Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
When I started this series, I expected its final post to be a summation of its previous themes and observations. Sometimes, life gets a vote. As I write this, I find myself in a similar mindset to the one I was in last year. Then, I was a few months past the death of my … Continue reading Seasons (Or Twenty Years, Part Four)
Ask ChatGPT to bring you up to speed on recent developments in an industry. To answer your question, it might search the web, retrieve relevant documents, consult previous conversations, and synthesize what it finds into a response. From the user's perspective, the interaction is straightforward. You ask a question, and the application answers. There's quite … Continue reading Pay No Attention To the Harness Behind the Curtain
I’ve written before about image similarity with pgvector and the usefulness of embeddings in geospatial workflows. The ability to represent observations as vectors gives us another way to search and compare data. With Earth observation embeddings, that comparison becomes geographic. I can start with a place and look for other places with similar characteristics. Ai2’s … Continue reading Exploring OlmoEarth Embeddings
Where It Diverges From, and Could Complement, Embedding Fields and Agentic Orchestration Geospatial analysis has long relied on symbolic representations and formal operations. A geographic information system stores typed geometries, associates them with coordinate reference systems, computes topological predicates, and executes workflows with defined inputs and outputs. The GIS analyst's expertise consists, in part, of … Continue reading Neuro-Symbolic AI and the Geospatial Workload
Abstract From 2011 to 2026, organizations outside the traditional geospatial industry became major developers of geographic data and technology. Ride-hailing firms built spatial indexes to price and dispatch trips. Social networks and cloud providers generated building and road data with machine learning and released it openly. Automakers bought a map company to keep it out … Continue reading External Innovation and the Diffusion of Geospatial Capability Across Technology Verticals, 2011–2026