Project Geospatial

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Jarrett Keifer of Element 84 presents ReMaking Cirrus: Reflecting on Five Years of Open Source Data Orchestration. Jarrett takes the audience through the evolution of Cirrus, a specialized framework designed to handle massive geospatial data processing pipelines—from ingest and metadata generation to indexing into searchable STAC catalogs.

Jarrett shares the project's journey from its roots in NASA's Cumulus project to its current state as a lightweight, STAC-native orchestrator used to manage over 30 petabytes of data. He provides a candid look at the technical "pendulum swings" the project has experienced, including the bold decision to remove all infrastructure-as-code dependencies and serverless framework logic in response to licensing changes, while distilling five years of development into three key lessons on funding, project vision, and managing technical debt.

Highlights:

🛰️ What is Cirrus? An introduction to the data orchestration component of Element 84's Filmpop suite for building geospatial data lakes

🔄 The Evolution of STAC Workflows: How Cirrus uses STAC items as the primary message format to track state across distributed processing tasks

🧩 Scaling to Petabytes: Managing massive archives like Sentinel-2 with a system that handles 30,000+ items a day and nearly 80 million total items

⚙️ The Serverless Redesign: Why Element 84 deleted 4,400 lines of code to remove closed-source build dependencies and move toward a "bring-your-own-IaC" model

🌐 Lessons in Open Source: Reflections on how funding sources, project vision, and inevitable failures shape the long-term success of a software project

🏢 From Cirrus to Swoop: A look at a cloud-agnostic "meta-orchestrator" experiment designed for Kubernetes and Argo Workflows

🏗️ Operational Reliability: Why making failures cheap, visible, and easy to resolve is a core design principle for high-volume data pipelines

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #DataOrchestration #STAC #Cirrus #OpenSource #AWS #CloudNative #DataEngineering #Python #Serverless #Element84 #ProjectGeospatial #DataLake #SoftwareDevelopment

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Tom Allnett and Stephen Smith of Green Info Network present Accessible Mapping for the Parks for California Grant Application Website. The presenters discuss the technical and design challenges of remediating a geospatial web application to meet WCAG accessibility standards, ensuring that complex interactive maps are usable for everyone, including individuals with low vision, color blindness, or those who rely on screen readers and keyboard navigation.

Tom and Stephen detail their approach to "comparable experiences," which prioritizes high-contrast visual design, structured text descriptions, and accessible keyboard controls over purely visual map interactions. They share practical implementation strategies using a FOSS stack—including Django, PostGIS, Leaflet, and MapServer—to generate dynamic, deterministic text summaries of spatial data, while also explaining why they currently opt for traditional database intersections over non-deterministic AI solutions for accessibility descriptions.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Accessibility Challenge: Why maps are inherently difficult to make accessible due to their visual nature and reliance on color

🔄 Comparable Experiences: Moving beyond simple alt-text to provide rich, text-based alternatives for complex geospatial data

🧩 WCAG & Legal Standards: Navigating the web content accessibility guidelines and state/federal laws like the ADA in California

⚙️ Color Contrast Matrix: A look at using outlines and numbered labels to ensure map features meet the 3:1 contrast ratio requirement

🌐 Deterministic Descriptions: Using PostGIS on the backend to create consistent, live text summaries of what is currently visible on the map

🏢 Keyboard-First Navigation: Implementing custom pan controls and tab-accessible map widgets to support users who don't use a mouse

🏗️ Human-Centric Design: Why manual description sprints and expert accessibility consultants remain vital for high-quality remediation

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #Accessibility #WebMapping #WCAG #ADA #GIS #OpenSource #InclusiveDesign #Leaflet #PostGIS #CaliforniaParks #ProjectGeospatial #UXDesign #WebDevelopment

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Jessica Breen presents Open Access for Open Source. Jessica discusses the launch of a new collaboration between FOSS4G North America and the open-access journal STAX, aimed at bridging the gap between open-source geospatial practice and academic literature.

The session outlines an opportunity for conference presenters—whether they delivered talks, workshops, or posters—to publish their work in a dedicated special issue. Jessica explains the benefits of open-access publishing, including retaining copyright and reaching a global audience, while detailing a transparent, collaborative peer-review process designed to be constructive and practitioner-friendly. She also provides practical tips for first-time authors on structuring short "two-pager" articles and sharing data through open repositories.

