I was watching the 2014 Japanese movie Wood Job about forestry. They mention using GIS and even use a Trimble device out in the field. Just sharing because I don't see GIS represented very often in media.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2964120/?_ssoLoop=1

I used SRTM data to create SVG's like this one of a mountains elevation profile. Every major line represents 100m and the whole space is 10x10 km.

Here is the link I would love you to test it out: https://visitwhale.com/peak-contours/

Subtitle: Fixes the current glaring errors in Google Maps when viewed from the USA, showing: "Lake Ontario" incorrectly labeled as "Lake America", and others.

Install

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/maps-region-switcher/fmbelciakdlpbepnbjefifbjaopmgcfd

Firefox: [pending approval]

Created by me, using AI in the capacity I typically do for all software projects now. Specifically, for subject matter research (comprising the majority of the AI interactions during initial development), code generation, code refactoring, and overall app architecture guidance. Source available here:

https://github.com/mfcallahan/maps-region-switcher

There's not much to this, it's a Chrome extension and Firefox add-in that allows the user to set the region used to render the map tiles. This affects the labels shown: in the USA, you may see obviously incorrect labels on geographic features like "Lake America" and "Gulf of America." Everyone knows these are wrong, despite Google's best efforts to change the lexicon of geography 🙄

This extension does have a more practical purpose too, it is actually pretty useful for seeing what your applications that implement Google Maps will look like from an international audience's perspective. Useful for testing and internationalization/localization of your apps which use Google Maps.

It works by creating two static declarativeNetRequest (a Chrome API used to block or modify network requests) rules rewrite the gl url query parameter on Google Maps urls, which is not normally surfaced to the user, with a guard rule preventing redirect loops. The extension contains no content scripts, and no DOM hooks.

Why this approach? Google Maps bakes basemap labels into a WebGL canvas from vector tiles. There is no DOM node to rewrite, so the obvious approaches like overlaying a replacement label or patching the tiles which intersect the feature, won't work (and won't stay within the Google Maps terms of use).

Setting the region instead produces Google's own rendering with correct font, halo, placement, line-breaking, at every zoom level and extent. It also modifies none of Google's content, which matters for both the Maps terms and Chrome extension store review.

100% FOSS, do whatever you want with this, including ignore it.

I was laid off from my GIS Technician position at the end of July. I've been looking for and applying to jobs since, but haven't secured a position yet.

My state's annual GIS conference is next month, and I'm planning to go to network, catch up with friends and alumni, and learn more about the new developments in the area. However, the registration form asks for my 'Company/Organization/University'. This is a required part of the form, so I can't leave it blank. Any suggestions for what I should put in this space?

I graduated a little over a year ago in Geography with GIS emphasis and currently work as a cadastral mapper for my county. Im NOT a fan of the work I do, but I loved GIS when I studied it in school, especially the analytical aspect of the projects.

Im thinking of switching over to the mining sector and have gotten some advice to think about getting a geology or earth science minor. I would be going back for just the minor. Curious if anyone works in the mining field and if they’d recommend this course of action.

I dislike my current job enough that I don’t want to work government (civil or federal) any longer and I’m seriously considering a change into IT if the only GIS jobs available are only government.

I have been building MapToCraft, a browser interface around the open-source Arnis generator.

The workflow is: choose a real-world area on an interactive map, draw the area of interest, and let Arnis convert OpenStreetMap vectors—such as roads, building footprints, water, and land use—together with elevation data into Minecraft blocks. The result can be downloaded as a Java Edition ZIP or an experimental Bedrock .mcworld.

The goal is to remove the local installation and setup steps and make geographic area selection easier for people who want to experiment with the generated worlds.

Browser tool: https://maptocraft.com/ Arnis source (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/louis-e/arnis

From a GIS perspective, I would appreciate feedback on the area-selection interface, sensible area and scale limits, and how clearly the site communicates that the output is a game-world interpretation rather than a survey-accurate reconstruction. I would also be interested in geographic edge cases that would be useful to test.

How do i get remote GIS projects to do. I am based in South Africa. I have experience in Spatial Data Analysis, Mobile programming, Web maps, Postgres/Postgis and cartography.

