

The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography
MapScaping
A podcast for geospatial people. Weekly episodes that focus on the tech, trends, tools, and stories from the geospatial world. Interviews with the people that are shaping the future of GIS, geospatial as well as practitioners working in the geo industry.
This is a podcast for the GIS and geospatial community subscribe or visit https://mapscaping.com to learn more
This is a podcast for the GIS and geospatial community subscribe or visit https://mapscaping.com to learn more
Episodes
Mentioned books

Nov 22, 2023 • 50min
Personal Branding in Geospatial
It's not about becoming an influencer it's about creating opportunities for yourself
In this episode, we tackle the common misconception that personal branding is solely for influencers, revealing how it's actually about creating the right visibility and opportunities in your professional sphere.
Helena Merschdorf shares her unique insights, drawing from her rich background in GIS and marketing, and discusses:
Solving the Obscurity Problem: Discover how personal branding can help you get noticed by the right people, not just everyone.
Effective Communication in Technical Fields: Learn the art of conveying complex GIS concepts to non-experts.
Defining and Building Your Personal Brand: Uncover the essence of personal branding and how to strategically develop it.
Overcoming Challenges: Helena offers guidance on tackling imposter syndrome and finding your niche in the vast world of GIS.
Choosing the Right Platforms: Get tips on selecting the best channels for your personal branding efforts based on your target audience.
Success Stories and Strategies: While specific examples aren't named, learn about the different levels of personal branding success and what might work for you.
This episode is not just about building a personal brand; it's about leveraging that brand to carve a unique path in the geospatial industry.
Connect with Helena here
https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenamerschdorf/
https://www.tales.co.nz/
Other relevant podcast episodes
Rebranding GIS and Geospatial
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/rebranding-gis-geospatial/
Python Maps
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/python-maps/
Getting Your Dream Job In Earth Observation
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/getting-your-dream-job-in-earth-observation/

Nov 15, 2023 • 40min
Entity Resolution with Placekey
Entity resolution is the process of matching and merging records from different sources that refer to the same entity.
today's episode is about entity resolution for place data, why you might want to do that, and what any of this has to do with the dollar, Unix time and the idea that If data is really driving innovation, join keys are going to become more valuable.
Today's guest is Auren Hoffman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/
https://twitter.com/auren
https://www.youtube.com/@worldofdaas
If you want to try Placekey for yourself go to https://www.placekey.io/
If you want to learn more about SafeGraph listen to this podcast episode
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/building-geospatial-truth-sets/

9 snips
Oct 4, 2023 • 46min
Strategic Buy-In For FOSS4G
This podcast explores how to get strategic buy-in for FOSS4G in organizations. It discusses addressing concerns about security and IP protection, perspectives of external and internal stakeholders, collaboration and empathy in decision-making, challenges of implementing open source technology in corporate environments, benefits of open source solutions, and accessibility and support in open source communities.

Sep 19, 2023 • 55min
From GNSS to VPS
Topics discussed in this podcast include the evolution of positioning systems, the role of Wi-Fi positioning and 5G, visual positioning systems, the potential of low Earth orbit satellites, predictions for the future of navigation and positioning technologies, and the importance of combining different positioning technologies for seamless navigation.

4 snips
Aug 30, 2023 • 52min
Overture Maps And The Daylight Distribution
Jennings Anderson, a research scientist at Meta, discusses the Overture Maps Foundation and the Daylight Distribution. He highlights the importance of stable ID systems and the integration of third-party data. Jennings explains the relationship between OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, emphasizing how they complement each other.

Aug 16, 2023 • 49min
100 billion Points Every Day
100 billion Points Every Day
100 billion is a very large number, let's say that I gave you a spreadsheet with 100 billion rows in it, each row consisted of five columns Latitude, Longitude, Device ID, A Timestamp, and a column telling the name of the data provider
What would you do with that?
How would you clean it? Make sense of it? Extract value from it? What would people use it for? And how would you do this in a way that could be systematized?
FourSquare does this every day with the help of something they call a movement engine.
To help understand more about how they do this I have invited Gabriel Durkin the director of data science on the podcast. This is the last in a series of episodes I have worked on together with FourSquare and I have to say it's been really enjoyable working with them.
If you are interested in hearing some of the previous episodes just check out the links below!
From Pixels To Patterns AI In Spatial Analysis
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/from-pixels-to-patterns-ai-in-spatial-analysis/
Big Data In The Browser
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/big-data-in-the-browser/
Spatial Knowledge Graphs
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/spatial-knowledge-graphs/
Designing For Location Privacy
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/designing-for-location-privacy/
All Of The Places In The World
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/all-of-the-places-in-the-world/
Geospatial Jobs
There are a few new jobs on our Job Board! The most interesting one is the role of Social Media Manager at Felt - United States (Remote)
( If you want to apply for this one, it might be a good idea to listen to this episode first ;)
https://mapscaping.com/podcast/felt-upload-anything/ )
See more at https://mapscaping.com/jobs/
As a bonus for reading all the way to the end :)
If you are looking for free terrain data for anywhere in the world you might find this useful
https://github.com/openterrain/openterrain/wiki/Terrain-Data
Some more episodes you might enjoy
ESRI, GIS careers, Geospatial Data Science
QGIS, Geospatial Python, ArcGIS Pro
Google Maps, Geomatics, Cartography
Location Intelligence, Mapping

9 snips
Aug 9, 2023 • 1h 3min
Synthetic Data For Real Problems
Learn about the importance of labeled datasets in computer vision and the concept of synthetic data generation. Explore the career journey of Chris Andrews from Rendered AI, specializing in synthetic computer vision data. Discover the use of physics-based synthetic data generation and the trend of reality capture and digital twins. Dive into the challenges of training AI systems and the future landscape of synthetic data in computer vision.

Aug 3, 2023 • 39min
Hub Ocean
An interview with a senior data scientist from Hub Ocean, a platform for unlocking and uniting ocean data. They discuss the challenges of implementing data hubs and the concept of fair data. The importance of ocean data, app development for data analysis, and the availability and accessibility of ocean data are also explored. The podcast highlights the need for data sharing and collaboration in the ocean data space.

10 snips
Jul 19, 2023 • 40min
Felt - Upload Anything
Learn about FELT, a unique mapping tool that allows users to upload any type of data without specifying the format. Explore the features of Felt, such as the 'upload anything' button and real-time spatial collaboration. Discover the world of GPS art and how Felt enables users to create traced routes. Gain insights into the company's hiring and monetization plans, and their vision of encouraging map creation.

9 snips
Jul 5, 2023 • 52min
The Rapid Editor
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.
https://segment-anything.com/
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
ESRI, GIS careers, Geospatial Data Science
QGIS, Geospatial Python, ArcGIS Pro
Google Maps, Geomatics, Cartography
Location Intelligence, Mapping


