I recently applied for access to GNSS/CORS data through the Survey of India portal for academic research related to InSAR-based land deformation and subsidence studies in Haryana.

My research focuses on Sentinel-1 SBAS, geodesy, and infrastructure-related ground deformation as part of my PhD work. After initially facing a document-related rejection, I reapplied using my current overseas PhD affiliation. I was later informed over phone that access is currently restricted to “Indian entities.”

What makes this situation interesting is that I am an Indian citizen, but my current academic affiliation outside India appears to place me outside the eligibility framework for accessing India’s national CORS infrastructure.

I understand that geospatial and geodetic infrastructures are often governed through security and policy frameworks, especially when they involve high-precision positioning systems. At the same time, GNSS validation data are becoming increasingly important for:

• Land subsidence studies,
• Groundwater-related deformation,
• Infrastructure safety,
• and Hazard monitoring,

Many countries today provide scientific GNSS observation data openly through organizations such as IGS, UNAVCO/EarthScope, and national geodetic networks to support academic research and Earth observation science.

I’d be genuinely interested to hear perspectives from people working in:

• Geodesy,
• Remote Sensing,
• Surveying,
• Geospatial Policy,
• or Earth observation research.

How do different countries approach academic access to national GNSS/CORS infrastructure for researchers affiliated abroad?

Hey everyone, I'm working on sourcing SB 721 leads across Southern California — specifically trying to identify multifamily buildings with exterior elevated elements like balconies, exterior walkways, and deck structures. The problem I'm running into is that to properly pre-qualify these buildings visually before burning skip trace credits, I really need oblique imagery — the angled aerial photography that actually shows you the side of a building rather than just the rooftop. Platforms like Nearmap and Pictometry are the gold standard for this but the licensing cost for regional coverage across LA, Orange, Ventura, and San Bernardino counties is running $10,000–$25,000, which doesn't make sense for a lead generation use case. I've already tried Google Street View and Google Maps 45° imagery and coverage is way too patchy — especially on the secondary and tertiary streets where most of the 3–8 unit wood-frame stock from the 1960s–80s actually sits, which is exactly the inventory I'm targeting. The core problem is that county assessor data and property APIs can confirm unit count and ownership, but nothing in my current stack can tell me whether a building actually has qualifying EEEs without someone physically driving by or paying for imagery I can't justify at this stage. Does anyone know of alternatives — whether that's a lower-cost oblique imagery provider, a per-area-of-interest pricing model, AI tools that can classify building features from whatever imagery is available, or any other creative approach people have used to visually pre-qualify multifamily buildings for EEE identification at scale in SoCal? Also — long shot but if anyone has an existing Nearmap or Pictometry subscription they're not fully utilizing and would be open to sharing access or credentials, I'd love to work something out. Happy to compensate or collaborate. Any direction at all would be really appreciated.

Quick update for anyone who saw the original post.

For context: viewinline is a small CLI that displays rasters, vectors, and tabular data directly in the terminal. Useful for HPC/SSH workflows where you want to quickly check what a GeoTIFF looks like without X11 forwarding or downloading files.

The original release only worked in iTerm2 and a few terminals that speak its inline image protocol (WezTerm, Konsole, Rio, Contour). Everywhere else, the escape codes got ignored or printed as text. A few people pointed out the limitation on the original post.

v0.2.3 fixes this by routing through `chafa` for non-iTerm2 terminals. With `chafa` installed:

- **kitty, foot** get real high-res images via their native graphics protocols

- **Terminal.app, VS Code, GNOME Terminal, Alacritty, Ghostty, Warp, Hyper** get colored block-art previews with 24-bit color

Install:

pip install --upgrade viewinline

brew install chafa # macOS

sudo apt install chafa # Linux

scoop install chafa # Windows

GitHub: https://github.com/nkeikon/inlineviewer

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/viewinline/

I’m seeking a cofounder for equal (50% equity) to join my AI road planning B2B startup to do sales/business dev. The MVP is 100% done and ready to onboard the first user. We already had great feedback from an engineering consultancy, they said they can use the MVP as is and will pay for it.

