Do you know what the geospatial product trap is? We fall in love with the technology, not the problem. I am a lucky person. My job has evolved to one where I primarily get to talk about geospatial technology all day. I could be scoping out internal or external projects or evaluating technologies. Increasingly, I provide advice on product ideas. This final situation has forced me to consider the nature of our community-of-practice. The common assumption that geospatial ...

The Canadian Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (NRCan) continues its work to implement the National Elevation Data Strategy. Through this strategy, one of NRCan's goal is to provide Canadians with an accurate three-dimensional representation of the country, in support of government priorities such as flood mapping. Because of the enormous task of obtaining a high-precision and up-to-date national elevation layer, NRCan works with different entities.The data coverage of the st...

Over the past year, Minerva Intelligence, a Vancouver-based cognitive AI company, has been awarded two contracts with Natural Resources Canada to design schemas at a national level: the National Flood Hazard Data Layer (NFHDL) and the National Hydro Network V2 (NHNv2). You might be asking yourself why an AI company is designing and building these important database structures. Minerva's cognitive AI system makes use of semantically inoperable data in knowledge graphs and has designed syste...