Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
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
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
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
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