A geospatial career journey
There is a stretch of my career I tend to skip over. When I tell the story of how I got here, I usually start somewhere around Zekiah, sometimes a little earlier, but the three years I spent at Booz Allen Hamilton in the 1990s rarely get more than a sentence. I move past them … Continue reading Reading the Terrain
I have been circling this idea in a few recent posts. I am not sure this one brings it all the way in for a landing, but it at least feels like it is on the approach. What sharpened it for me were two recent customer conversations where AI was assumed to be part of … Continue reading Does Your Workflow Need A Model?
For eighteen years, I drove past the Morgantown Generating Station on my way to work. Its stacks were part of the background geography of my daily life, sitting along the Potomac River in Newburg, Maryland. Like many pieces of industrial infrastructure, it was both conspicuous and easy to stop seeing. It was just there. Then, … Continue reading What Spatial Finance Cannot See From Orbit
Summaries of selected talks from FedGeoDay 2026, Day 1, April 2026, US Census Bureau, Suitland, MD Once again, I served on the FedGeoDay organizing committee this year. FedGeoDay continues to be one of the higher-value events on my calendar, and this year was no exception. With a focus on data preservation and federal data stewardship, … Continue reading FedGeoDay 2026: Four Talks Worth Your Attention
Open a dataset of building footprints for a mid-sized city in sub-Saharan Africa. The polygons are clean. They snap to grid, close correctly, and sit at plausible addresses. Run them through any geometry validator and they pass. Load them in QGIS and they look, to every reasonable inspection, like a map. Some of them may … Continue reading Plausibility Is Not Provenance