. I have used the narrative cartography ("story map") format quite a bit recently, and my go-to has been this open-source project: https://github.com/opengeos/maplibre-gl-storymapsIt has been both elegant and easy to use and I highly recommend it. My only frustration … Continue reading Narrative Maps in WordPress