A geospatial career journey
This week, I had the opportunity to attend OGC@30, the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The early 1990s were the very beginning of my professional career and they were also a time of geospatial innovation. Many of the pioneers from that time, including OGC founder David … Continue reading Thirty Years of OGC
I flew home from St. Louis yesterday, returning from the FOSS4G North America conference. I took a different approach to the conference this year than I did in 2023. Rather than moderate sessions and participate in a lot of on-site logistics, I sat in on more sessions so I got to see a lot more … Continue reading A FOSS4GNA Savasana
In the 18+ months since I stepped back into the world of geospatial consulting and services, one of the most striking things I have noticed is the seemingly increased tribalism in the geospatial space. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given the increased tribalism of society in general, but that’s a different post that won’t get … Continue reading Walls and Bridges
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
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
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 spent the past couple of days at the Esri Federal GIS Conference, still referred to by many as the “FedUC,” in Washington, DC. The primary reason I went was to attend some customer meetings. The FedUC draws many people (6,000 in this year’s case) from around the country and it’s a convenient place to … Continue reading In HIFLD, a Lesson
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They are usually motivated by well-intentioned, but often misguided, factors and are typically designed to fail. That said, the annual passage of January 1 is a good milestone for assessing goals for the coming year. A lot of the work winds down between mid-December and January … Continue reading Simpler Goals