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

From GNSS to VPS

** 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 enhancing positioning and navigation.

 

Future of Positioning: Predictions and expectations for the future of navigation and positioning technologies.

 

Connect with Sandy on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-kennedy-569a6a4/

 

 

Recommended listening 

SBAS - Satellite-based augmentation system

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/satellite-based-augmentation-system-a-base-station-in-the-sky/

 

GNSS - past present and future

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/navigating-the-past-present-and-future-of-gnss/

 

Where does Goolge's blue dot come from

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/how-google-calculates-your-location/

 

On the personal front, I have just moved back to New Zealand after 13 years in Denmark. It has been pretty busy the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of published podcast episodes. 

 

Overture Maps And The Daylight Distribution

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 ID system within the Overture Maps Foundation and the potential for easy conflation and integration of third-party data.

Jennings also explains the relationship between OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, highlighting how they complement each other.

 

Relevant podcast episodes 

OpenStreetMap Is A Community Of Communities

Cloud Native Geospatial

Cloud Optimized Point Clouds

The Rapid Editor

With regards to accessing Overture Map data, you might find this YouTube video helpful

https://youtu.be/fZj6kTwXN1U?feature=shared

 

Just in case you are interested in the Google building footprints here is a link to that :) 

https://sites.research.google/open-buildings/

100 billion Points Every Day

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 of something they call a movement engine.

To help understand more about how they do this I have invited Gabriel Durkin the director of data science on the podcast. This is the last in a series of episodes I have worked on together with FourSquare and I have to say it's been really enjoyable working with them. 

If you are interested in hearing some of the previous episodes just check out the links below!

 

From Pixels To Patterns AI In Spatial Analysis

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/from-pixels-to-patterns-ai-in-spatial-analysis/

Big Data In The Browser

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/big-data-in-the-browser/

Spatial Knowledge Graphs

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/spatial-knowledge-graphs/

Designing For Location Privacy

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/designing-for-location-privacy/

All Of The Places In The World

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/all-of-the-places-in-the-world/

Geospatial Jobs

 

There are a few new jobs on our Job Board! The most interesting one is the role of Social Media Manager at Felt - United States (Remote) 

( If you want to apply for this one, it might be a good idea to listen to this episode first ;) 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/felt-upload-anything/ )

See more at https://mapscaping.com/jobs/

 

As a bonus for reading all the way to the end :) 

 

If you are looking for free terrain data for anywhere in the world you might find this useful 

https://github.com/openterrain/openterrain/wiki/Terrain-Data

Synthetic Data For Real Problems

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 realistic images of cars based on the specifications of a specific sensor.

These data sets are often referred to as synthetic data or fake data and to help us understand more about this I have invited Chris Andrews from Rendered AI on the podcast.

 

Here are a few previous episodes you might find interesting 

 

Computer Vision And GeoAI

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/computer-vision-and-geoai/

In this episode, the discussion is aimed at an increased understanding of the differences between computer vision and the AI that is used in the Earth Observation world.

 

Labels Matter

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/labels-matter/

What it takes to create labeled training data manually. If you are new to the idea of labeled data sets this is a good place to start.

 

Fake Satellite Imagery

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/fake-satellite-imagery/

This is a good episode if you want to know more about Generative AI and Generative Adversarial Networks. 

 

Also, check out this website https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ to get an idea of where and how these Generative Adversarial Networks can be used. Look for a website called This City Does Not Exist  http://thiscitydoesnotexist.com/

 

On a silently similar note try uploading an image to https://bard.google.com/ … it's pretty interesting! 

 

 

 

Hub Ocean

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 data hubs have a gravity to them that becomes more powerful over time.

One of the guiding concepts behind these data hubs seems to be the idea of FAIR data - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable data  

…. But its not enough to ensure that the data is fair I think we should also consider how we can make the results of our research Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable data 

If you are not already familiar with Cloud Optimised Geospatial formats it is worth checking out these two episodes. 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-optimized-point-clouds/

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cloud-native-geospatial/

 

 

 

Felt - Upload Anything

 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 support protomaps and the development of PMtiles as well as contributing code to Maplibre and Gdal 

 

... But that is not why you should listen to this episode … you should listen to this episode because if we are going to grow the geo pie we need more upload anything buttons

 

Easily bring data into Felt with our QGIS plug-in and Felt API 

How We Make Your Data Look Great at Every Scale with Tippecanoe

The Rapid Editor

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 important thing is it correct.