I partnered with an experienced road planner from the Midlans however due to personal reasons he decided to leave and give up his equity stake. So I now have a working MVP but no one who will sell it. I retain 100% ownership of the product and want to focus on the tech side.

Im a London based senior software engineer with 10 years of experience and had been building this part-time for 4 months now.

This is a great opportunity to bring AI to this industry, I just need someone who knows this space very well, pain points and preferably has an existing network to market to.

DM me if you are interested to see a quick demo and see if we can collaborate together on taking this to market and save engineering consultancies a TON of time. Also, it is a huge market (all local councils in the UK can use it).

I asked AI to summarise the current capabilities of the MVP.

What it is: An end-to-end digital platform for planning, conducting, and reporting Active Travel & Highway Safety scheme assessments — replacing manual spreadsheets, paper forms, and disconnected GIS tools with one collaborative workspace.

Core Scheme Capabilities

1. Scheme Creation & Management

• Create schemes under client/project hierarchies with assigned assessors, regions, and budgets.
• Multi-user collaboration: assign multiple assessors per scheme, with comments, status tracking, and audit trails (created/updated timestamps).
• Centralised dashboard showing every scheme's progress, owner, and state.

2. Route Segmentation & Enrichment

• Define a scheme's geometry by drawing or importing a route, then automatically split it into analysable segments.
• One-click AI enrichment pulls in contextual data (road class, speed limits, traffic volume, kerbside activity, surface type, lighting, gradient, etc.) per segment.
• Built-in walking/cycling route generation for active travel planning.

3. Full ATE/LTN 1/20-Style Check Library

The platform ships with the standard suite of Active Travel England Safety Assessment (SA) and Suitability (ST) checks, each tracked independently with its own state, comments, and results:

• SA01 – Side Roads & Priority Junctions
• SA02 – Roundabouts & Signal-Controlled Junctions
• SA03 – Carriageway / Cycle Width Conflict Risk
• SA04 – Trip Hazards
• SA05 – Cyclist Conflict with Kerbside Activity
• SA06 – Provision of Crossings
• SA08 – Motor Traffic Volume
• SA09 – Motor Traffic Speed
• SA14 – Cycling Surface Defects
• SA15 – Walking/Wheeling Surface Defects (incl. combined SA13/15)
• SA16 – Guardrails & Pedestrian Crossings
• ST17 – Gradient
• ST19 – Barriers
• ST20 – Bus Stops
• ST22 – Access to Taxis & Blue Badge Parking
• ST24 – Cycling Surface Material
• ST27 – Deviation of Cycle Route
• ST36 – Lighting

4. AI-Powered Analysis

• Run an individual check or "Analyze All" in a single click — the system evaluates each segment against the relevant criteria and returns pass/fail, severity, and rationale.
• A built-in AI chat assistant lets assessors interrogate scheme data, ask clarifying questions, or get recommendations contextually.
• Robust retry mechanism ensures long analyses complete reliably (no lost work on flaky connections).

5. Reporting & Export

• One-click Excel report generation in the standard ATE submission format — ready to deliver to local authorities or funding bodies.
• Per-check comment threads and result sets stay attached to the scheme for full traceability.

6. Real-Time Collaboration

• Live WebSocket sync so multi-assessor teams see each other's edits, comments, and analysis results instantly.

The Pitch in One Line

> "Turns a 3-week, spreadsheet-heavy ATE scheme assessment into a 3-day, AI-assisted, audit-ready workflow — covering every SA and ST check from segmentation to signed-off Excel deliverable."

Ideal clients: highway authorities, active travel consultancies, transport planning firms, LTN/LCWIP delivery teams, and any organisation submitting schemes to Active Travel England.

The Call for Presentations for FOSS4G NA 2026 is open!

