The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

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 wo...

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...

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 topograph...

  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,...

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 A...

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, enab...

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 off...

How do we get data from a satellite down to Earth? How do we task a satellite?  Today the answer is likely to be via radios and a system of downlink sites or ground stations. As the satellites pass overhead or within “line of sight” data can be sent via radio from the satellite to the receiver on the ground.  If you don’t want to wait until the satellite can see the ground station, you can send yo...

There is a general understanding that it is becoming increasingly difficult to extract meaning from all the data we are collecting without using AI.   But what is AI, and how did we end up in a situation where it is identifying wolves from dogs based on the presence of snow in the background of images?    What does this mean for spatial analysis using tabular data?    What is explainability?    Th...

PYGEOAPI is a Python server implementation of the OGC API suite of standards ... which might be really useful if you are thinking about upgrading from the first-generation OGC standards to the second-generation OGC standards  ... or if need to implement a custom data source or custom functionality to your web services.     https://pygeoapi.io   If you are using MapServer , Geoserver, Mapproxy , QG...

So why would anyone want to put alot of data into a browser? Well, for a lot of the same reasons that edge computing and distributed computing have become so popular. You get the data a lot closer to the user and you don’t have to pay for the compute ;)  … this sounds great but as I found out during this conversation it's not as easy as it might seem!  There are a lot of trade-offs that need to be...

Sounds like a great idea right?   In this episode, Paul Ramsey explains why you shouldn't ... unless you want to ... and how you can ... if you have to.   You can find Paul's blog here: http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/about   Some more episodes you might enjoy   ESRI , GIS careers , Geospatial Data Science   QGIS , Geospatial Python , ArcGIS Pro Google Maps , Geomatics , Cartography Location Intelli...

A knowledge graph is a network of relationships between real work entities and in this episode, you will learn how and why knowledge graphs might be a better choice than spatial joins!    Further listening! The H3 Indexing System https://mapscaping.com/podcast/h3-geospatial-indexing-system/   Hex Tiles https://mapscaping.com/podcast/hex-tiles/   Points of Interest data https://mapscaping.com/podca...

I am sure you have heard of ChatGPT by now so the hope of this episode is to give you some more context about what is it built on and how it works.   To do that I invited Daniel Whitneck back on the podcast  You can connect with Daniel here https://datadan.io/   and listen to his previous episode here: https://mapscaping.com/podcast/an-introduction-to-artificial-intelligence/   This is perhaps the...

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers and systems to derive meaningful information from digital images.    You might think that this is exactly what we are doing in earth observation but there are a few important differences between computer vision and what some people refer to as GeoAI.   This week Jordi inglada is going to help you understand what thos...

Data is what data does  - more about that later on ;)  This episode focuses on designing for privacy, how do we create value from location data without sacrificing personal privacy?  Well, you might start by adhering to the Enhanced Standards For Precise Location Information which means that information about sensitive places like churches, hospitals, military bases, and LGBTQ+ spaces isn't misuse...

When comparing multispectral and hyperspectral data it is not simply a case of “more data more better”!  With hyperspectral you have “The curse of Dimensionality” but you also get more flexibility to pick exactly what bands you want to use! With multispectral you have less noise but you also have less data! This episode is designed to be a beginner's guide to the differences between hyperspectral...

This week we are going to learn how Foursquare is trying to identify and map all of the places in the world!  Foursquare uses a mixture of crowd source and data conflation to maintain a database of 205 million places ... and it's not easy! Each phone might see the world slightly differently in terms of location accuracies and crowdsourcing data means that people "check-in" at different locations. ...

Protomaps is a serverless system for planet-scale maps, it's an umbrella project consisting of a few different components one of which is PMtiles. PMtiles is “Cloud Optimise Geotiff” for web mapping, what this means is that you can build a base map and host it without the need for a server!  PMtiles is a single file that you can access via HTTP range requests in the same way that you can access da...

Storytelling with point clouds   This is not your typical point clouds episode! Today we are talking about how to use point clouds to tell a story. During this episode, you will hear Benjamin Muller talk about using a point cloud to make a film about the city of St Gallen in Switzerland and you might be tempted to think … what a waste of time! Why not use the data to make better measurements that...

You are about to meet Peter Spencer, a Freelance Archaeologist, Surveyor, and Geomatics Specialist You are also about to learn how geospatial tech and techniques are being applied in the field of archaeology at an object scale with laser scanning that enables fragments of skeletons from all over the world to be 3D printed and pieced together locally. At a site scale LiDAR, ground penetrating radar...

Warning! this podcast episode is not as boring as it sounds!   While geospatial standards are boring on purpose ... this episode is not .- If you woke up this morning wanting to listen to a boring podcast episode about geospatial standards this is not for you!    Scott Simmons ( OGC’s Chief Standards Officer )  https://www.ogc.org/about/team/scott-simmons/ helps us understand what a Geopose is and...

It sounds like a clickbait title, right? And to be fair I am trying to capture your attention but this is not clickbait in the sense that the title makes a promise that the episode lives up to!  This is not a “get-rich-quick-scheme” its a story about someone like us who is earning money by using his geospatial skills to teach others. Konrad Hafen is a hydrologist with the USGS and runs two website...

Distributing Geospatial Data - Every wondered why you might what to do this? Or maybe you understand the why but are unsure about the how?  Perhaps you have heard people talk about partitioning data or sharding data, you might have heard some of these terms used in the context of enterprise-scale geospatial systems and parallel processing and thought … Wow … that sounds daunting! This podcast epis...

So you might be wondering why the United Nations World Food Programme needs a geospatial support unit. Let me give you a brief overview,    Basically, they curate and maintain global datasets that they use to model the risk of sudden-onset disasters than might lead to a food security risk. They use this model to send out early warnings to at-risk communities and help with the response when disaste...