Yesterday I read Sylvain Lesage’s post Parquet with GEOMETRY type is not GeoParquet and started writing a reply for Linkedin but it ended up a bit too long to just be a comment, so I thought I’d just post it here as a blog. Overall it’s a great write-up and I appreciate that Sylvain took the time to share his understandings, and that he’s been diving deep to be able to support the geospatial + Parquet ecosystem. And most all of it is right on, but I wanted to provide some more context...| 2023 Blog Archives
Stephanie May is a geographic technologist and cartographer based in Seattle, Washington. In addition to being a founding member of CNG’s Editorial Board, she serves on the board of the MapLibre Organization, an open source ecosystem for webmapping, and is the Principal of Liminal Maps. 1. What geospatial trend or tool excites you right now? I’m energized by how much easier it has gotten to build, host, and embed cloud-enabled web maps. A few technologies stand out: PMTiles allow for serv...| 2023 Blog Archives
In our ongoing series on geospatial raster data formats, Julia Signell and I have been exploring the finer points of array data storage. Throughout our research, we’ve found that chunking – breaking a large dataset down into smaller pieces for individual storage and retrieval – is universally relevant regardless of data format. Chunking, as we’ve seen, is an absolutely necessary strategy for making large datasets usable, but in the cloud era, it has become something tyrannical, making...| 2023 Blog Archives
TL;DR: We’re excited to introduce the Cloud-Optimized Geospatial Formats Guide to help you navigate the ever-expanding universe of cloud-native geospatial technologies. Many thanks to NASA’s Interagency Advanced Concepts and Implementation Team (IMPACT) and Development Seed for their leadership in creating this guide and opening up to the community. --- Last week, NASA announced that NASA’s Level-1 and Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System Distributed Active Archive Center (LAADS D...| 2023 Blog Archives
At the end of September, the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) community members gathered together in Philadelphia (and virtually) to improve STAC, grow the ecosystem of tools around STAC, and discuss other complementary cloud-native geospatial projects. This was the 8th STAC Sprint and the first in-person sprint since 2019. After three days of effort, we made some great strides across the board. Everyone gathered the first morning of the sprint. Based on the attendees of the sprint and th...| 2023 Blog Archives
In March, Jed described the “Naïve Origins of Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF” – an access pattern and ecosystem that revolutionized data delivery for AWS, its customers, and the public sector. COG is an established technology for producing and consuming imagery, but there’s a missing half of geospatial: vector data. Organizations that work with imagery are wrangling vectors, too: consider building footprints, tasking areas, parcels, agricultural plots, and ML labels. COG’s accessibility a...| 2023 Blog Archives
The Python ecosystem for open-source cloud-native geospatial tooling is fantastic. Projects like fsspec make it easy to work with cloud storage as if it were local, dask enables scaling computation from a single node to an entire server farm, libraries like zarr, kerchunk, and rasterio make it easy to read and write spatial data, which can then be analyzed with projects pandas and xarray. But – and this might surprise a number of Python users! – some people don’t know Python, and some p...| 2023 Blog Archives
The GeoParquet community is pleased to announce the release of GeoParquet 1.0.0. This is a huge milestone, indicating that the format has been implemented and tested by lots of different users and systems and the core team is confident that it is a stable foundation that won’t change. There are more than 20 different libraries and tools that support the format, and hundreds of gigabytes of public data is available in GeoParquet, from a number of different data providers. Why GeoParquet? I g...| 2023 Blog Archives
Anyone who has been following me closely the last couple of months has picked up that I’m pretty excited by DuckDB. In this post, I’ll delve deep into my experience with it, exploring what makes it awesome and its transformative potential, especially for the geospatial world. Hopefully, by the end of the post, you’ll be convinced to try it out yourself. My Path to DuckDB So I think I first heard about DuckDB maybe six months ago, mentioned by people who are more aware of the bleeding ed...| 2023 Blog Archives
Meet Scott Parks, a trailblazer in the world of map development who is transforming hiking experiences through geospatial data. As the founder of Postholer, a resource for hikers that features interactive trail maps, Scott leverages open-source geospatial tools to provide hikers with smart mapping solutions. Our team first became aware of Scott’s work when he built upon Kyle Barron’s demonstrations of how to create responsive browser-based tools to work with large volumes of geospatial da...| 2023 Blog Archives