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Hi everyone,

I’m a final-year Geomatics/Surveying Engineering student planning a capstone project on post-war urban reconstruction and resilient infrastructure in Khartoum, Sudan.

I’m considering two approaches:

Option A — 3D City Modeling + BIM/GIS

\- Extract buildings from satellite/aerial imagery using ML/DL (e.g., U-Net)

\- Create a LoD1/LoD2 3D city model

\- Integrate GIS with Civil 3D/BIM

\- Develop a framework for reconstructing underground utilities and drainage

Option B — SAR + Hydrology + BIM/GIS

\- Use Sentinel-1 SAR for flood/surface-change detection

\- Combine DEMs and rainfall data for hydrological/runoff modeling

\- Identify flood-prone areas and surface-water accumulation

\- Use the results to plan conceptual drainage corridors in Civil 3D

My questions:

1. Which option has stronger academic and professional value?

2. Is Option B too ambitious for an undergraduate project, or should I focus deeply on one pipeline?

3. What free/open datasets would you recommend (Sentinel, GEE, ERA5, DEMs, OSM, etc.) given the difficulty of field validation?

4. What would be a good way to include ML/DL without turning the project into an AI project?

I’d especially appreciate advice from professionals/researchers in GIS, remote sensing, surveying, hydrology, BIM, or post-disaster reconstruction.

My goal is to produce something technically realistic that could contribute to future reconstruction efforts in Sudan.

Thank you!

I've been loading Overture's monthly places dumps into a side project - 307,100 places across 512 cities and 120 countries, read straight from the S3 Parquet with DuckDB, about three seconds per city on one small VPS. Two things cost me real time. Posting them in case they save someone else some.

1. The category substring trap

Overture's categories.primary is a flat string like bar, cafe, parking. I had a rescue rule mapping "park" to my internal park category, matching on substring. That quietly swallows: parking, car_park, industrial_park, business_park, office_park, mobile_home_park, rv_park.

815 car parks ended up in a "parks" ranking on a live site before anyone noticed. What finally gave it away was a Q-Park garage in Paris rendering with a tree icon in sixth place.

To be clear, this is not an Overture data problem, and I checked before saying so: in a San Diego bbox, 219 of 219 places with "parking" in the name are correctly categorised as parking. The data was right, my matching was wrong. But the failure is silent and the output looks plausible, which is the worst combination.

Things that do need to pass through: skate_park, dog_park, national_park and state_park are all real places.

1. categories is not the only option any more

If you are still reading categories, note that release 2026-08-19.0 ships all three side by side. I ran DESCRIBE against it today:

categories - struct(primary VARCHAR, alternate VARCHAR[])

basic_category - VARCHAR

taxonomy - struct(primary VARCHAR, hierarchy VARCHAR[], alternates VARCHAR[])

taxonomy.hierarchy is what I actually wanted all along: it gives you the ancestry, so you can match on a level instead of hoping one string does not contain another.

1. Minor, but worth knowing

About 3.2% of the places in my extract (7,923 of 250,647) have no Latin-script primary name. If you generate URL slugs from names you need a transliteration step, or you end up with identifiers like place-78b0d703.

The project itself is a game (auracity.lol) if anyone is curious what 307k Overture places look like as a leaderboard, but the notes above are the part I thought was worth writing down.

Hey all, I have about 5 years of experience in GIS. Most of my experience has been in power distribution and other utilities, but I’ve also done some intel work. I will be going back to school in the spring and won’t have time for a full time job. Has anyone had luck with finding a part time GIS job? Just a shot in the dark.

Hello, I’m interviewing for an entry level urban community planner position tomorrow and I’m a bit nervous. I’ve mostly been interviewing for GIS roles and know what kind of questions to be prepared for. But I’m not sure what kind of questions they will ask me for a community planner position. What are some of the questions that are commonly asked in an interview for this kind of role? I would appreciate any advice on how to best prepare for this interview.

Thanks!

Disclaimer: I'm working on the library.

Check it out here: https://github.com/camptocamp/ogc-client

A new version came out with a much better documentation, new features and improved existing ones.

