Geospatial Infrastructure Should Outlive Its Technology

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 →

The Geography Everyone Loves to Hate

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 →

Mission Assurance and Human Geography

In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked in critical infrastructure protection, building geospatial applications and data sets to model how infrastructure networks behave. I worked on systems like switched telecommunications, commercial rail, and refined petroleum products, along with the ways those systems depend on one another. Working on those teams, I learned a … Continue reading Mission Assurance and Human Geography →

Interpretation and Ownership

In 1951, Paul Fitts edited a report on human engineering for air-navigation and traffic-control systems. One of its lasting artifacts was a deceptively simple allocation device that came to be known as the Fitts list: what humans are better at and what machines are better at (Fitts, 1951). In shorthand, it became HABA-MABA: Humans Are … Continue reading Interpretation and Ownership →

GeoAI and the Soft Middle of the Geospatial Market

My recent essay on the SaaS market argued that AI pressure is unlikely to apply evenly. The exposed segment was products in the middle of the market that are expensive enough to prompt examination, bounded enough to cleanly emulate, and shallow enough in terms of integrations that rebuilding them would not be outrageous. They were … Continue reading GeoAI and the Soft Middle of the Geospatial Market →