Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
I’ve written before about image similarity with pgvector and the usefulness of embeddings in geospatial workflows. The ability to represent observations as vectors gives us another way to search and compare data. With Earth observation embeddings, that comparison becomes geographic. I can start with a place and look for other places with similar characteristics. Ai2’s … Continue reading Exploring OlmoEarth Embeddings
I spent 25 years as a federal contractor, much of it delivering software acquired through the Department of Defense acquisition process. At no point did I feel that the way the government acquired software was particularly well aligned with how we actually built it. Over time, I began to suspect that our customers felt the … Continue reading AI and the Economics of Government Software Procurement
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