I would absolutely love any kind of feedback on this Javascript library. I've seen so many times similar code being written over and over again to read a WMS GetCapabilities, compute a GetFeature URL, and so many others. At some point I really wanted to have a JS library that knows and implements all the big standards, and lets you completely forget about them.

It now handles a lot: WFS, WMS, WMTS of course, but also many flavors of OGC API, TMS, STAC API and even WPS.

I just hope this will be useful :)

Have a great day!

I love maps and geo quizzes and I wanna do GIS and/or Geospatial Data for a living but I'm not studying geo in uni. I'm studying History and Political Economy at KCL so I can definitely analyse data well and explain it simply. I'm currently doing the CS50P course for python and will take a kaggle course on SQL and still trying to find a course on Arc/QGIS. I guess my question is can I still make it into GIS/Geospatial Data or Location Intellegience without a geo degree or any formal experience? Keep in mind that I do intend on creating a portfolio for well documented projects using SQL, Python, and GIS softwares.

We're a small student team trying to understand how post-disaster damage assessment really works before we assume anything about it.

If you've worked an event like HOT, GISCorps, a local EM office, or professionally, I'd love to hear about the last real one you mapped:

• How long was it before anyone actually knew which buildings were destroyed or which areas flooded?
• What was the slowest part? Getting imagery, cloud cover, the manual tracing, the validation/QA step, coordination, something else?
• Is the bottleneck more about getting usable imagery, or turning it into a map someone can act on?

I keep reading that the imagery often exists within a day or two but that turning it into a usable damage picture takes much longer...but I might have that completely backwards, and I'd genuinely rather hear "that's not the real problem" now.

Not selling anything, not building during a live event. Just trying to learn the actual workflow. Thanks for any war stories.

Before the late 18th century, property boundaries in North America relied on the metes and bounds system referencing trees, boulders, and creek beds that constantly shifted or rotted away, triggering endless boundary lawsuits.

Thomas Jefferson and government surveyors replaced that organic model with the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Surveyors dragged 66 foot iron Gunter's chains through dense forests to subdivide the continent into rigid 6 mile square townships and 1 mile sections before settlers even arrived. The square roads and orthogonal crop lines visible from airplanes today are the direct legacy of that initial surveying framework.

I am reaching out for advice and guidance regarding my career path in the GIS and remote sensing industry. I graduated in geography a year and a half ago. My journey so far started fast: I completed a great internship at a well-known institution, which helped me quickly land a job in the mining sector. Although employment came easily, the role didn't involve much geography or GIS work, so after a year, I transitioned into a remote sensing position at a prestigious organization, complete with a decent salary bump.

However, this new workplace has been quite disappointing due to the toxic work environment and poor career growth. Because of my junior status, I am mostly relegated to repetitive tasks with very few learning opportunities. Before joining, I was driven to learn data science and AI to polish and expand my CV, but this discouraging early-career experience has heavily drained that momentum.

Despite this, I still love remote sensing and want to keep studying, knowing that data science skills are crucial for unlocking better job opportunities.

For those further along in their careers, I would love to hear your thoughts on a few things:

• What was your own junior-level experience like, and how did you navigate those early hurdles?
• Did you ever feel like repetitive tasks were burning out your motivation, and how did you handle it to stay focused on long-term learning?
• What paths or strategies do you recommend for steering a career toward more challenging and fulfilling work in GIS and remote sensing?

i'm starting college in a week and i chose to major in Geo Informatics, my university has a different approach to it by adding programming and basically teaching students the technical side to it. I chose this not because i like geography, but because i couldn't major in computer science and with the list of options i had, i think this is the closest major i could study that is closest to cs, although they are different, but because Geo Informatics offered computing courses like AI, Machine Learning and Data science, i thought this is good cuz now im specializing in a "sort of" CS field.
i want to become best of both worlds so i can get a job with a good pay roll, i'm intermediate in my cs side but have absolutely no clue about the programming side of GIS
any tips to make things clearer for me?
i grew interest in GIS after discovering it so i am willing to do whatever it takes.
i need tips on where to start with and how to start, make my foundation strong
i would appreciate it!

I built this to check whether the earthquakes in the news are actually the big ones. It grew into a globe with live quakes, wildfires, aurora nowcast, sun/moon geometry and more.

