Geospatial FM

Wilfred Waters
  • 4.7 (3)
  • SCIENCE
  • UPDATED MONTHLY

Obsessed with geospatial foundation models, broadcasting in geospatial and compounding via publicly listed geospatial equities.

  1. UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM about NEOM

    1D AGO

    UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM about NEOM

    The Geospatial FM podcast topic profile: 1. Data engineering for geospatial 2. GEOSPATIAL FOR WORLD MODELS (foundation models are so last week) 3. GEOSPATIAL IN PREDICTION MARKETS (spatial finance is so 2022) 4. In this context, stocks, globally 5. Human rights outcomes of these stocks Item 5 is always number 1. So we are finishing the year with that focus. Let's look at this BBC article about a murder of a tribal landowner to make way for the world's largest dictator vanity project, The Line in Saudi Arabia: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52375343. Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti spoke in this video before he was murdered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Mp_CKbjdE. One thing he predicted was being framed by the government surrounding his dead body with weapons. They did report finding his body in such a state: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=35599. Another BBC article profiles Col Rabih Alenezi https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445. He said he was a security force leader who was asked by the government to, if necessary, kill villages who resisted eviction. He refused and escaped to the UK. Whoever replaced him obviously was not so upstanding, and Abdul Rahim al-Hwaiti was killed.  So we have a suitably arresting human rights issue to examine for the podcast. I then used The UN's Communication Report and Search tool (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/Tmsearch/TMDocuments) to find out about the western companies involved, an issue flagged by the BBC. I found a UN Letter of Urgent Appeal to AECOM: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28030. The communication search tool shows the CEO, Mr Rudd, does not appear to have responded to the letter. It is significant that AECOM was a recipient, because they're the best international design firm according to Engineering News Record (https://www.enr.com/toplists/2025-top-500-design-firms-preview). Last year it was Jacbos, also a delivery partner on The Line, but they have not received a letter of urgent appeal. In the letter, reference is made to an earlier one about the killing of Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=25483). The UN accompanied that letter a week later with a summary for the public: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136322.  In tying up loose ends, I observed that another recipient of such a letter was Solar Water. They announced in 2019 what they were doing for NEOM: https://www.solarwaterplc.com/company-news/green-technology-in-the-neom-project-and-others-how-will-it-change-the-rules-of-the-game-in-the-gulf/. Five years later, however, after receiving the letter (https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=28049), they gave up $100 million by cancelling the project: https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-aw-canceled-100m-neom-contract-human-rights-abuse-saudi-2024-5.  AECOM has done no such thing. They could not even bear to respond to the letter. Despite being a signatory to the UN Global Compact (https://unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/participants/17780-AECOM-Technology-Corporation). AECOM is in the Consultancy vertical of the World Model 500. The podcast remains faithful to its 5 topics. Topic 5, human rights, is always number 1. Please accept, dear Mr. Rudd, the assurances of my highest consideration.

    1h 15m
  2. Voting in the Geospatial Economy

    10/27/2025

    Voting in the Geospatial Economy

    Ryan Kmetz is Research Director at IQSpatial. We are privileged to have his time in this episode. He talked with us about economic conditions faced by geospatial workers in the US. We reflected on the emergence of a protest movement, the No Kings march a couple of weekends ago. We observed how this has emerged in the context of very high cost of living, lack of wage growth, high costs of housing and education. Ryan is a useful guest here because he has in his family history a great great great grandfather who was involved in similar protest movement against a Russian czar and was sent to Siberia as punishment. In a hero's journey like so many who have come to America over the centuries, this man escaped prison to New York City where he sold newspapers on a street corner. A few generations later we have Ryan to tell this story and remind us that things happen in cycles. By using a translation service you can read more about this family member here. Ryan also told us about another family member who adds to the picture of unrest like we see now occurring in cycles, and how cynical political figures can exploit underprivileged groups in society to distract the population from the real causes of their issues. I recommend listening to find out more about that family figure. Ryan then turned the mic toward me for a summary of what I have observed in my career from the perspective of exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It was a chance to step through what I covered earlier in the year in 8 episodes starting here. We then used this material about cycles of exploitation of the vulnerable in society across the centuries, examples of how to deal with that from his family history and evidence of this pattern continuing in my career across the world to make the case for a new way of worker participation in the economy. That new way is expanding democratic participation via owning shares. When you own shares you can vote on how a company is run. Through community organising (and we can use a prior guest Frank Romo for inspiration here) Ryan and I perceive there is an opportunity to assert ourselves in the industry to direct our work to favour the poor and marginalised. I look forward to your own reflections on this matter and working with you to build up a force for justice here.