Highlights:

🛰️ Bridging the Gap: Why open-source geospatial work often misses out on academic citation and how a special issue can help

🔄 Open Access vs. Traditional Publishing: A look at how flipping the subscription model makes information free for everyone while authors keep their copyright

🧩 The STAX Review Process: An inside look at a transparent, consensus-based peer-review system where reviewers work together with authors

⚙️ The "Two-Pager" Format: A low-barrier entry point for publishing 800- to 1,200-word articles that focus on what was done and why it matters

🌐 Citable Workflows: Transforming GitHub repos and workshop slides into durable, citable entries in the scholarly record

🏢 Data Stewardship: Best practices for sharing datasets through repositories like Zenodo, FigShare, and Dryad to ensure long-term reusability

🏗️ Support for Authors: How the FOSS4G academic committee is helping non-academics navigate the publishing process without the need for "academic-ese"

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenAccess #AcademicPublishing #OpenSource #DataScience #PeerReview #STAXJournal #ResearchImpact #GIS #ProjectGeospatial #DigitalScholarship #OpenData #ScienceCommunication #TechnicalWriting

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Ian Horn from the Kentucky Division of Geographic Information presents KyFromAbove on AWS: Transitioning to an Open Data Platform. Ian shares the story of how the Commonwealth of Kentucky moved its massive library of aerial imagery and elevation data from legacy FTP and physical storage systems to a cloud-native, open-data registry on AWS.

The presentation details the technical shift to cloud-optimized formats (COGs) and the implementation of a STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) API, which now manages over 340 terabytes of data, including high-resolution 3-inch oblique imagery and statewide LiDAR. Ian provides a candid look at the lessons learned during this rapid migration—from mastering the AWS CLI and Python to the significant cost savings achieved by leveraging open data programs—while offering practical advice for other public agencies looking to modernize their data distribution.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Kentucky Advantage: Fun facts about why Kentucky is recognized as a leader in statewide LiDAR and topographic mapping

🔄 Moving Beyond FTP: The transition from 20 years of "zip and download" to a modern, streaming cloud-native architecture

🧩 Big Data Milestones: Managing 342 terabytes and 9.4 million objects, including three phases of statewide orthoimagery

⚙️ Implementing STAC: How Kentucky stood up a STAC API and browser to make their massive imagery archive searchable and interoperable

🌐 Financial Impacts: Saving an estimated $41,000 per month in storage and server costs by joining the AWS Open Data Registry

🏢 Lessons Learned: The importance of "starting with the end in mind" and why sync is superior to cp for massive bucket migrations

🏗️ User Feedback: Addressing the challenges of supporting legacy CAD users while moving toward cutting-edge cloud formats

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenData #AWS #STAC #LiDAR #Kentucky #CloudNative #GIS #AerialImagery #OpenSource #DataEngineering #ProjectGeospatial #PublicSector #DataModernization

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Nathan McEachen, founder and CEO of TerraFrame, presents Scalable GeoAI: Harnessing Agents, Knowledge Graphs, and DGGS. Nathan discusses the critical need for scalable, real-time geospatial intelligence in disaster response and resiliency contexts, moving beyond simple chatbots to systems that understand the semantic relationships between geographical features and their downstream impacts.

The presentation details a multi-agent architecture that leverages Spatial Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) to model complex relationships and Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) to normalize and aggregate statistical data. Nathan demonstrates how these technologies work together to provide traceable, deterministic answers to natural language questions—such as identifying which census areas are compromised by power failures during a flood—while emphasizing the importance of semantic identity and interoperable data publishing standards to avoid creating new information silos.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Scalability Challenge: Why AI alone can't magically integrate spatial data and the need for upfront interoperability in National Spatial Data Infrastructures

🔄 Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS): An introduction to the emerging OGC standard that quantizes the world into uniform zones for efficient data normalization

🧩 Spatial Knowledge Graphs: Moving from feature-type centric tables to relationship-centric graphs that Large Language Models can traverse and understand

⚙️ Agentic AI Tools: Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to expose data endpoints such as DGGS servers and triple stores to autonomous AI agents

🌐 Disaster Resiliency Demo: Watch a real-world prototype query flood levels near Winnipeg and automatically correlate power infrastructure with census boundaries

🏢 Beyond Silos: The vision for "No STAC"—transforming SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs into interoperable knowledge graphs for cross-agency data discovery

🏗️ Avoiding Monoliths: Why the goal should be a standardized approach for publishing federated graphs rather than "one big graph to rule them all"

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #GeoAI #KnowledgeGraphs #DGGS #DisasterResiliency #AI #OpenSource #DataEngineering #STAC #OGC #TerraFrame #ProjectGeospatial #MachineLearning #SemanticWeb

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Joseph Holler, Matthew Mills, and Samuel Bernard of Middlebury College present Reproducing Geographic Analysis Studies: Open Science Project-Based Learning. The presenters discuss a unique NSF-funded curriculum that teaches advanced GIS students to apply open science research practices by attempting to computationally reproduce published GI science studies.

