My Blog

Is a post stepping away from Geography, a radical proposition on organisational dynamics and a different take on AI For the past thirty years, organisations, particularly those in the public sector, have quietly undergone a transformation.  A simple look at their structure reveals a barrel-shaped organisation, not the classic pyramid of the late 20th century.  …

Read more “Roll out the Barrel – Why the Organisational Barrel is Collapsing Back into a Pyramid”

Geomob London is just around the corner, taking place on Wednesday, September 16th at the Geovation Hub. If you follow the conversations here on edparsons.com, you know how deeply invested I am in the evolution of our field—whether we are talking about new paradigms in Location Intelligence, the latest standards emerging from the Open Geospatial …

Read more “See you down at the GeoMob”

If you’ve been following my work over the years, you know I spend a good chunk of my time thinking about where spatial data is heading next. Lately, that conversation has been dominated by one topic in particular: Artificial Intelligence. As an advisor to the team at Geolytix, I recently had the pleasure of hosting …

Read more “Geospatial, AI, and Summer Holidays : The Geolytix Podcast Series”

OK so I said my next blog post was going to be about my aviation photography… But stuff happens !! During my time working at Google, we used to describe Google Earth and Maps as a mirror of the real world. It wasn’t just a marketing slogan; it was a guiding principle. To us, the …

Read more “How a banana broke the world’s mirror”

Who else got into geography to change the world rather than just digitise it? If you read Rohan Silva’s recent essay in The Times, you’ll have seen him articulate a shift that is quietly rewiring the way we think about knowledge work. Silva captures a profound transition brought on by the rise of Artificial Intelligence: we …

Read more “AI is moving Geographers from the “how” to “what”!”

Last week I spent a very enjoyable and productive day at the 2026 edition of the Geobusiness exhibition and conference. I was invited to appear on a panel addressing amongst other things the role of the Geospatial Professional in the AI dominated future, I made the point that we as Geographers need to “Up our …

Read more “Geographers are Architects, Not Draughtsmen”

For those of us in the geospatial world, the ability to derive a precise location from a non-GNSS source is always a fascinating technical feat. Over the last year, Starlink users—particularly in the maritime and “off-grid” communities—discovered that SpaceX’s hardware was doing exactly that. By querying the local gRPC (Remote Procedure Call) API of a …

Read more “The End of Starlink’s “Pseudo-GPS”: Security over Utility”

For over half a century, the geospatial industry has operated on a foundational, largely unchallenged premise: the physical world is an absolute reality, and the goal of technology is to measure, index, and represent it with ever-increasing fidelity. Data giants like HERE, TomTom and of course Google built empires by deploying fleets of sensor-laden vehicles …

Read more “The Map of Dreams : Why AI’s “World Models” might be the Geospatial Industry’s Ultimate Disruption”

As Chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) it was a pleasure to once again attend a Technical Committee meeting this week in Philadelphia, and while no longer participating in the technical work of the organisation it was an opportunity to take a step back and evaluate the role of …

Read more “Any Objection to Unanimous Consent?”