Project Geospatial

This video segment covers the question and answer portion of the "Open Source Geospatial Applications for Resilience" demonstration session at FedGeoDay 2025. A key question is posed to Karen Townsend of Sea Island Software regarding the effort required to integrate the various data sources used in the Hurrvac application. Karen explains that it's a significant, long-term development effort involv...

Xan Frederick's, the Emergency Response Coordinator for the USGS National Geospatial Program, discusses how open geospatial resources contribute to disaster prediction, preparation, and response, emphasizing the human element and building proficiency with data tools. She highlights The National Map as a core resource, aggregating data from USGS and partner agencies like federal, state, local, indu...

This fireside chat explores achieving resilience in the "Cyber War," particularly concerning cyber security in open source systems. Moderated by Ashley Fairman, the discussion with Damian Taylor (USPS) and Jennifer (Supply Chain Risk Management expert) defines resilience as the ability to recover quickly or preempt disruptions. They advocate for a "defense-in-depth" approach with multiple layers o...

Jaymes Cloninger, CEO of Motive Corporation, presents the findings of the first annual Geospatial and Federal Report 2025, based on a survey of federal government GIOs and CIOs. The report captures a snapshot of the current state of geospatial technology within federal agencies. Key insights reveal that the role of geospatial technology has expanded across all responding agencies over the past fiv...

Katie Picchione, Response Coordination Lead for the NASA Disasters Response Coordination System (DRCS), delivers a keynote addressing how Earth observation data can be applied to the "what, so what, and now what" framework of disaster response. Drawing on real-world examples and the increasing frequency of billion-dollar disasters, she underscores the urgent need for timely access to overhead imag...

Adam Timm, Field CTO at Crunchy Data, introduces Crunchy Data Warehouse, a new solution designed to merge the capabilities of data lakes and PostgreSQL databases. He highlights the traditional struggles of scaling PostgreSQL for analytical workloads and the challenges of using data lakes for operational tasks. Crunchy Data Warehouse addresses this by allowing users to query data stored directly in...

Emma Paz from Development Seed discusses the process of data aggregation, focusing specifically on the Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program (CSDAP), where she serves as the technical lead. CSDAP is responsible for acquiring commercial satellite data and making it accessible to researchers. Emma explains that managing the massive volume of geospatial data (over 30 petabytes) from diverse s...

Galen Scott from NOAA's National Geodetic Survey (NGS) presents on the upcoming modernization of the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS). He emphasizes the foundational importance of geodesy, the science of measuring Earth's size and shape, for all geospatial data and mapping, describing it as nation-building science crucial for modern applications like autonomous vehicles and smart cities. G...

Ghermay Araya highlights the critical role of address data and management systems as foundational, often "hidden," spatial data infrastructure essential for everyday use cases like emergency response, service delivery, and economic operations. He notes the current federated approach in the US, where addresses are locally generated and aggregated, but points out the lack of a national unified addre...

Jason Gilman from Element 84 discusses how to ensure reliability when combining large language models (LLMs) and AI with geospatial data to enable users to ask natural language questions and receive accurate, reliable answers. He introduces "natural language geocoding," a technique developed to translate a user's natural language description of an area (like "within 10 kilometers of the coast") in...

Quincy Morgan introduces Layer Cake, a new cloud-native tool from OpenStreetMap US providing access to OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in the GeoParquet format. He highlights OpenStreetMap as the world's largest free, editable vector data repository, fostering collaboration and digital democracy. OpenStreetMap US supports this ecosystem in the United States. Layer Cake offers a direct and easy way to acc...

Ryan Burley from GeoSolutions discusses their involvement in developing and supporting open source geospatial software and applications for climate resilience and emergency management. GeoSolutions is a key contributor and steering committee member for prominent open source projects like GeoServer, GeoNode, and MapStore. They support various customers, including those in critical domains such as S...

