Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
My retirement plan is pretty simple. I don’t plan to. I am fortunate to enjoy my work and see no reason to stop doing it in response to an arbitrary age boundary. Geography figures into that viewpoint. I grew up in the DC area, where the news was always dominated by local and national leaders … Continue reading The “R” Word
In my recent work, including withe Clairvoyint, I've been using Overspan lately to access OpenStreetMap data with AI. It operates a full-planet Overpass service with an MCP interface, which gives me a convenient way to work with OSM without maintaining that infrastructure myself. Its paid plans put explicit limits around requests and query resources. That … Continue reading Revisiting Open Data and AI
If you visit the Clairvoyint website, it says that we turn expert analytical methodology into reusable agents that can perform analysis and produce reports, briefs, and assessments while preserving the evidence behind their findings. That's a reasonably concise description of the product. But what does it actually mean? The answer goes back a couple of … Continue reading What We’re Building at Clairvoyint
On August 10, 1846, Congress established the Smithsonian Institution with a simple mission: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” and gave it “perpetual succession.” One hundred eighty years later, the Smithsonian is still here, though almost everything about how it carries out that mission has changed. (siarchives.si.edu) The people who established the Smithsonian couldn't have … Continue reading Geospatial Infrastructure Should Outlive Its Technology
I am an inveterate infrastructure geek due to work I did earlier in my career in critical infrastructure protection. One of my projects was to build a system to model the behavior of commercial freight rail. Of course, I am also a programmer. Between railroads and writing software to model them, it was impossible to … Continue reading The Geography Everyone Loves to Hate