Episodes
AI Autocomplete for QGIS Brendan Ashworth the CTO and co-founder of https://buntinglabs.com/ focuses on integrating AI with QGIS, and today on the podcast we are talking about Autocomplete for vectorization. Along the way Brendan will share with us why Bunting Labs chose to build this on top of QGIS, the Challenges in Map Digitization, what the development process was like and how this is different from tools like Segment Anything ( from meta )  Here's what we discussed: Introduction to...
Published 04/12/24
GNSS receivers - why precise positioning will not be coming to your phone any time soon   Igor is the CEO and cofounder of Emlid.com a company that started out making high-precision GNSS receivers in his kitchen and crowd-funded the first batch on Kickstarter.    But that was over ten years ago so today on the podcast Igor is going to tell us about the innovations that made this possible, give a great explanation of RTK and PPP and explain why we should expect to see high precision...
Published 03/21/24
Refactoring the Way you Talk About your geospatial skills: It is Costing you Money Some of the key topics in this episode  1.Our Geospatial Skills and Marketability: There's a realization that while our traditional geospatial skills are valuable, they might not always be marketed effectively to match the broader IT and data analysis job markets. We discuss the benefit of framing our skills in terms that are more widely recognized outside the niche of geospatial technology, such as data...
Published 03/15/24
Modern geospatial - not the bleeding edge of geospatial but modern geospatial - what is it? Well my guest Will Cadell, the CEO of SparkGeo describes modern geospatial as the intersection of the cloud, smart space, open source data/standards, AI and smart devices - that's modern geospatial  And as you will hear during the discussion it's important to understand the difference between modernisation and innovation when we think about moving people from where they are now to where they want to be...
Published 02/29/24
The main topics discussed during this episode include: Basics of LIDAR data and its applications. Differences between LIDAR and photogrammetry. Processing chain of LIDAR data. Challenges in classifying point clouds. Applications of LIDAR technology in vegetation mapping, terrain modelling, and infrastructure inspection. The future of LIDAR technology includes the potential for more affordable and widespread use. Importance of automated processing tools for handling large volumes of...
Published 02/15/24
Alex Leith is a Digital Earth Architect and in this episode, you will learn what Infrastructure as code is  - hint it is the opposite of the "clicky-clicky" and so much more! Connect with Alex here https://auspatious.com/   Recommended Listening  Cloud-Optimized Point CLounds https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-optimized-point-clouds/   Cloud Native Geospatial  https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-native-geospatial/   Planet Scale Tiled Maps without a...
Published 01/26/24
GeeMap is an open-source Python library that provides tools for interactive mapping with Google Earth Engine (GEE), which is a platform for earth science data and analysis ... and today you are going to hear from the creator of GeeMap!   Connect with Qiusheng Wu here: https://wetlands.io/   This episode is sponsored by Planet learn more at https://www.planet.com/gis/   Recommended Listening Introduction to Google Earth...
Published 01/09/24
GPS reimagined? Why do we need to reimagine GPS? ... Is it broken?   Recommended Podcast Episodes   How Google Calculates Your Location https://mapscaping.com/podcast/how-google-calculates-your-location/   From GNSS To VPS https://mapscaping.com/podcast/from-gnss-to-vps/   Navigating The Past Present and Future of GNSS https://mapscaping.com/podcast/navigating-the-past-present-and-future-of-gnss/   SatelliteBased Augmentation System - A Base Station In The...
Published 12/27/23
Nyall Dawson is a QGIS developer, cartographer, and owner and founder of North Road, a company specializing in open-source geospatial software. His journey into geospatial began with personal interests in mapping and cartography, which later evolved into a business called North Road. But that's not why I wanted to make this episode for you, I wanted to share this story with you because it could be your story too.  You could decide to have a story that starts with contributing to something you...
Published 12/20/23
This episode is all about making beautiful maps ... I am not a cartographer but my guest Mamata Akella is a professional cartographer at Felt!  So today on the podcast we are talking about Essential Elements of Map Design: Which of course starts with questions like - who is it for, what is it for and how do we get it to them? And then moves on to Visual Hierarchy,   Zoom-Based Styling, Color Palettes, and Interpretation We discuss a few practical examples during the conversation and you can...
Published 12/14/23
Planet manufactures and manages the world’s largest constellation of earth observation satellites! Imaging “Just about everywhere on earth just about every day – Making change visible, accessible, and actionable” … and the hope of this episode is to help you understand how they do that – along the way you will hear about their two constellations and how they work together Learn the difference between ghost ships and dark ships and find out that there are very few ground control points in the...
Published 12/06/23
This episode is a story about wide-angle imaging for fire mapping and maritime search but it's also a story about changing the culture and getting people to trust a new way of doing things.   My guest today is Alison Harrod - mission success manager at a start-up called Overwatch imaging    Whenever I work with a company like Overwatch Imaging it is hard to know which story to tell, we could just as easily have made an episode about AI and object detection or about smart sensors because they...