    53 min
  3. Apache Sedona and SedonaDB in Microsoft Fabric

    10/22/2025

    Apache Sedona and SedonaDB in Microsoft Fabric

    0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri 1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView 6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse 22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric? 26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers 35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial 57:20 - Why is it worth it to use Apache Sedona in Fabric? 1:00:44 - SedonaDB Apache Sedona is a way for a regular Apache Spark using data analyst to acquire geospatial capabilities. With Sedona, if you know SQL, you know GIS. Rakesh Gupta is Principal Consultant at SketchMyView in London. He tells us about how to set up Apache Sedona in Microsoft Fabric in 2 lines of code. It was a privilege to have his time for this tutorial as he showed how easy it is to get up and running with a powerful, free spatial analysis system that leverages Apache Spark for scalable compute. He also touched in the new SedonaDB, released last month. This is a significant development for the geospatial economy because it is a database created with geospatial data as a first class citizen. This means we have our own database library that is only a pip install away: pip install "apache-sedona[db]" Something to consider as a replacement for DuckDB. More here and here.

    1h 22m
  4. LocationIntelligence.US

    10/13/2025

    LocationIntelligence.US

    Having started his career at USGS in 1980, Joe Francica is a veteran of the geospatial industry. He has a lot of experience in publishing, for example as Editor In Chief of (the now shuttered) Directions Mazagine…and he has been host of On Point with Korem. Joe’s latest venture is www.LocationIntelligence.us. In my endless search for the world’s geospatial companies, I came across his Guide to the Location Intelligence Marketplace. It contains his global list of over 1000 such companies. What a treasure trove! Joe has of course made his own effort to segment the market. In Appendix 4, the report has over 100 venture capital and private equity firms that are versed in the task of assessing viability of geospatial business ideas. A fascinating statistic - in the decade 2015-2025, Joe estimates that these firms have put $USD10 billion into geospatial ideas! The timing of this episode is exquisite. Just when I was starting to think about starting a business in another industry, he has got me thinking again. If others have had success, why can’t I? And why can’t you? Thanks Joe, for inspiring us and giving us this report as an expression of a tremendously successful career.

    46 min

  5. 10/07/2025

    GeoRiskAI

    Arham Ansari confronts some challenges that most of us in the liberal democratic Western world do not. For example, in a small town near Delhi in northern India he only has 8-10hrs of power per day. There had also been a blackout the whole 3 days prior to the first day of recording the episode. India is not a wealthy country and he cannot afford to pay for expensive cloud computing/storage services to handle the large volumes of data required to train a flood prediction service on decades of records about 100+ parameters. This sharpens our appreciation of what he has achieved. Arham is a civil engineering graduate applying for jobs in India’s public service. Whilst cramming for entrance exams, he has applied some of his knowledge to the risks of heat waves, floods and landslides. He has grouped those solutions under GeoRiskAI. I appreciated his candor on LinkedIn about learning the ropes. For example he admitted to making his flood predictions 24% less accurate after correcting the inputs. It is good to see openness about the learning process on LinkedIn where people are usually posting glitzy, perfect demos. If you’re looking for a determined individual with the intellect required to make meaningful progress against the challenge of flood prediction, I recommend reaching out to him.

    1h 22m
  6. RomoGIS on AI

    08/12/2025

    RomoGIS on AI

    Frank Romo is an inspiring leader in geospatial. He runs several educational programs with school students across the country such as in The Bronx and recently St Louis. The focus of episode was therefore on how AI is being used to facilitate better outcomes for students. Frank gave examples from his community organising work such as urban planning and urban design renderings in The Bronx, gathering data for geospatial projects, and as a study aid by creating a quiz to help pass the Part 107 drone pilot license. Frank is a joy to talk with. He is such a breath of fresh air because of the concerted efforts he makes to be approachable to all. He dresses the part. It is deliberately memorable and contrasts strongly with typical office dress. He wears a bandana in some of the photos with students. As such, he brings an atmosphere of fun, informality and through this it is easier to generate engagement with students and adults alike regarding what can often be a dry subject - drawing maps with databases. In the first episode I recorded with him, he publicly displayed for the first time a dashboard about gun violence in The Bronx, created during a RomoGIS community organising effort. First episode. Frank gives us a masterclass in community organising. He just so happens to have geospatial capability also. He provides several fantastic examples of geospatial outputs and acquisition of political power by communities that he has served. The Bronx gun violence dashboard is here. We are once again seeing, in this subsequent episode with him, the first public display of another dashboard from further community organising efforts. This is a dashboard about A Decade of NYC Shootings (2015 - 2024). In Frank's own words: "This project transforms ten years of NYPD shooting incident data into an interactive app that reveals where gun violence has occurred in New York City between the years of 2015 to 2024. The data was processed by RomoGIS with data sourced from the NYC Open Data Portal. This app is designed to inform community safety initiatives and policy interventions as part of RomoGIS' GIS For Good Initiative to end Gun Violence (www.gisforgood.com, https://gunviolence-romogis.hub.arcgis.com/)." Frank is a leader. We are privileged to have his time.

