A geospatial career journey
I had a project over the summer that required me to do a deep dive into various concepts around AI. Approximately 200 academic papers later, I came away with a laundry list of things I wanted to try. I am primarily interested in the capabilities of LLMs, but I am not particularly interested in the … Continue reading Experimenting with RAG Using ChatGPT and DuckDuckGo
At FedGeoDay in April, I attended a workshop conducted by my friend Steve Pousty on the use of vector databases. Steve is a great teacher and I learned a lot that day. I’ve been on a bit of a journey since. I’ve gotten some project work with AI and I find vector databases to be … Continue reading Image Similarity with PgVector
As I mentioned earlier this year, I spend a lot of time working in Python these days. More and more, my work seems to be about performing geospatial tasks with the minimal amount of geospatial dependencies possible. My most recent work has been generating contours from a set of sampled elevation points. I’ve done this … Continue reading Just Enough Geospatial
A couple of weeks ago, I had a need to return GeoJSON from PostGIS. This is something I've done many times, but I usually do the final formatting in the application/API layer with Javascript or Python. Basically, my workflow has been to SELECT, using the built-in ST_AsGeoJSON function to convert the geometry to GeoJSON. I … Continue reading Producing GeoJSON with SQL
Early in my career, I dealt with a requirement to post-process a corpus of existing documents to "geocode" them. This meant identifying the locations referenced in each document, calculating a minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), and writing the MBR, the file path, and some associated ID into a database, so that documents could be surfaced via … Continue reading Simple Geocoding with ChatGPT
Directions Magazine has announced that it is shutting down, with May 31, 2024 as the deadline to access/republish any content from the site. My first reaction when reading this was that I didn't know it was still around. Unfortunately, I was not being facetious, but it's also not funny and I should have been more … Continue reading So Long, Directions
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a live discussion of the Geospatial Innovations group on LinkedIn, along with Linda, Bonny, Tim, and Will. The topic was “Reimagining Maps” and was spurred by a couple of recent posts by Linda and Will - "Modern Mapping" and "Modern Geospatial", respectively. The discussion ostensibly examined … Continue reading Decoupling Maps
NOTE: This post was an April Fool's joke. It’s happened to us all - tucked away in the dusty corners of our attics or closets is that box with a serial port Zip drive and a dozen disks. Curiosity usually gets the better of us and, after a few downloads and a couple of kernel … Continue reading Announcing Legacy Data Abstraction Library (LDAL)
As I was building a Python notebook in Databricks, I started thinking about how much Python work I've been doing since I went out on my own. That got me thinking about all of the SQL I had been doing the last couple of years at my previous role, then the Javascript before that and … Continue reading Rings In a Tree
I've been working a project recently to investigate training an LLM (LocalGPT, in this case) to help analyze a document library. (More on that in the future.) For ingest, it handles PDF files really well. I needed some well-known (by me) content to kick the tires for initial prototyping so I decided to dump all … Continue reading Export WordPress Posts to PDF