Introducing Geospatial Explorer

What is going on here?

Hello. I feel like introductions are in order. My name is Brandon. I’m nobody special—just a middle-aged GIS professional who works at an electric utility company and lives in northeastern Oregon with my wife and 2 children. And this is the first post in this…blog? Newsletter? I’m not sure what to call it. I don’t know how often it will be updated. I’m calling it the Geospatial Explorer, and I do know it’s purpose: to show you, the reader, that this “complicated” geospatial technology isn’t really that complicated when you get down to it, and that in today’s age of data proliferation, anybody with some passion, time, and elbow grease can do some amazing geospatial analysis. This content will remain free for the foreseeable future, and right now is a wholly academic enterprise.

So what does it mean to be a geospatial explorer? The word “geospatial” can really be thought of as location. You would be hard pressed to find an industry that doesn’t use it. At its core, we care about location because it helps us make better decisions. From early Polynesian wayfinders using the sun, stars, and ocean swells to navigate from island to island, to people using cutting-edge large-language-models in products like google maps to find out more information about the businesses in a given area, everyone wants information on location not for its own sake, but to help them make a choice. And the tools you need to make that choice will vary based on your own knowledge and experience. Some tools require great knowledge to use. Some, very little.

Here’s an interesting thought exercise: What if you were stranded in the middle of nowhere and you were trying to find your way home? To get home, you need to start moving in a direction. But not any direction will do—you must pick the one that brings you closer to home. To make the right choice, you need some combination of knowledge and tools. Perhaps you are familiar with the area and can use landmarks and the sky to choose a direction. Maybe you know generally where you are and can use a paper map and a compass. Or maybe you have a GPS-enabled phone and can simply tap a few buttons on the phone and voila! You have your heading. Each of these methods are in service to one simple question: which direction should I start walking so I can make my way home?

At this point, I’m going to contradict myself a little bit here and say that the first substantive article I write won’t really be helping me make a better decision at all. It will, however, be about improving our knowledge for use in the future. We’ll focus on showing how existing data that is freely available to everyone can be used to do some pretty advanced 3D geospatial modeling. In that article, we’ll be discussing how to use deep learning algorithms to “classify” features in a 3D model of the small town of Hermiston, Oregon. Do those series of dots represent a tree or a telephone pole? We’ll just have to wait to find out!