Author: Ed Parsons

The geospatial industry has long been on a quest for a universally accepted system to identify real-world entities like buildings, roads, and businesses. Such a system promises seamless interoperability, but its pursuit has been fraught with challenges, often clashing with the commercial realities and vested interests of powerful data owners. Let’s explore this journey through …

Read more “The Quest for a Universal Geospatial ID: From the One Ring to the Holy Grail?”

This famous phrase by Chairman Mao can be subverted to focus on the final step of a journey, which is particularly relevant to solving one of the hardest problems in geospatial technology: the final 10-metre problem. How can we provide high-accuracy pedestrian navigation or wayfinding to ensure users reach their actual final destination, such as …

Read more “A journey of a thousand miles ends with a single step. “

When Snap Map first launched within the Snapchat app, it was met with a mix of curiosity and privacy concerns. Yet, this integrated feature has quietly become a significant success story, particularly among its core demographic – Millennials. While perhaps not always the focus of mainstream tech commentary, Snap Map has proven to be far …

Read more “Snap Map the maps app you probably don’t use.. and that’s the point !”

For people of my generation the term Splat will always be associated with the Saturday Morning Children’s TV show ‘Tiswas” and was to the result of someone getting a “custard pie” in their face… Now the hot topic in 3D Geospatial rendering are Gaussian Splats.. In Geospatial 3D, Gaussian splats are used as for rendering …

Read more “3D Tiswas style”

It was a great pleasure to spend half a hour talking with my friend Jerry Brotton on his excellent History of Maps podcast, “What’s Your Map“. This excellent podcast series cover the history of cartography by getting people to select a single map to place it’s significance in the development of mapping. The podcast is …

Read more “What’s My Map?”