Shane Brennan discusses a method for classifying 3D point clouds by leveraging 2D computer vision techniques. He focuses on point cloud data collected from moving vehicles equipped with LiDAR sensors, explaining that this data can be represented as panoramic images containing information like range. The core idea is to apply existing 2D object detection and segmentation models, such as YOLO, to th...

This panel, moderated by Bill Doins, features experts Emily Cala, Jason Gilman, Ron Goldblat, and Jackie Kaisle discussing the role of AI in the federal geospatial landscape and demystifying common terminology. Panelists share diverse applications of AI they are working on, from detecting insights and optimizing workflows to image analysis for damage assessment and predicting disease outbreaks. Th...

This panel, moderated by Eddie Pickle, brings together leaders in the open data community—Maggie Collie (OpenStreetMap US), John Crowley (MAPAP Action), Angelina Calddron (Meta / Overture Maps Foundation), and Jed Sunwal (Radiant Earth)—to discuss the role of open data in fostering resilience. They highlight the importance of initiatives like OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Overture Maps in building commu...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Adeel Hassan, a senior machine learning engineer at 84.2, presents Bringing it all Together: Knowledge Graphs, LLMs, and Cloud-Native Geospatial Data. Adeel discusses the Noah Knowledge Mesh project, an ambitious initiative funded by NOAA to bridge the gap between complex satellite datasets and real-world user questions through natural language processing. The...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Bruce Momjian, a co-founder and Core Team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, shares his decades of experience on Building Open Source Teams. Bruce explores the unique challenges of leading a global community of volunteers and how "servant leadership" is the key to sustainable open-source success. Moving beyond typical corporate management, Bruce...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Pete Gadomski of Element 84 presents Cloud Native Geospatial Metadata with STAC GeoParquet. Pete explores the practical application of the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification and how the emerging GeoParquet format is addressing the scalability limitations of traditional static and API-based metadata catalogs. The presentation compares traditional...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Calvin Metcalf of the Sanborn Map Company takes a deep dive into an unlikely hero of the modern web: **Cloud Optimized Shapefiles**. While shapefiles are often seen as a relic of the past, Calvin demonstrates how these multi-file structures can be modernized to work natively on the web through clever indexing and byte-range requests. Calvin breaks down the anat...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Randal Hale of North River Geographic Systems presents Dragging Some FOSS4G into your Closed Source Life. Randal shares a decade of experience transitioning public and private organizations from proprietary GIS stacks to open-source solutions like QGIS and PostGIS. Through a series of candid—and often humorous—case studies, Randal explores the "messy middle" of...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Sina Kashuk, co-founder of Fused, presents DuckDB + Rasters: High-Performance Geospatial Analytics with H3 Hexagons. Sina explores how to overcome the traditional challenges of joining raster and vector data by converting raster datasets into a uniform H3 hierarchical grid system, enabling high-speed analytics directly in the browser via DuckDB-Wasm. The presen...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Annie Cartas from the University of Maryland’s CATT Lab presents Evolving the Trip Analytics Platform. Annie shares the technical journey of modernizing a transportation analysis web application—transitioning from a legacy Leaflet-based system plagued by "fog of war" loading screens to a high-performance stack powered by MapLibre, PostGIS, and vector tiles. The...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Dan Baston of I-Sciences presents GDAL's New CLI: A Ground-Up Redesign for Consistency and Power. Dan explores the significant overhaul of the GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) command-line interface, moving away from the "swiss-army knife" approach of massive, inconsistent tools like gdalwarp and ogr2ogr toward a suite of single-purpose, highly predic...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Sophia Parafina, a cloud advocate for the EarthScope Consortium, presents Geophysics in the Cloud. Sophia introduces the mission of EarthScope, a nonprofit organization funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that provides the global scientific community with access to high-quality geophysical data—including seismic, GNSS, SAR, and magnetotelluric obser...

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Julia Signell and Jarrett Keifer of Element 84 present Is Zarr the New COG? The presenters tackle the growing debate around whether the Zarr data format is poised to replace Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) by providing a technical comparison of how each format handles multi-dimensional arrays, chunking, and compression. Julia and Jarrett break down the "apples...