Geospatial

  • FOSS4G Nashville 2022

    I attended and gave a talk at FOSS4G Nashville 2022. This was a short, 1.5 day hybrid conference with about 30 in-person attendees and an unknown number of folks watching and giving presentations online. Howard Butler gave a keynote talk entitled “Serve data, not services,” and my talk was titled “STAC software, now and looking…

  • FOSS4G Nashville 2022

    I attended and gave a talk at FOSS4G Nashville 2022. This was a short, 1.5 day hybrid conference with about 30 in-person attendees and an unknown number of folks watching and giving presentations online. Howard Butler gave a keynote talk entitled “Serve data, not services,” and my talk was titled “STAC software, now and looking…

  • AWS re:Invent 2022 Mega Recap

    This month our geospatial team traveled to Las Vegas to attend AWS re:Invent and talk about FilmDrop—our cloud-native, geospatial processing suite. Over the course of the week, we had a chance to meet tons of great people and spend time in talks and labs learning as much as we could. We’ve put together a mega…

  • Tasking Sprint

    Two weeks ago, right before SatSummit, we hosted a “Satellite Tasking API Sprint” at our office in Alexandria. The goal was to initiate a conversation around standardizing how users submit tasking requests to data providers. The companies attending, made up of data providers, analytics users, and developers, represented a wide and deep knowledge base around…

  • A Software Engineer’s First Experience with Geospatial: Data, Tooling, and STAC

    About a year ago, I started on a new project at Element 84 working with geospatial imagery. In this blog post, I will document some things I learned on my journey. My hope is these lessons learned will help encourage more generalist software engineers to start experimenting with geospatial data and tooling. I had never…

  • A Tool to Highlight Underfunded and Under-resourced Communities: A Peek Behind the Technical Curtain of Headwaters Economics’ Rural Capacity Index

    To address the disparity in access to funding resources, we partnered with Headwaters Economics to develop the Rural Capacity Index.

  • Cloud Optimized Formats: NetCDF-as-Zarr Optimizations and Next Steps

    At Element 84 we help groups rethink how they approach technology and are particularly focused on supporting migration to the cloud. As we moved from local hard drives to the cloud, there are things we took for granted when it came to file formats. On your own hard drive reads are cheap and latency is…

  • Dan Pilone on the Minds Behind Maps Podcast

    Earlier this month, Dan Pilone, our Co-founder and CEO spent a few hours with Maxime Lenormand at the Minds Behind Maps Podcast. The conversation spans a variety of topics from Dask and Xarray, game theory and open source software, through people-focused growth and Element 84’s hiring process. Dan Pilone is the CEO and co-founder of…

  • Jeff Siarto on the MapScaping Podcast

    Since 2010, we’ve been working with scientists and data providers at NASA, NOAA, and USGS to help improve their remote sensing data systems through better processing pipelines, metadata, and improved user experiences. A large part of that effort was aimed at improving time-to-science—reducing the amount of time spent downloading, processing, and preparing data versus actually…

  • Machine Learning to Drive Urban Resilience: Mapping Tree Canopy with the World Bank

    As one of seven pilot programs to address environmental issues in Africa, Azavea trained student workers to label satellite imagery using GroundWork and created a machine learning model to identify tree canopy.

  • Deconstructing Analysis-Ready Data

    The 4th Analysis Ready Data (ARD) Workshop was held virtually in October 2021. Consisting of ten minute lightning talks packed into 1 hour sessions, participants from government and industry presented developments in “Analysis Ready Data”. Each day followed a specific theme such as calibration and validation, standards, time series, optical, SAR, and vegetation. The problem?…