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geoMusings by Bill Dollins

A geospatial career journey

Image Similarity with PgVector

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 →

Bill Dollins gis 2024-07-192024-07-19 5 Minutes

Just Enough Geospatial

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 →

Bill Dollins gis 2024-07-052024-07-05 2 Minutes

Producing GeoJSON with SQL

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 →

Bill Dollins gis 2024-06-04 4 Minutes

Simple Geocoding with ChatGPT

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 →

Bill Dollins gis 2024-05-142024-05-14 5 Minutes

So Long, Directions

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 →

Bill Dollins gis 2024-04-042024-04-04 3 Minutes

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