Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
If you visit the Clairvoyint website, it says that we turn expert analytical methodology into reusable agents that can perform analysis and produce reports, briefs, and assessments while preserving the evidence behind their findings. That s a reasonably concise description of the product. But what does it actually mean? The answer goes back a couple of Continue reading What We re Building at…
On August 10, 1846, Congress established the Smithsonian Institution with a simple mission: “the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” and gave it “perpetual succession.” One hundred eighty years later, the Smithsonian is still here, though almost everything about how it carries out that mission has changed. (siarchives.si.edu) The people who established the Smithsonian couldn t have Continue…
I am an inveterate infrastructure geek due to work I did earlier in my career in critical infrastructure protection. One of my projects was to build a system to model the behavior of commercial freight rail. Of course, I am also a programmer. Between railroads and writing software to model them, it was impossible to Continue reading The Geography Everyone Loves to Hate
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked in critical infrastructure protection, building geospatial applications and data sets to model how infrastructure networks behave. I worked on systems like switched telecommunications, commercial rail, and refined petroleum products, along with the ways those systems depend on one another. Working on those teams, I learned a Continue reading Mission…
In 1951, Paul Fitts edited a report on human engineering for air-navigation and traffic-control systems. One of its lasting artifacts was a deceptively simple allocation device that came to be known as the Fitts list: what humans are better at and what machines are better at (Fitts, 1951). In shorthand, it became HABA-MABA: Humans Are Continue reading Interpretation and Ownership
My recent essay on the SaaS market argued that AI pressure is unlikely to apply evenly. The exposed segment was products in the middle of the market that are expensive enough to prompt examination, bounded enough to cleanly emulate, and shallow enough in terms of integrations that rebuilding them would not be outrageous. They were Continue reading GeoAI and the Soft Middle of the Geospatial Market
In early February 2026, a sharp software-sector selloff, widely described in market commentary as the SaaSpocalypse, erased hundreds of billions of dollars in SaaS and software-services market value. Anthropic s release of Claude Cowork plugins gave investors a concrete example around which to reprice a concern that had been building for more than a year: AI-assisted Continue reading Vibe Coding,…
Introduction The current data center boom appears to be an early-stage, brute-force response to the first wave of artificial intelligence demand. The market has encountered a rapid increase in demand for training, inference, and AI-enabled cloud services, and the immediate response has understandably been physical scale in the form of larger campuses, more megawatts, denser Continue reading AI…
A few weeks ago, I was on a catch-up Zoom call with a friend I hadn t chatted with in a while. He made mention of the recent uptick in my blogging activity and then, very good-naturedly, took me to task for using footnotes and citations. He joked that he was going to have to level Continue reading On Essays
Every general-purpose technology reaches a point where it stops being the subject and becomes part of the foundation. The web passed through it, as did virtualization, the relational database, and cloud infrastructure. Few people now describe a product as running in the cloud as though that were the noteworthy fact about it. The capability has Continue reading Life After AI
I ve been doing some recent work related to automating QA in AI workflows. Most recently, I built a small jury pool app to assess agreement across generated outputs, which got me interested in small models. It s a necessary step to ensure quality and precision, and it well-trodden by research. After running down a few rabbit Continue reading Applicability of Small Models for Agentic QA
I recently finished implementing a network analysis through PostGIS and pgRouting, exposed through an MCP interface so it can be called by AI. I have done versions of this as a Lambda and as a Google Cloud Function. Before that, I did it in Node. Before that, in ASP.NET with a different routing library. Before Continue reading Twenty Years, Part Three
This post summarizes themes that emerged across multiple sources curated by GeoFeeds during April and May 2026. Taken together, these themes suggest that geospatial AI (GeoAI) is moving through a familiar stage in the life of an emerging technology. The early question was whether it could do useful work. The current discussion revolves around what Continue reading Geospatial AI State of Play,…
In a post last week, Open Data and AI, I discussed how open data projects are facing a new kind of consumer: AI-automated systems that can pull public data continuously, at scale, and in patterns the original infrastructure was never designed to support. OpenStreetMap is one of the clearest examples. It is globally important, community Continue reading Prototyping AI-Ready OSM
Open data projects are seeing a new kind of consumer in the form of automated systems that can consume public data continuously, at scale, and through access patterns that were not designed with them in mind. People downloading data, building products, or creating derivative services have always been part of the bargain. AI-driven consumption, however, Continue reading Open Data and AI
My recent work has gotten me thinking about the relationship between skills, as in Claude skills rather than personal ability, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. I am building MCP servers for projects and starting to put together skills that my teams can share across engagements. That work has also overlapped with GeoFeeds, where I Continue reading A Familiar Pattern for MCP and Skills
There is a stretch of my career I tend to skip over. When I tell the story of how I got here, I usually start somewhere around Zekiah, sometimes a little earlier, but the three years I spent at Booz Allen Hamilton in the 1990s rarely get more than a sentence. I move past them Continue reading Reading the Terrain
I have been circling this idea in a few recent posts. I am not sure this one brings it all the way in for a landing, but it at least feels like it is on the approach. What sharpened it for me were two recent customer conversations where AI was assumed to be part of Continue reading Does Your Workflow Need A Model?
