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

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

Wednesday Jul 19, 2023

Felt - Upload Anything

Wednesday Jul 19, 2023

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

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

Some more episodes you might enjoy

https://segment-anything.com/

Wednesday Jul 05, 2023

The Rapid Editor

Wednesday Jul 05, 2023

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.

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!

Some more episodes you might enjoy

https://youtu.be/UakRtYmoWow

Wednesday Jun 28, 2023

PostgreSQL - Listen and Notify Clients In Real Time

Wednesday Jun 28, 2023

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!

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/

Some more episodes you might enjoy

Thursday Jun 22, 2023

Applying For A Job, Getting Picked and Negotiating The Contract

Thursday Jun 22, 2023

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!

Some more episodes you might enjoy

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

Wednesday Jun 14, 2023

Using Lasers To Talk To Satellites

Wednesday Jun 14, 2023

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

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/

Some more episodes you might enjoy

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

Wednesday Jun 07, 2023

From Pixels to Patterns: AI in Spatial Analysis

Wednesday Jun 07, 2023

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?

This is not a "how-to" do spatial analysis using an AI episode, it is an overview of AI in spatial analysis episode with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at FourSquare

https://foursquare.com/

Wednesday May 31, 2023

pygeoapi - A Python Geospatial Server

Wednesday May 31, 2023

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, QGIS server, or Deegree you might find this episode interesting!

Relevant previous episodes

Cloud-native Geospatial

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

Geoserver

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/geoserver/

Geonode

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/geonode-open-source-geospatial-content-management-system/

Some more episodes you might enjoy

https://location.foursquare.com/

Wednesday May 24, 2023

Big Data In The Browser

Wednesday May 24, 2023

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 evaluated when moving data and analytics to the client.

Nick Rabinowitz Senior Staff Software Engineer at Foursquare has a ton of experience with this so he volunteered his time to help us understand more about it.

https://studio.foursquare.com/home

If you are not familiar with the Arrow data format it might be worth checking out

Apache Arrow defines a language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on modern hardware like CPUs and GPUs. The Arrow memory format also supports zero-copy reads for lightning-fast data access without serialization overhead

Related podcast episodes that you might find interesting include

H3 grid system

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/h3-geospatial-indexing-system/

The H3 geospatial indexing system is a discrete global grid system consisting of a multi-precision hexagonal tiling of the sphere with hierarchical indexes. H3 is a really interesting approach to tiling data that was developed by UBER and has been open-sourced.

Hex Tiles

https://mapscaping.com/podcast/hex-tiles/

If you have not heard of the H3 grid system before listen to that episode first before listening to this one it will add a lot of useful context!

Spatial Knowledge Graphs

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

Foursquare is moving away from spatial joins and focusing on building a knowledge graph. If you are not familiar with graphs this might be a good place to start, also its interesting to hear the reasons for the move from spatial joins to another data structure.

Distribution Geospatial Data

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

This is interesting if you want to understand more about distributed databases and some of the strategies for doing this. It sounds complicated but this episode is a really good introduction!

Cloud Native Geospatial

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

This episode give a solid overview of what cloud-native means and some of the current geospatial cloud native formats out there today

I am constantly thinking about how I can make this podcast better for you so if you have any ideas or suggestions please let me know!

Also, I am thinking of recording a behind-the-scenes episode, is that something you might be interested in? if so what questions do you have?

Some more episodes you might enjoy