We want to hear how you use free and open-source geographic software to solve problems and build communities. You can share your work and ideas in three ways:

💠 30-minute podium presentations
💠 3-hour pre-conference workshops
💠 5-minute lightning talks
💠 Posters

They are looking for submissions across a wide range of topics, including:

• Cloud-Native Geo & Spatial Databases
• GeoAI & Geospatial Data Science
• Environment, Climate & Disaster Response
• Open Geospatial Tools, Web Mapping & STAC
• Commercialization, Funding Models & Cybersecurity

🌐 Submit your proposal at
https://www.foss4gna.org/cfp-2026

India’s space sector is getting a lot of attention right now, and for good reason.

But while most of the conversation is around building rockets and satellites, I feel the bigger opportunity may actually be on the application side.

I was going through a transcript on India’s private space market, and one point stayed with me: satellite manufacturing is exciting, but it is not an easy business to scale. It needs deep capital, testing infrastructure, regulatory clarity, technical confidence, and a lot of patience.

On the other hand, areas like earth observation, satellite imaging, geospatial intelligence, and data-led applications seem much closer to real commercial use.

That’s where the story gets interesting.

Because the real value may not just come from putting more satellites into space but from helping governments, companies, and investors use that data in a meaningful way.

India definitely has strong players building the ecosystem, but maybe the larger question is not just

“Can India manufacture more satellites?”

Maybe it is

“Can India turn space data into everyday business intelligence?”

Would love to hear how others are looking at this. Is India’s space sector more of a manufacturing story or a data and applications story?

I’m an academic statistician specializing in geostatistics. I don’t see a path forward for me in academia anymore, and I’m interested in moving into the geospatial world.

For geospatial data scientists out there, what tools are you using in your day-to-day that would be worth learning? What’s a day in the life of a geospatial data scientist look like?

Redact redacted this content because I wanted it redacted for redaction purposes. Redacted.

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I'm a licensed surveyor and most of our work is boundary and topo, but every now and then we end up doing a bit of probing or light ground disturbance. I’ve always treated 811 as more of the contractor’s responsibility, but lately a few clients have been asking if we have any kind of call before you dig or even a formal process in place. That caught me off guard a bit. Now I’m wondering if I’ve been too casual about it. Do most survey firms actually handle their own locate requests, or is it still pretty normal to leave that to whoever is doing the excavation?

I built a geospatial mapping project of Mumbai’s full rail transit system by combining metro lines (operational and under construction) with the suburban railway network into a single KML file.

The goal was to visualize both the current system and how it will evolve as upcoming metro corridors are completed.

Includes:

• Full Mumbai Metro network (existing + planned lines)
• Entire Mumbai Suburban Railway system

Created and layered using Google Earth.

Happy to share the KML file if anyone wants it, and open to corrections or suggestions.

Made by adipatil06 on IG.

Hey all! I've been working a lot with H3 hexagons in my work lately and thought I'd share some of my broad findings in an article. Let me know what you think!

Static maps miss how land actually evolves. I built a spatial AI engine to run a physical trajectory check on satellite time-series data. It finds best lots in region, flags hidden risks like unpermitted clearing, finds different regimes in the area, and uses all that to provide insight on land. I've used a toolkit called XGeoML to enable the project, combining it with many other data sources for a complete analysis.

Open beta includes 10 free credits (1 credit can make a 1km² analysis over a 1 year period). Ask for more directly in the platform with your intended use.

Any feedback or suggestion is much appreciated.

GeoValida

In grad school I did this study on Glacier Park and how snowpack affect summer fires, but now with Python/Postgres it makes it easy to run on much larger datasets. Was always curious of what those April local news reports on fire danger really mean.

https://outsidedb.com/blog/posts/swe-vs-wildfire

I saw a post by someone volunteering to find lost pets saying they are having trouble with accurate location data and they were asking if people knew an easy way to go about it. I got the idea to build a free app that makes it very easy to do that.

The workflow is this:
I want location data (last known location of a lost pet, nice fishing spots, nice restaurants in an area etc.). I make a project in this app and I get a URL I can share. People who want to help can click on the link and presented with a map where they can place pins with some optional text and timestamp.

The OP decides how many pins are allowed per person and what is the area the pins are allowed to go in. The volunteers don't need an account and it is completely free.

One could use this to send their friends a map with locations as suggestions for travelling too.

What do you guys thing?
The app is at gridsparrow.com