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

Planet Scale Tiled Maps Without A Server

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 data within a Cloud Optimised Geotiff with the important difference that PMtiles can also contain vector data!

What this means is that you can create your own base map, and host it on something like Amazon S3 object storage at a fraction of the cost of other base map solutions! 

 

During this episode, you will hear Brandon, the founder, and creator of Protomaps, talk about scarcity, and well I have never really thought about base maps as being a scarce resource I can definitely see how a product like PMtiles could remove some of the barriers to entry for a lot of creativity in terms of base maps. 

 

More information on Protomaps is here:  https://protomaps.com/

 

Tippecanoe

https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe.git

https://bertt.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/creating-vector-pmtiles-with-tippecanoe/

Relevant podcast episodes 

Cloud Optimized Point Clouds

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

Cloud Native Geospatial

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

Microsoft’s Planetary computer

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-planetary-computer/

Stamen Design - Full Stack Cartography

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/full-stack-cartography/

 

If you have any questions or comments, let me know, I would love to hear from you!

Storytelling With Point Clouds

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 lead to better decisions? 

How many IT projects have failed, not because they were based on bad decisions but because they failed to get people to adopt the changes? 

The best decisions are meaningless unless they are adopted. 

So, how do we get people to change or adopt the change we are trying to make? 

I think the first thing to understand is that packaging matters! 

This episode is a case study into wrapping our ideas in a story and visualizing them using geospatial data.

 

Here is a link to the visualizations that were created using the point cloud data

https://www.gruenesgallustal.ch/resume

 

You can take a look HxDR platform here

https://hxdr.com/

 

If you are interested in more technical episodes about point clouds you might enjoy these!

 

The Point Data Abstraction Library

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/pdal-point-data-abstraction-library/

 

Cloud Optimized Point Clouds

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

 

Bathymetric Lidar

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/bathymetric-lidar-and-blue-carbon/

 

Lidar from Drones

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/lidar-from-drones/

 

Lidar from Space

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/gedi-space-lasers/

Geospatial Archaeology

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, and photogrammetry have completely changed the game in terms of modeling archaeological sites in a non-destructive manner.

And at the landscape scale, Earth observation data and AI are being used to prospect for new sites!

 

You can connect with Pete here

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-spencer-mcifa-162292136/

 

If you find this episode interesting you might like these episodes ;) 

Using Synthetic Aperture Radar ( from space ) to find where drinking water is leaking out of pipes https://mapscaping.com/podcast/finding-water-leaks-from-space/ 

 

This episode is all about using LiDAR from drones

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/lidar-from-drones/

 

The earth archive project is one archaeologist's goal to scan the entire world using LiDAR to create an archive for the future. 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-earth-archive/

Navigating the World of Geospatial Standards

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 how it might be used, why we need GeoRSS, and something called SensorThings!  

 

You will also learn about the PubSub standard for the syndication of spatial data and why streaming data is not always the answer.

 

We also discover what the most boring geospatial standard is and when the shapefile "might" die. 

 

All in all, this is a light-hearted look at a very serious topic and I hope you enjoy it! 

 

What to know more about the Open Geospatial Consortium? this is a good place to start! https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-open-geospatial-consortium/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making Money With Geospatial Content

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 websites and a youtube channel, he is a geospatial content creator who makes money from ads and from selling online courses. 

 

 Websites

https://geospatialschool.com/

https://opensourceoptions.com/

Youtube channel

https://www.youtube.com/@opensourceoptions

Each episode I publish has some sort of editorial intent, the intent of this episode is to show you a real-life example of someone like us who is using their geospatial knowledge if a different way. 

Not because I think this is for everyone! But because I think the more examples we are exposed to of people doing something different the more options we might see in our own lives. 

We don’t have to take advantage of these opportunities but there is some comfort in knowing that they are there. That we are not stuck.

 

If you listen to this episode and what to learn more about making money with geospatial content, Konrad and I will host a free webinar ( if we get enough interest! )  where we teach you the basics. Sign up here https://geospatialschool.com/webinar/

Distributing Geospatial Data

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 episode is meant to be a soft introduction to the world of distributed geospatial databases and some of the concepts surrounding them.

 

Along the way, you will be introduced to something called Apache Sedona which is a cluster computing system for processing large-scale spatial data, and hear the surprising stat that 97% of enterprise data remains unused! … perhaps because of the lack of context?