If you are interested in OpenStreetMap you might enjoy this episode 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/openstreetmap-is-a-community-of-communities/ which is a great introduction to OpenStreetMap as a project but also explains some of the commercial interest in updating the map which adds a lot of context to Rapid and its development and future.

 

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

If you have not heard of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team this is well worth checking out! 

https://www.hotosm.org/

 

Segment Anything 

(SAM) can segment objects by simply clicking or interactively selecting points to include or exclude from the object. This makes it a user-friendly tool for image segmentation.

https://segment-anything.com/

 

Mapillary

Mapillary is a platform that provides street-level imagery and map data from all over the world. The platform is powered by collaboration and computer vision, which helps in generating and maintaining up-to-date, detailed maps.

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/scaling-map-data-generation-using-computer-vision/

 

GeoSpatial Jobs!

Drone Deploy’s Earthworks team is looking for an experienced Back End Engineer Full time / Remote

NV5 is looking for a Senior GIS Analyst

https://mapscaping.com/jobs/

Want to help? I could really use some support!

 

 

PostgreSQL - Listen and Notify Clients In Real Time

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 interfaces.

pg_eventserv does one thing and one thing only: take events generated by the PostgreSQL NOTIFY command and passes the payload along to waiting WebSockets clients.

pg_eventserv is free and easy to install and you can find it here: https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_eventserv

What this means is that any client can watch for notifications and update as changes in the database happen.

Real-time data!

Here is a link to a Youtube video demonstration of pg_eventserv in action!

https://youtu.be/UakRtYmoWow 

I will let Paul Ramsey the creator of pg_eventserv explain all this in more detail in this episode. 

If you want to reach out to Paul the best place to do that is http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/ 

Or if you want to listen to previous episodes with Paul you might find these interesting

Raster in the database?

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/rasters-in-a-database/

Dynamic Vector Tiles Straight From The Database

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/dynamic-vector-tiles-straight-from-the-database/

Spatial SQL- GIS Without The GIS

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/spatial-sql-gis-without-the-gis/

 

also ...  If you are interested in spatial databases at scale ... you might find this episode interesting

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/distributing-geospatial-data/

 

 

Applying For A Job, Getting Picked and Negotiating The Contract

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 geospatial recruitment specialist for a few well-known companies like Google, Descartes Labs and is currently the Head of Talent at Regrow Ag. In this episode, he is going to help us understand some of the answers to these questions.

 

Reach out to Jett on LinkedIn or Twitter 

If you enjoy this episode and are interested in more career-focused episodes go to https://mapscaping.com/podcasts/ and filter by “Geospatial Career"

 

See you next week!

 

Using Lasers To Talk To Satellites

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 your data to a geostationary satellite that can always see a ground station and let it send the data back to Earth. 

Radios are tried and tested, they have been used for this purpose since the inception of satellite communication and radio waves can pass through Earth's atmosphere without significant loss!

But … the frequency spectrum for radio waves is strictly regulated, which can limit available channels for communication, and the bandwidth of radio frequencies is limited, which can reduce the volume of data transmission.

What about lasers? 

You can send more data faster with a laser, you don’t need to worry about interfering with someone else part of the radio spectrum, and ground stations can be much smaller even human-portable! 

But … lasers struggle with clouds and the technology is still relatively new

So what is the best way to communicate with satellites? Radio or Laser? The answer is … it depends ;) 

 

Jordan Wachs, Director of Business Development for SpaceRake.net does a great job adding context to this discussion but perhaps the bigger question here is what will we do when satellites become internet devices, part of the Internet of Things?

What if they were always on always connected in the same way your phone is always on, always connected? What will this enable? 

 

This episode was sponsored by Sponsored by Sinergise, as part of Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem knowledge sharing

 

People who liked this episode also liked …

 

How to keep your satellite pointing at earth

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/how-to-keep-your-satellite-pointing-at-earth/

 

Hyperspectral v’s Multispectral

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/hyperspectral-vs-multispectral/

 

Sentinel Hub

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/sentinel-hub/

 

Swing by our website sometime https://mapscaping.com/