For eighteen years, I drove past the Morgantown Generating Station on my way to work. Its stacks were part of the background geography of my daily life, sitting along the Potomac River in Newburg, Maryland. Like many pieces of industrial infrastructure, it was both conspicuous and easy to stop seeing. It was just there. Then, Continue reading What Spatial Finance Cannot See From Orbit
Summaries of selected talks from FedGeoDay 2026, Day 1, April 2026, US Census Bureau, Suitland, MD Once again, I served on the FedGeoDay organizing committee this year. FedGeoDay continues to be one of the higher-value events on my calendar, and this year was no exception. With a focus on data preservation and federal data stewardship, Continue reading FedGeoDay 2026: Four Talks Worth Your…
Open a dataset of building footprints for a mid-sized city in sub-Saharan Africa. The polygons are clean. They snap to grid, close correctly, and sit at plausible addresses. Run them through any geometry validator and they pass. Load them in QGIS and they look, to every reasonable inspection, like a map. Some of them may Continue reading Plausibility Is Not Provenance
I first saw the typewriter when I rolled up the door of the shed. That small shed with the gabled roof and T-111 exterior had been there since the mid-1990s. My father built it with two sections. One was for his workshop and the other was intended to be my mother’s sewing room. I’m not Continue reading The Typewriter
Note: This post is the second in a four-part series leading to the 20th anniversary of this blog. I was recently at a conference that was primarily focused on climate risk. One particular panelist caught my attention when talking about analyzing vulnerabilities by first creating a digital twin and then using an AI model to Continue reading Twenty Years, Part Two
Following up on my previous post, I built a new Claude skill to take advantage of the increasing wealth of data online in cloud-native formats like GeoParquet. Given that DuckDB can read from such sources in place, I built the skill to use it to perform spatial analysis tasks on specified data sets. Here is Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude, Part 2
When Steve Crocker published RFC 1 on April 7, 1969, he did not present it as doctrine. He described tentative agreements, open questions, and a document offered in expectation of reaction (Crocker, 1969). That posture matters. It is a reminder that stewardship and governance were not late additions to shared technical infrastructure. They were part Continue reading RFC 1, OGC, and the Long Arc of…
I have decided that, in the next phase of my career, the most advanced spatial analysis I will perform will be deciding where to park this baby. AI is taking over the entire industry anyway, so I thought I d use it to make a conceptual rendering of my food truck/semi-retirement plan. The actual truck is Continue reading And I m Out
I spent the first five years of my career, from 1993 to 1998, doing mostly AML programming. There was also some AutoLISP, MapBasic, Clipper, and Avenue during that time, but it was mostly AML. In hindsight, that was a fortunate place to begin. I had no real exposure to GIS or geography in college, and Continue reading Shortening Translation Distance
Over the next several months, I will be making the rounds on my 2026 geo-conference schedule, with stops at FedGeoDay, State of the Map US, and FOSS4G North America. These are not just events I plan to attend. They are communities I have been involved with in different ways, and each one represents a part Continue reading Geo Roadshow 2026
In 1993, at the very start of my career, I was a newly minted AML developer working on a data automation project. A good bit of the industry’s energy at the time was focused on digitizing vast amounts of geospatial information that still existed in analog form, including mylar, paper maps, and other physical artifacts, Continue reading Twenty Years, Part One
Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent some of the best technical talent working in this space. None Continue reading Sovereignty and Open Source
[Author s Note: At the time of this writing, I am a member of the OSM US Advisory Council. This post reflects my personal analysis and opinion. It has not been endorsed by OSM US, and is not intended to reflect their views.] Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a Continue reading The Siren Song of Global Identifiers
In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral Continue reading When Geospatial Is Consumed…
Not everything I do these days is with AI. Lately, I ve had the opportunity to do some work with Mergin Maps as part of my consulting work. It is a field data collection application by Lutra Consulting that builds on top of QGIS. The mobile collection app itself is available for iOS and Android through Continue reading XLSForm with Mergin Maps
I first encountered the term agent more than 20 years ago, when I was working on an agent-based modeling system for simulating infrastructure inter-dependencies. Imagine an agent representing a power plant that has gone offline and an agent representing a telecommunications end office switching itself to battery backup and tracking how many simulation cycles the Continue reading How OOP Helped Me…