 

You can connect with Mo Sarwat on 

Twitter https://twitter.com/MoSarwat

Or at https://mosarwat.org/

During the conversation, we mention PostgreSQL and PostGIS a few times which are topics that we have covered in previous podcast episodes

 

Servicing Dynamic Vector Tiles from PostGIS

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

 

An introduction to PostgreSQL

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/postgresql-an-open-source-geospatial-database-for-gis-practitioners/

 

Spatial SQL

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

Toward the end of the conversation, we touch on the idea of cloud-native geospatial formats, and if you are interested in understanding this concept you might find these two previous episodes helpful

 

Cloud Optimized Point Clouds

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

 

Cloud Native Geospatial

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

 

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to reach out! I would love to hear from you

Geospatial Support for the UN World Food Programme

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 disasters happen. 

 

Of course, there is more to it ...

 

But I will let Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan ( The head of the Geospatial Support Unit at the UN World Food Programme)  explain it in more detail.

 

The Hunger Map

https://hungermap.wfp.org/

 

BeforeAfterMap OSM Before-After Maps is an online tool that allows anyone to easily compare how a particular area looked in terms of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data at two different years, side by side, and get a visual insight into mapping contributions over time.

https://beforeafter.baato.io/

 

 

 

 

Aerial Imagery: The State Of The Art

Personally, I don't feel like aerial imagery gets the attention it deserves! So I invited Michael Bewley - Senior Director of AI Systems at Nearmap back on the podcast to help bring us up to speed on the state of the art of capturing, processing, and building a business around aerial imagery.

If you don’t care about aerial imagery, think of this as a story about turning unstructured data into structured data into insights and building a business around that.

 

You can connect with Micheal on Twitter and LinkedIn

https://twitter.com/michaelbewley

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbewley/

 

Listen out for the following highlights

• It's not a camera it's an imaging system!
• Detecting change is not hard, detecting meaningful change is hard
• Are human abilities still a good benchmark for AI systems? 
• How to determine if an AI system is a prototype or production ready

 

Previous Interview with Michael Bewley

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/collecting-and-processing-aerial-imagery-at-scale/

 

Stratospheric Balloons As Remote Sensing Platforms

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/cube-satellites-of-the-stratosphere/

 

The technology stack and the cultural stack

This episode covers a wide range of topics from the role of geospatial in systems thinking - representing natural systems in location systems and how we can apply the technology behind virtual worlds to the real world.

During this conversation, it became clear to me that technology should be used in service of culture and not the other way around. I think in terms of geospatial we have an interesting opportunity to have an outsized impact if we can just figure out how to market it! 

 

I often think about problems as being either technological or cultural and it seems to me that technology generally moves faster than culture. Although I am sure we can all think of some great examples of huge cultural shifts that have happened in response to short-term emergencies in the past few years. 

 

Culture seems to react to technology as opposed to driving technology. I think if we were all better at marketing we could change this. 

 

Connect with Ingo Simonis

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingosimonis/

 

Previous Episodes featuring the Open Geospatial Consortium

 

The Open Geospatial Consortium

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/the-open-geospatial-consortium/

 

Open Geospatial standards - shared standards to solve shared problems

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/open-geospatial-standards-shared-standards-to-solve-shared-problems/

ChronoCards - Building a Business on ArcGIS Pro

My guest on the show today is Mike. Today Mike is the founder of a software startup called ChroneChards, but he started as a cartographer for an adventure race and Patagonia.

So he has come a long way.

A couple of other really interesting points about Mike.

He is a self-taught software developer and he is a self-taught businessman.

The reason why I mentioned this means that if he can teach himself these things, then you can do it too.

And as you'll discover later on in the episode, all you have to do is to get really, really comfortable with uncertainty.

 

You can connect with Mike here https://chrono.cards/

or on Twitter https://twitter.com/get_ChronoCards

 

It's probably worth riffing on this idea of uncertainty just for a minute. 

 

I think this is one thing that we all have in common. There'll be something about our lives, professional or private that we are uncertain about. 

I've had the pleasure over the last three, four, or five years of talking with a few different people that have overcome a lot of uncertainty. 

People that are self-taught software developers like Mike, people that have started their own GIS geospatial consultancies, and build their own businesses around their skills, none of those people have overcome uncertainty.

None of those people are now immune to uncertainty!

They have simply learned to live with it. 

So as someone who has experienced and continues to experience a lot of uncertainty, these stories have really helped me they've really had a positive impact. It's been great to know that other people go through this too. 

So here are some links to those episodes and hopefully, they will inspire you as well. 

From GIS Analyst to Software Engineer

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/from-gis-analyst-to-software-engineer/

Starting your own geospatial consultancy 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/starting-your-own-geospatial-consultancy/

Self-employment in the GIS / Geospatial industry 

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/self-employment-in-the-gis-geospatial-industry/

Being self-employed in the earth observation sector

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/being-self-employed-in-the-earth-observation-sector/

Mid-career change

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/mid-career-change/

I quit my job

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/i-quit-my-job/