Published 11/30/23
It's not about becoming an influencer it's about creating opportunities for yourself   In this episode, we tackle the common misconception that personal branding is solely for influencers, revealing how it's actually about creating the right visibility and opportunities in your professional sphere. Helena Merschdorf shares her unique insights, drawing from her rich background in GIS and marketing, and discusses: Solving the Obscurity Problem: Discover how personal branding can help you get...
Published 11/22/23
Entity resolution is the process of matching and merging records from different sources that refer to the same entity.   today's episode is about entity resolution for place data, why you might want to do that, and what any of this has to do with the dollar, Unix time and the idea that If data is really driving innovation, join keys are going to become more valuable.   Today's guest is Auren...
Published 11/15/23
Embracing Open-Source Geospatial Technology is easy as an individual but what if you want your organization to use FOSS4G How do you get strategic buy-in? It turns out that the software does not sell itself and that even in the age of AI we still have to convince a human if we want organizational change to to happen.  I think the temptation is to say hey look at this long list of specifications and notice how FOSS4G is often better or equal to the close source equivalent.  Or hey look at the...
Published 10/04/23
** Warning** Consuming this content may lead to educated opinions and or a better understanding of the future of location technology!   ** Proceed with caution!! **   If are curious about any of the following topics this episode is for you!   Evolution of Positioning Systems  Terrestrial-based Positioning: The role of Wi-Fi positioning and the potential of 5G in positioning.    Visual Positioning Systems (VPS)   GNSS Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites: The potential of LEO satellites in...
Published 09/19/23
In this podcast episode, Jennings Anderson, a research scientist at Meta, discusses the Overture Maps Foundation, a downstream product of OpenStreetMap. He explains his background in open map data and his interest in studying collaboration within the OpenStreetMap community. Jennings then dives into the Daylight Distribution, an open data product produced by Meta, and how it combines building data sets from various sources into one unified theme. Jennings emphasizes the importance of a stable...
Published 08/30/23
100 billion Points Every Day 100 billion is a very large number, let's say that I gave you a spreadsheet with 100 billion rows in it, each row consisted of five columns Latitude, Longitude, Device ID, A Timestamp, and a column telling the name of the data provider What would you do with that?  How would you clean it? Make sense of it? Extract value from it? What would people use it for? And how would you do this in a way that could be systematized? FourSquare does this every day with the help...
Published 08/16/23
Computer vision is everywhere! But teaching an algorithm to identify objects requires a lot of data and this is definitely the case when we think about GeoAI   But it is not enough to have a lot of data we also need data that is labeled If we are looking for cars in images we need a lot of images of cars and we need to know which pixels are the car!  Of course, I am oversimplifying but I hope you get the idea,  Now imagine that you can automatically generate a large labeled data set of...
Published 08/09/23
This is an interview with a senior data scientist from Hub Ocean, a platform that aims to unlock and unite ocean data. Hub Ocean - as the name suggests is a hub for ocean data  Now we have talked about these kinds of data hubs before on the podcast - Sentinal Hub - a data hub for earth observation data, Microsoft Planetary Computer, Google Earth Engine, Open Topography is data but for topography data …. The concept is not new but also not easy to implement and if they work, these types of...
Published 08/03/23
 felt.com is a browser-based mapping tool and its also a reminder that just because we have always done web mapping one way it doesn’t mean it always has to be done that way. For example, Felt lets you upload anything! That's a bold promise, you can upload anything you want and we will figure it out on the back end.  Felt is also the first and only flagship sustaining member of the QGIS project, they are supporting the development of an open-source tiling engine, called Tippecanoe. They also...
Published 07/19/23
Rapid is a free open-source web-based editor for an OpenStreetMap. In the past the focus was on conflating AI-generated datasets with OpenStreetMap data but the future for this editor is conflating authoritative datasets with OpenStreetMap.  Humans are in the loop, people reviewing data authoritative datasets and adding them to OpenStreetMap with a few clicks!  So you might be wondering, what is Authoritative data? And perhaps it doesn’t even matter what authoritative means maybe the most...
Published 07/05/23
The promise of digital mapping is to provide a shared and real-time view of the state of the underlying system. pg_eventserv is a free and open-source component that helps fulfill the promise of real-time event modeling and shared views in PostgreSQL. By connecting to PostgreSQL and listening on specified channels, pg_eventserv captures database notifications and forwards them to web clients, enabling real-time updates and synchronization of data displayed on maps or other web...
Published 06/28/23
You guessed it this episode is all about recruitment! Who is this episode for? Well if you have a career in geospatial … it's for you!   Getting the job you want, changing your career path, or deciding whether to work at a start-up or a more established company. Once you have made these decisions, how do you stand out from the crowd? What is it the recruiters are looking for? And if you do get offered a contract should you negotiate and what is negotiable?    Jett Metcalf has worked as a...
Published 06/22/23