Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
Summaries of selected talks from FedGeoDay 2026, Day 1, April 2026, US Census Bureau, Suitland, MD Once again, I served on the FedGeoDay organizing committee this year. FedGeoDay continues to be one of the higher-value events on my calendar, and this year was no exception. With a focus on data preservation and federal data stewardship, … Continue reading FedGeoDay 2026: Four Talks Worth Your Attention
Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial analysis tasks on specified data sets. Here is … Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude, Part 2
I spent the first five years of my career, from 1993 to 1998, doing mostly AML programming. There was also some AutoLISP, MapBasic, Clipper, and Avenue during that time, but it was mostly AML. In hindsight, that was a fortunate place to begin. I had no real exposure to GIS or geography in college, and … Continue reading Shortening Translation Distance
In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral … Continue reading When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale
I first encountered the term "agent" more than 20 years ago, when I was working on an agent-based modeling system for simulating infrastructure inter-dependencies. Imagine an agent representing a power plant that has gone offline and an agent representing a telecommunications end office switching itself to battery backup and tracking how many simulation cycles the … Continue reading How OOP Helped Me Understand AI Agents