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently put out my first open source Python project. I wouldn’t say I’m super proud of it, at least not yet, as it’s far from what I imagine it could be. It’s also kind of a weird mix of a very specific tool to better format the Google Open Buildings dataset, mixed in with benchmarking experiments for different ways to format that data. But it felt good to actually release it, and was awesome to immediately get help on the packaging. I wanted to ...| 2023 Blog Archives
Where geospatial data users create the future together.| cloudnativegeo.org
CNG is the place where geospatial data users create the future together. To make the share of knowledge between those data users even smoother, we’ve refined our process for getting blog posts onto cloudnativegeo.org. Whether you want to share a deep-dive technical tutorial, highlight lessons learned from a recent project, or explore ways to strengthen our community, this updated approach makes it simple to propose, write, and publish. The following information can also be found at CONTRIBU...| CNG Blog
Editorial Board Spotlight series features a different board member sharing their perspectives on geospatial trends and tools, what’s capturing their attention through reading or their current work, and the challenges they believe our community should focus on.| cloudnativegeo.org
Challenges to work on to help the Cloud-Native Geospatial community thrive..| cloudnativegeo.org
A recap of the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium that took place in Vienna, Austria, in June 2025.| cloudnativegeo.org
A recap of the inaugural CNG Conference that took place in Snowbird Utah.| cloudnativegeo.org
We have partnered with thriveGEO to accelerate training and capacity building for cloud-native spatial skills.| cloudnativegeo.org
Seven months ago, we issued A Call to Action for the Data Community to break down geospatial data silos and make GIS a core part of analytics. Today, we’re thrilled to announce two major developments that bring this vision closer to reality: The Parquet specification has officially adopted geospatial guidance, enabling native storage of GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY types Iceberg 3 now includes GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY as part of its official specification Now both Parquet and Iceberg support column...| CNG Blog
Have you benefitted from Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF’s? SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs? Zarr, COPC or GeoParquet? Not just the formats, but the whole ecosystem of tools and data around it? Well I’d like to present you with an incredibly easy opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ and help build and expand the movement. And all you have to do is attend a conference! One that should be a totally awesome experience, the first in-person CNG Conference, from April 30th to May 2nd. I have big dreams fo...| CNG Blog
Cloud-Native Geospatial represents a significant shift in how geospatial data is processed, stored, and analyzed. This approach offers GIS Professionals greater scalability, allowing them to handle massive datasets without relying on traditional and often limited on-premise infrastructure. Additionally, the cloud-native approach enhances collaboration by enabling multiple users to access and work on shared datasets in real-time, regardless of their physical location, helping to eliminate data...| CNG Blog
Want to build your own QGIS plugins and any other geospatial tools? Read this account of using AI tools to code a plugin for QGIS.| cloudnativegeo.org
An overview of the QGIS plug-in development and the motivations behind creating the plug-in.| cloudnativegeo.org
A goal for me this year is to ‘ship more’, so in the spirit of releasing early and often I wanted to share a little new project I got going this past weekend. See https://github.com/cholmes/geoparquet-tools. It’s a collection of utilities for things I often want to do but that aren’t trivial out of the box with DuckDB. It started focused on just checking GeoParquet files for ‘best practices’, which I’ve been working on writing up in this pull request, as I realized that lots of ...| CNG Blog
DuckDB’s functionality has continued to expand, and as of version 1.1 it reads and writes GeoParquet natively, as long as you have the spatial extension installed.| cloudnativegeo.org
Don’t miss this opportunity to make your mark in the cloud-native geospatial community| cloudnativegeo.org