The presentation provides a deep dive into the course structure, which uses a Project-Based Learning (PBL) framework to move students from introductory GIS software to high-level spatial analysis in R and Python. The students share their experience reproducing a high-profile study on hazardous heat exposure in prisons, detailing the technical hurdles they encountered—such as missing data grids, inconsistent code scripts, and undocumented environments—and how overcoming these obstacles deepened their understanding of geographic validity and the full research life cycle.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Reproducibility Crisis: Why most GI science studies can't be repeated and the difference between computational reproduction and broader verification

🔄 Project-Based Learning (PBL): Moving beyond step-by-step lab tutorials to sustained, authentic inquiry on real-world research problems

🧩 Open Science Research Compendium: A look at a standardized structure for organizing raw data, metadata, procedures, and computational environments

⚙️ Building a Pre-Analysis Plan: The importance of registering a research strategy in a computational notebook before executing any code

🌐 Real-World Case Study: Reproducing nature sustainability research on extreme heat risk in US carceral facilities using R and T-MAP

🏢 Identifying Threats to Validity: How students interrogated the coarse 4x4 resolution of climate data against localized prison coordinates

🏗️ Creating Public Products: Transforming messy research into living, citable web reports and digital archives with DOIs

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenScience #GIS #Reproducibility #Rstats #SpatialAnalysis #DataScience #MiddleburyCollege #HigherEducation #ProjectBasedLearning #GIscience #GitHub #ResearchEthics #ProjectGeospatial

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Michele Tobias, a data scientist at UC Davis DataLab, presents Remote Sensing for Plants that are Hard to See. Michele explores the intersection of coastal ecology and geospatial data science, focusing on the challenge of identifying beach vegetation—the "forgotten" architects of protective dune systems—using publicly available remote sensing data and open-source tools like R and QGIS.

The presentation highlights the technical difficulties of monitoring beach plants, which are often silvery or sand-covered, making standard greenness indices like NDVI ineffective. Michele tests alternative methods, including the "Cacti Index" adapted for Sentinel-2 data and topographic position indexing (TPI), while discussing the limitations of current public data resolution and the critical need for perfectly paired imagery and elevation datasets to track these rapidly changing environments.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Role of Beach Plants: Why these often-ignored plants are essential for natural coastal protection and dune building

🔄 The Monitoring Challenge: Why traditional field sampling is too slow, expensive, and physically demanding for daily beach changes

🧩 Data Constraints: The difficulty of finding paired imagery and Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) from the same temporal window

⚙️ Beyond NDVI: Why standard vegetation indices fail for succulent, reflective beach plants and the search for better spectral alternatives

🌐 Topographic Position Index (TPI): Using elevation data to identify dunes and other micro-topographic features on the sandy shore

🏢 The "Cacti Index" Experiment: Adapting desert remote sensing techniques to find silvery, high-reflectance coastal vegetation

🏗️ A Plea for Data: Why current public data resolution (10m-30m) is insufficient for beach management and the need for finer spectral bands

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #RemoteSensing #CoastalEcology #BeachPlants #DuneRestoration #Sentinel2 #Rstats #QGIS #OpenSource #DataScience #ProjectGeospatial #Conservation #ClimateResilience #EcologicalMonitoring

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Ted Banken presents Simplifying the Retrieval of Open Places Data. Ted discusses the challenges of working with massive open datasets like Overture Maps, which contains billions of points globally, and the technical hurdles that prevent non-engineers from easily accessing this data.

The presentation provides a practical guide to retrieving "Places" (Points of Interest) data using a variety of open-source tools—from QGIS plugins for visual learners to streamlined packages in R and Python for developers. Ted demonstrates how to find every bagel shop in New York City using cloud-native GeoParquet formats, and introduces "pyplace," a Python package he developed to reduce complex SQL queries into simple, one-line functions for exploratory spatial analysis.