One of the advantages of writing a blog for nearly twenty years is that you can go back and see how some of the things you wrote about have held up over time. Suffice it to say there are a number of posts that tempt me to hit the delete key. There were times when Continue reading Post GIS Revisited
I have said repeatedly throughout my career that the effective use and adoption of technology requires a deep understanding of your own business processes and workflows. This is true regardless of the nature of the technology: proprietary or open-source, SaaS or cloud or on-prem, web or desktop or mobile, SQL or not. None of these Continue reading AI Still Requires You to Understand Your Business
It s been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it s been humming along, and we ve added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from those blogs over the previous year. I ve Continue reading GeoFeeds: Now with MCP
I ve been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it s become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to where I am focused on important behaviors, rather than Continue reading Spatial Analysis with Claude Code
As I’ve recounted before, what became HIFLD started as the M: drive on a Windows server in a musty government building in Norfolk, VA. Early exercises made it obvious that the data on our M: drive didn’t match the data on other M: drives. They also made it clear that sharing data, especially across 2002-vintage Continue reading Data Preservation: Let the Pain Guide You
Earlier in my career, I was working on an infrastructure protection task and we were reconciling data from several sources that addressed the same road network. The data from the locality was authoritative, but it lacked some information we needed so we were conflating other data to the linework. I commented on the general lack Continue reading Metadata Rising
I wasn’t looking forward to FOSS4G North America. The political and economic situation in the US made it much more difficult to attract sponsorship dollars. The government shutdown and the preceding sets of arbitrary and capricious cuts to government staff made attendance hard to predict. Three weeks prior to the event, it was not at Continue reading FOSS4GNA, 2025, and Life
Once again, FOSS4G North America is bringing together the people shaping the future of open-source geospatial technology. This year, it takes place November 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from the centers of federal decision-making where open data, open tools, and open collaboration appear to be increasingly at risk. Continue reading You Should Attend FOSS4G North…
I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It s true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside Parallels, but I didn t see the need to Continue reading Supporting Open Source: A Case Study
You are already using open-source. I ve said that time and again to various audiences. The most committed Microsoft and Esri users will immediately balk, but it s easy to knock the objections down. Azure? Linux abounds. Esri? GDAL under the hood. And what does the Py in ArcPy stand for? Oh yeah, Python, the open-source programming Continue reading Unless
I have no problem with vibe coding. Yes, you can make bad code with it, and quite easily. The worst way to vibe code is to issue a monolithic prompt like Build a word processor with the features of Microsoft Word. But using techniques like chain-of-thought or plan-and-solve prompting in an iterative manner can yield Continue reading Vibing Adjacencies
Before it was HIFLD, it was briefly FGDWG. Before that, it was a nameless thing in its infancy. In those early days, it bounced around between conference rooms in Norfolk, Dahlgren, and Chantilly. I was fortunate enough to be in the rooms where it was born and took shape. I was a contractor supporting an Continue reading HIFLD Open Is Dead*, Long Live HIFLD
The time since I ve last posted has been quite busy. I ve completely recovered from my previous eye issues and have been able to start traveling again. In fact, I m writing this post from a hotel room. In addition to my consulting work at Cercana, I took on a role as the CTO of Photometrics AI, Continue reading Geospatial, AI/ML, and Infrastructure
As the man said, Life moves pretty fast. At the start of the year, I had a planned eye surgery that sidelined me for a couple of weeks and then kept me somewhat limited after that. During that recovery, I was further sidelined by a respiratory illness. Five days after getting the all-clear from my Continue reading Happy New Year to Me
It s amazing what you can find when you plug in an old external hard drive. I recently rearranged my desk and realized that one of the external drives on top of my desktop Linux machine had apparently been unplugged for a while. I plugged it in to see what it held, and there were a Continue reading A Geospatial Time Capsule
Depending on your point of view, vibe coding using generative AI to iteratively develop code by using natural language to describe desired functionality is either revolutionary or the slippery slope to deploying poor, irresponsible software. While both viewpoints have merit, I fall somewhere in the middle. As a programmer who is approaching 50 Continue reading Vibe Coding a Mock API