The constraint I set myself: one HTML file you can download and open from your own disk. No build, no npm, no account, no server. Two layers stay dark without a network but the rest runs offline. Do expect version differences, not all functionalities will be suitable for an offline version.

Some things that turned out harder than expected:

- Reusing the day/night terminator maths for an eclipse shadow put it in the wrong coordinate space. It dimmed the earth 1.1% where 94% belonged. A gradient forgives a few degrees of skew, a hard shadow edge does not.

- globe.gl resets controls.target to the origin every frame, and pointOfView replaces the vector rather than writing into it.

Demo: https://terra.terryelemans.nl

Genuinely curious about one thing: I'm drawing earthquake depth on a sphere where 18 km is thinner than the line width. Right now I encode it rather than draw it to scale. If you've solved depth-on-a-globe in a way that reads honestly, I'd like to see it.

If you have 2-3 minutes to play around and let me know what you think!

Fully Remote Opportunity 🚀 $65 - 70 / hr PostgreSQL DBA (ArcGIS & Enterprise Geodatabases)

Summit Human Capital is currently looking to a hire a 100% Remote Sr. PostgreSQL DBA ASAP! This role will be supporting one of our Fortune 500 clients who is well-known for their cutting-edge industry-leading technology department!

The ideal candidate will meet the following criteria:

Required:

• 5+ years of experience as a Postgres DBA

• Experienced with the installation, configuration, and upgrading of databases to both Linux and Windows environments

• PL/pgSQL experience focused on loops, conditional statements, and variables within both stored procedures and/or functions

Preferred Skills:

• Experience within AWS environments

• Experience working within ESRI environment, ideally within ESRI Enterprise Geodatabase

Responsibilities:

• Create and maintain database objects (triggers, indexes, schemas, relational structures) and develop automation to streamline data loading.

• Monitor and optimize database performance, ensure high availability, and proactively identify and resolve potential issues.

• Manage user access and permissions, enforce security protocols, and maintain data integrity in line with best practices.

• Schedule regular maintenance, manage backups, and perform disaster recovery to safeguard data.

• Provide best‑practice guidance to development teams and resolve production data issues promptly

Interested, or know someone who would be a great fit? Shoot me a message, and I'll put you in touch with our recruiter!

I'm trying to map historic roads and earthworks, particularly in relation to them having indigenous participation in their construction, on my land and the surrounding area, and have a lot of shapes and very large rasters with approximations and such. I need to be able to use this to present geographic information to people, particularly in relation to landscape change, waterway diversions and reversals, and dam removal. I've presently got a bunch of shapes and rasters in Google Earth Pro, which is going to be retired. It doesn't import into ArcGIS, and I can't afford my own license for ArcGIS anyway. There's also probably a lot that can be inferred from LiDAR data (mill pond footprint, unfilled millraces) if anyone wanted to help me from that side of things as well.

An easy way to translate metes and bounds would be great too.

I have plenty of programming experience across many language paradigms if there's something that can be done that way.

​

Hi everyone!

I’m a final-year Geomatics/Surveying Engineering student currently trying to decide on a graduation project. I’m mainly interested in GIS and Remote Sensing, and I’d like to work on something that is both technically meaningful and useful beyond just being an academic project.

Some areas I’m considering are:

\- Environmental & climate monitoring — rainfall variability using datasets such as ERA5, dust storms, or land/surface deformation.

\- Hydrology & hazard assessment — flood mapping using satellite imagery, NDWI, DEMs, or spatial databases.

\- Urban & infrastructure mapping — LULC change detection, updating existing maps, or using ML/DL for feature extraction.

I’m also interested in combining Google Earth Engine, Python, GIS, and machine learning where appropriate.

For those working or studying in GIS, Remote Sensing, or Geomatics:

If you were starting your final-year project today, what kind of project would you choose?

Are there any datasets, workflows, or current industry/research trends that you think would be particularly valuable to learn?

I’m especially interested in ideas that can demonstrate practical skills and potentially make a good portfolio project—not just something that produces a map at the end.

Any suggestions, project ideas, or criticism of the areas I’m considering would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!