Highlights:

🛰️ The Overture Maps Dataset: An overview of the massive, multi-source open data project supported by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom

🔄 Why GeoParquet? Understanding the benefits of ultra-compressed, column-oriented storage for high-speed spatial querying

🧩 Bridging the SQL Gap: How "analyst-first" tools help urban planners and policy experts access big data without deep engineering knowledge

⚙️ QGIS Workflow: Using the GeoParquet Downloader and QuickOSM plugins to visualize and clip global place data locally

🌐 The R Experience: A look at the "overtureR" and "nominatimlight" packages for elegant spatial filtering and leaflet mapping

🏢 Python & PyPlace: A demo of Ted's custom library designed to simplify Overture data retrieval into human-readable Python functions

🏗️ Real-World Application: Watch a step-by-step demonstration of extracting specific business categories across a major metropolitan area

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenData #OvertureMaps #PointsOfInterest #GIS #GeoParquet #Python #Rstats #QGIS #UrbanPlanning #OpenSource #DataEngineering #ProjectGeospatial #LocationIntelligence

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Brian Timoney of IQGeo delivers a thought-provoking presentation titled Selling the Contemporary Enterprise Software Experience. Brian reflects on the evolution of open-source geospatial software—from the early days of "selling free" to the modern era where tools like PostgreSQL and PostGIS have won the developer community's hearts but face new challenges in enterprise environments.

Brian explores the critical factors that drive enterprise software adoption, including user experience, security, and the "derisking" of technology for decision-makers. He offers a candid look at the importance of maintaining open-source infrastructure in a culture obsessed with the "new and shiny," and makes a bold prediction about the future of GIS in the age of AI.

Highlights:

🛰️ The "Victory" of Open Source: Reflecting on the journey from Victoria 2007 to PostgreSQL topping the Stack Overflow developer surveys

🔄 Selling "Free" to the Enterprise: Why leading with "free" often breeds suspicion in corporate boardrooms and how to pivot to value

🧩 User Experience Beyond GIS: Designing map interfaces for field workers with gloves on, rather than just for other GIS professionals

⚙️ The Enterprise Security Nightmare: Lessons from recent high-profile geospatial hacks and the paramount importance of data security

🌐 Data Quality in the Age of AI: How artificial intelligence might finally help solve the industry's persistent "suboptimal data" issues

🏢 The Maintenance Challenge: Navigating the countercultural impulse required to support mature, reliable software over long time horizons

🏗️ The Future of GIS: Why the "world's favorite GIS" by 2030 might be an AI model like Claude rather than traditional desktop software

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #OpenSource #EnterpriseSoftware #GIS #PostgreSQL #PostGIS #GDAL #SoftwareDevelopment #TechTrends #DataSecurity #UXDesign #ProjectGeospatial #AI #Innovation

In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Christopher Seeger, a professor at Iowa State University, presents Teaching FOSS: Building Local Capacity with Open Source Geospatial Tools. Christopher discusses the critical role of University Extension programs in empowering rural communities through data literacy and accessible, free, and open-source software (FOSS).

Drawing from over 20 years of experience in geospatial outreach, Christopher outlines a specialized "stack" of tools designed for users who may not be tech-savvy—from city clerks to retired volunteers. He explains how low-barrier tools like geojson.io, Tableau Public, and OpenStreetMap (OSM) can be used to unlock "hidden" community data, such as water usage records or local infrastructure needs, and turn them into actionable insights for local decision-making.

Highlights:

🛰️ Extension and Outreach: How Iowa State University bridges the gap between academic research and local community challenges

🔄 Data Science for the Public Good: Insights from an intensive program that trains students to work on state and government challenges in rural areas

🧩 The Low-Barrier Stack: Why tools like geojson.io and Tableau Public are ideal for entry-level users to map and share data

⚙️ Facilitated VGI: Using OpenStreetMap to help communities map missing infrastructure like childcare centers and new housing developments

🌐 Custom Imagery in OSM: How to leverage state-level orthophoto servers to update OpenStreetMap when commercial satellite imagery lags behind

🏢 Tableau Public for Communities: A deep dive into using the free version of Tableau to create interactive dashboards with spatial data

🏗️ Advanced Visualization: Using Inkscape and QGIS to create custom vector graphics and simplified geometry for web-based maps

For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com

#Geospatial #FOSS4G #DataLiteracy #OpenSource #GIS #IowaState #TableauPublic #OpenStreetMap #CommunityDevelopment #RuralData #Education #ProjectGeospatial #VGI #DataScience #PublicService