Category Archives: Magazine
The Image as Evidence
Time-stamped, location-aware imagery has quietly crossed a threshold from documentation to trusted record. The geospatial profession is now in the business of producing evidence — and the standards have not caught up to the stakes. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer:...
Leave No Fingerprints: Survey-Grade Accuracy in an Era of Zero Disruption
There is a version of a great survey that nobody even notices happened. No lane closures. No overnight crews in reflective vests. No targets bolted to deck surfaces. No personnel standing on live structures. No disruption to the vessels passing underneath or the aircraft taxiing overhead. The infrastructure keeps operating exactly as it did before...
The Private Geospatial Firm as Data Steward
The MAPPS community sits at the center of a transition most of its clients haven’t fully named yet. The firms that articulate it first will own the conversation. For most of its history, the private geospatial services firm has been defined by what it delivers: orthophotos, LiDAR point clouds, photogrammetric products, hydrographic surveys, corridor maps....
The Duct Tape Principle
The geospatial industry has never been short on capability. That said, industry leaders have learned to look beyond the technology, to lead with problems instead of solutions. The most successful seek to find the places where people are improvising, stitching together workarounds, doing something difficult and expensive because no better option exists, and to start...
Worlds Colliding: Sensor Fusion, Platform Modularity, and the New Architecture of Geospatial Data Collection
At Geo Week 2026 in Denver, one of the industry’s most experienced voices in multi-sensor positioning argues that the real transformation isn’t in any single instrument — it’s in how the instruments learn to work together. Mohamed Mostafa has been thinking about sensor fusion longer than most people in the geospatial industry have been using...
Cleaner Signals, Better Sites
How Antenna-Level Interference Mitigation Improves Machine Control Productivity. Construction job sites have always been challenging environments for positioning. Steel structures, heavy machinery, changing terrain, and partial sky visibility are part of the daily reality. What has changed dramatically over the past decade is the radio-frequency (RF) environment in which modern construction now operates. Today’s job...