    38 min
  7. Floodmapp

    08/05/2025

    Floodmapp

    Juliette Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Floodmapp joins us to continue the coverage of how the geospatial industry is responding to the flood season. This is after an episode with Shelly Klose about True Flood Risk a couple of weeks ago. I should also highlight the episode on flood models with Fathom last year. Juliette describes the capacity of her company to perform operational impact based flood forecasting. This is about using live data feeds such as from measures of precipitation, flood gauges, earth observation to provide a more accurate, real time estimate of where inundation will occur. Due to these factors, it will be better than, for example in the US, FEMA's 100 year flood polygons from here. As such, she was able to give examples from the State of Queensland in Australia where the system was used by emergency responders to decide where to send door knocking crews and also rescue personnel. Products from the likes of First Street and Fathom will not be able to offer these real time directives on where to send first responders. This is because they are large scale risk models developed with variables like topography, climate and historical rainfall without real time data on rainfall in the moment. They cannot offer advice on where to evacuate people from, where emergency services should send boats and helicopters. We are privileged to hear from her as they are involved now in the Texas flood clean up. She emphasised that they offer services in forecasting, 'nowcasting' and 'postcasting'. It is of course helpful to have assistance in characterising the inundation extent after a flood. This helps with helping where to look for damage and the deceased, along with verifying the risk modelling work of the likes of FEMA, Fathom and First Street. But one is forced to wonder how things would have gone if this or a similar service was involved in forecasting and early warning system activation for the area around Camp Mystic in Texas. Speaking of which, it was good to have an expert like Juliette give her take on this viral post of mine in the moment as the implications of Camp Mystic spread across the internet. She had a simple directive - ‘by law … $USD8.7 billion has been spent just on [residential building] smoke alarms for fires… but what is the … investment in flood early warning systems? The economic damages from fire vs flood… it actually suggests that flood… is really far and above the cost … of fire. So I’d really like to see the expenditure on flood early warning systems reflect the risk. …if we’re investing this much on fire then we really need an alert system in every community where people are at risk’. Emphasis mine. The analysis I proposed above is happening now. I face a very steep learning curve on cloud native geospatial tooling such as Wherobots but I am making progress with the help of Matt Forrest, Ryan Kmetz and Piergiorgio Roveda. The output will be a nationwide identification of the communities at risk. I look forward to Juliette’s assessment of that analysis.

    46 min
  8. Azure Maps

    08/01/2025

    Azure Maps

    Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps. It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings: Microsoft Bing Maps is the most well known amongst the public. It is a web-based mapping service offering street maps, aerial imagery, and route planning for public and consumer-facing applications. Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform designed for developers to integrate real-time mapping, routing, and spatial analytics into enterprise and IoT applications. Code samples. Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro was released 2 months ago. It provides global-scale environmental datasets and analytical tools, tailored for scientific research and sustainability use cases, with deep integration into cloud-native workflows. It's nice to see a big tech monopolist has devoted some attention to our industry and is keeping up with the cloud native geospatial trend. Speaking of trends, we have a nice continuation here of the episode with Nelson Roque that kicked off the name change to Geospatial FM. This is because of a recent blog post about model context protocol (MCP) by Clemens. Why has a brain researcher's comments about what cognition is made me excited about MCP servers? They enable tool use and extraction of up to date data from APIs. This enables the AI to operate on data beyond what it was trained on. As stated in the recording, this is sounding suspiciously like multimodal real time data feeds. This is an aspect of organic organism cognition as described by Nelson. Something else that got my attention here is that Clemens mentioned introducing both short and long term memory, check the diagram here. As such, we have a nice demonstration in front of us about the kind of progress a Big Tech company is making at the cutting edge of our species effort to duplicate our reasoning capacity. Thanks Clemens!

    37 min
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4.7
out of 5
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About

Obsessed with geospatial foundation models, broadcasting in geospatial and compounding via publicly listed geospatial equities.

Information

  • Creator
    Wilfred Waters
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    99
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Wilfred Waters
  • Show Website
    Geospatial FM