RASTER TILES – What You Need To Know Map rendering is likely the most relevant feature of every web mapping platform. It defines how the user receives and interacts with the available data. Most platforms adopt the tile coordinate system over the pixel and world coordinate systems.  This article discusses the concept of raster tiles,…

What is Geotagging and Why is it Important? Broadly speaking, geotagging is the attachment of a geographical reference to a digital product like a photo, website, QR code or SMS message. It serves various benefits and, without even knowing it, many applications you use and photos you take use geotagging. By having GPS enabled on…

CONNECTING QGIS WITH A POSTGIS DATABASE QGIS and PostGIS are excellent tools for managing geospatial data. Both GIS platforms offer an interactive Graphics User Interface that allows users to write queries to answer geospatial questions, manage maps, and produce informative presentations.  This article discusses the process of connecting a PostGIS database with QGIS on your…

Why It’s Time to Create Your First Online GIS Portfolio We all know the standard procedure of what to “hand in” when applying for jobs, but not all of us have considered online portfolios to be a part of our homework. As the world continues to become increasingly digital-focused, online portfolios have become more and…

Understanding the Difference Between GNSS, GPS, and SBAS Understanding navigation systems via satellites is a study within itself. Throw in acronyms for everything, and you’ve got a whole new language on your hands.  It’s easy to spell out what these acronyms stand for but knowing the context surrounding their differences and how they’re related is…

Getting Started with PostGIS SQL (Structured Query Language), usually pronounced “see-quel”, is the standard language for interacting with relational databases, and many cloud data warehouses including Databricks, Snowflake, AWS Redshift, and Google BigQuery. Knowing SQL means that you can analyze data stored in tables and work cross functionally across all of the major cloud data…

Understanding Cloud-Optimized Point clouds This article will have two sections; with the first section explaining in detail the cloud-optimized point clouds data format, and the second part touching briefly on how to use cloud-optimized point clouds in QGIS from version 3.26 and later. Point cloud data Point cloud data refers to a collection of points…

Emergency Management & GIS In addition to having a presence in three-dimensional geographic space, natural disasters like floods and fires are time series events. They often take place rapidly, and it is crucial to monitor their continuously evolving conditions; remote sensing and geospatial information systems equip users with the tools to locate and categorize these…

Do I Need to Code to Have a Successful Career in Geospatial? There is no doubt that geospatial skills are in demand. Just this year the UK government published an independent report assessing demand for geospatial skills. They cited increased demand for geospatial skillsets across the whole economy, in various industries, but more crucially, they…

Open Source GIS Servers What Is A GIS Server? Several technologies go into supporting the utilization of GIS capabilities over the internet as web services. Through these technologies you can be able to share maps over the internet, access spatial data from different sources as well as do spatial analysis just like you would on…