Link: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2024/organizations If you are a student or early-career developer and want to make your mark in open-source geospatial, the following geospatial organisations are participating in the 2024 Google Summer of Code: OSGeo 52North OpenStreetMap Organic Maps Open Transit Software Foundation Applications from candidates will be accepted between 18 March and 2 April, while the internships run for 12 weeks over the summer ..read more

Link: https://protomaps.com/blog/open-core-to-open-source/ The Protomaps project, a set of protocols and software for serving fast map tiles over the Web, is transitioning to a new funding model. Previously, Protomaps’ main source of funding was selling one-time downloads of basemap tiles. Now you can purchase access to commercial, hosted tile APIs and hands-on support through the project’s GitHub sponsorship page: For $14, you get one million tile requests via the commercial API. The tileset is derived from the Daylight Map Distribution, which includes data from OpenStreetMap but has gone th ..read more

Link: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2024-02-02-geocompas Development Seed’s data team in Ayacucho, Peru has spun out to form GeoCompas: I am pleased to announce that the skilled data and annotation team from DevSeed is separating to become an independent employee-owned company called GeoCompas. The Geo AI practice at Development Seed has grown, and the GeoCompas team has been essential in providing crucial mapping, annotation, QA, and automation support. Their expertise in geodata is now available to everyone. The new company focusses on OpenStreetMap editing, data labelling and annotatio ..read more

Link: https://sparkgeo.com/blog/map-to-speech-a-method-for-making-web-maps-more-accessible/ Darren Wiens of SparkGeo demonstrates an AI-driven approach to generating audio descriptions for interactive web maps. The overall process is simple yet effective: Convert the current map view to an image. Upload the image to OpenAI’s API to return a text description of the images. Upload the text description to OpenAI’s API to receive the audio of the text description. It’s one example of how new generative AI technologies can be put to good use. It is simply impossible for humans to provide alt-text ..read more

Link: https://ckochis.com/serve-protomaps-tiles-with-nodejs You can serve PMTiles directly from a cloud object storage but in some cases, you want to control who accesses data and how often—and you need a server for that. Craig Kochis wrote up two examples of how to serve PMTiles using a NodeJS server application from a co-located file and S3 ..read more

Link: https://docs.protomaps.com/deploy/cost I tried to estimate the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS before; now there’s a handy tool for that. Based on monthly tile requests you can compare the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS or Cloudflare with the cost of using maps from Google or hosted map-tile providers ..read more

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTfhpO7Kpc8 A webinar on cloud-native geospatial technologies and their applications in the pacific region features four speakers: Wei Ji Leong of Development Seed introduces cloud-optimised data formats for geospatial data, focussing on imaging, multi-dimensional data cubes, point clouds and vector data. Alex Leith of Auspatious talked through the history of Digital Earth platforms, and how cloud-native spatial data have shaped and influenced their development. Leo Ghignone from the University of Tasmania explained how IMOS, the Integrated Marine Observi ..read more

Link: https://github.com/stac-api-extensions/collection-transaction collection-transaction is a new STAC extension proposing an API for managing STAC collections and providing a clean REST interface for managing collection metadata: POST to create, PATCH or PUT to update, and DELETE to delete an item. stac-fastapi’s transaction extension already supports collection management, but its implementation is inconsistent with transactions API for items. collection-transaction will align both APIs and provide a consistent standard for managing STAC metadata ..read more

Link: https://mapbrief.com/2023/12/06/what-if-the-fix-for-the-geospatial-workforce-crisis-is-better-pay/ Brian Timoney contemplates why talented GIS professionals seek employment in other areas, tracing the problem to broad scoped roles and lower pay compared to similar roles in other industries. Even discounting the vagaries of job titles, the skew in the distribution of GIS Analyst salaries is notable because it implies a stagnant middle grinding away while effectively blocking the ability of new entrants to rapidly ascend the wage scale as you’d find in more “normal” distributions I have ..read more

Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesw5jpZchueoLk5-dLP4c4wLwiknD-Dk The recordings from this year’s PostGIS day are available on Youtube; just in time so you can add them to your festive tech playlist ..read more