Cloud Native Geospatial Summit may be my new favorite geospatial gathering

By Robert Cheetham, Abaca Labs, President

I spent this week in the mountains east of Salt Lake City at the first #CNG2025. Here are few my impressions from the event.

Chris Holmes remains an inspiring leader in the geospatial ecosystem, and each time he gets up on a stage, he builds on his previous talks by articulating a new facet of his vision for what we need to do next. What I took away this time included:

1. the need for the development of flexible data schemas for a global set of 15 foundation layers — he highlighted Vector Core Language (Vecorel) as a mechanism — for more details see https://github.com/vecorel/sdl and https://medium.com/radiant-earth-insights/towards-flexible-data-schemas-483735a0993c
2. the need for robust geospatial benchmark data sets for training AI models that can build those foundation layers
3. a realization that we are at the “Crux” — in a rock climbing context, the crux is the toughest and most physically demanding part of a climbing route. The crux we face is being made even more challenging by the damage to U.S. government capacity for contributions to critical institutional data infrastructure.

I regrettably didn’t get a chance to catch up with , but every time I saw him this week, I was reminded that in light of the recent threats to NASA/NOAA/USGS Earth science missions and open data, what might have, a year ago, sounded like a hair-brained idea to build a dedicated, high resolution satellite constellation (see ) for humanitarian and disaster response is starting to look remarkably prescient and necessary. Common Space

Overture Maps Foundation ‘s core membership (the “Steering” members) remain key contributors, but they’ve also quickly attracted a substantial group of “Contributor” members that can join for $3,000, and the list already includes 30+ organizations both familiar and fresh — https://overturemaps.org/about/members/ . If I was still running , I would have signed up to join in order to help shape one or more of their Working Groups and Task Forces ( ). They are also now measuring their features in billions. I regretted missing their workshop on how to get started using Overture data and the GERS identifier system. https://overturemaps.org/about/working-groups/

Brianna R. Pagán, PhD (now at Development Seed after leaving NASA a couple of months ago) made a deeply personal and impassioned case for how inadequate our current disaster response capabilities remain as well as how generous this community can be.

There is a lot of great work being done to create tutorials and other docs that help people get started with cloud native geospatial tooling, but a lot of work remains to be done: a need for more and better on-ramps and learning tools for non-geospatial people was a consistent theme. Also, even when we publish best practices (like the one for STAC at https://github.com/radiantearth/stac-spec/blob/master/best-practices.md ) people mostly don’t read, so tooling needs to be thoughtfully designed to nudge people toward good practices. @Matt Hanson observed that “flexibility is the enemy of interoperability” and this has become an issue for the STAC standard.

Drew Breunig invoked Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s book, Railway Journey , to outline how time became standardized, and what we can learn from this in order for geospatial information to reach a similar level of maturity. Memorable quote: “a dataset’s value is directly related to how many datasets with which it connects”. It’s not enough to publish geospatial data — it is only valuable to the degree is it connected to other data and used. Drew also pointed out that a recent surge in geospatial interest coincides with the growth of DuckDB.

There is a new version of Source Cooperative under development, and the team is looking for input. There are two versions of the survey — for current users and future users — so even if you are not yet a user or contributor, there is a survey for you ( ) https://survey.source.coop/

Ankur Shah Delight led multiple activities that engaged the entire group of conference attendees with sharing ideas and shaping priorities. It’s helpful to have a skilled and experienced facilitator like this, and it was probably even more helpful that Ankur is not from the geospatial tech ecosystem. Also, I think it’s great to see that there is a lot of room for innovation in terms of how gatherings like this can be more useful and effective to advance the ecosystem. A related note: one entire track on Building Resilient Data Infrastructure organized by Brianna R. Pagán, PhD required that people put away their phones and laptops in order to engage in attentive discussion. Nice.

The new CEO at , is shaking up this geospatial stalwart. This summer, they plan to introduce individual memberships of $200 for professionals and $125 for developers. I plan to become one of the first. Peter Rabley

Move over COGs, Zarr is ascendant.

New (to me) initiatives to check out:

This was a terrific first outing for the CNG Summit and the Radiant Earth Foundation team did an amazing job planning and organizing it. For me, it will now join SatSummit, SatCamp, and FOSS4G as one of my favorite gatherings. Its modest size, clear focus, and the mix of technology, policy, and community made it a very compelling experience. It was also a constant reminder of how many great human beings there are in the geospatial community.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on May 4, 2025.