Kyle Barron, Cloud Engineer at Development Seed. You’ve spent years figuring out how to visualize large geospatial datasets in web browsers. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what initially drew you to this area? I have a bit of a nontraditional background; I have virtually no official training in geography or computer science. In college, I was interested in urban and environmental economics, trying to understand how policies shape cities and the environment. I planned to pur...| CNG Blog
This blog post highlights some key talks and posters at AGU 24 you won’t want to miss.| cloudnativegeo.org
We invite you to join us at CNG Conference 2025 in Snowbird, Utah from April 30 to May 2 2025. Set against the beautiful backdrop of Snowbird, Utah, this inaugural event will convene the cloud-native geospatial community to learn from one another and collaborate to make geospatial data easier to access and use. The event will include keynote speeches, panel discussions, hands-on workshops, networking opportunities, and showcases of open-source projects, all designed to enhance attendees’ sk...| CNG Blog
This week on Wednesday, November 13, the CNG Virtual Conference 2024 will gather data user practitioners, enthusiasts, and newcomers to explore the latest in cloud-native geospatial technology. Come hear keynotes from NASA, Carto, the University of Tennessee, and speakers from many other organizations sharing updates and insights on cloud-native geo. This online event is an inclusive space for anyone curious about cloud-native geospatial, whether you’re an industry expert, an innovator, or ...| Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum - CNG
We are excited to announce the founding CNG Editorial Board, a group of leaders in our community who have graciously volunteered to guide our work.| cloudnativegeo.org
We’re excited to announce the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG) membership program. We have changed our name, but not our commitment to making geospatial data easier to access and use. As geospatial data becomes more important, so does the need for a vendor-agnostic, trusted platform to help people understand the true benefits and limitations of geospatial technology. CNG is stepping up to meet this need, providing a neutral forum where geospatial data users can come together and exchange...| CNG Blog
In May last year, we announced the “Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation” as an initiative to “help people adopt patterns and best practices for efficiently sharing Earth science data on the Internet using a cloud-native approach.” Since then, we’ve done quite a bit. We’ve published 29 blog posts and quickly attracted over 1,000 followers on X. We created a new Slack workspace which has over 400 members and 200 monthly active users. Combined with some of Radiant Earth’s previously...| CNG Blog
We are proud to announce the final release of STAC 1.1.0. The focus has been the addition of a common band construct to unify the fields eo:bands and raster:bands. Additionally, Item Asset Definition (field item_assets) - formerly a popular STAC extension - is now part of the core specification. Various additional fields have been made available via the common metadata mechanism, e.g. keywords, roles, data_type and unit. We collaborated closely with the editors of OGC API - Records to align b...| CNG Blog
Introducing STAC GeoParquet, a specification and library for storing and serving STAC metadata as GeoParquet.| cloudnativegeo.org
An overview of the changes in STAC 1.1.0-beta.1.| cloudnativegeo.org
An overview of the fiboa converter tool and how it can be used to create interoperable field boundary data.| cloudnativegeo.org
Chris Holmes and Javier de la Torre argue for geospatial data to move from a niche concern requiring specialized tools to a standard data type that can be integrated seamlessly with other data.| cloudnativegeo.org
An examination of how to develop extensible shared data schemas to make data more interoperable.| cloudnativegeo.org
An introduction to the fiboa (Field Boundaries for Agriculture) ecosystem.| cloudnativegeo.org
An introduction to the fiboa (Field Boundaries for Agriculture) core specification and extensions.| cloudnativegeo.org
Announcing fiboa (Field Boundaries for Agriculture), a new project we’re collaborating on with the Taylor Geospatial Engine focused on improving interoperability of farm field boundary data and other associated agriculture data.| cloudnativegeo.org
How common data schemas and identifiers can enable global cooperation and maximize the value of geospatial data.| cloudnativegeo.org
Some updates on the upcoming 1.1 release of the GeoParquet specification which will include a bounding box column and GeoArrow encoding.| cloudnativegeo.org
A compilation of GeoParquet-compatible libraries, tools, and data providers offering compelling datasets within the specification| cloudnativegeo.org
This dataset merges Google’s V3 Open Buildings and Microsoft’s latest Building Footprints, making it the most complete openly available dataset.| cloudnativegeo.org
