Bill Dollins

Yep. So many permutations…

The Siren Song of Global Identifiers Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a thoughtful discussion within the open geospatial community. At issue is the idea of a global identifier system for real‑world geographic entities, which is something that would make it far easier to align data across the many datasets practitioners work with every day. The discussion that followed, including comments from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is not unusual for infrastructure standards.

The Siren Song of Global Identifiers

Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a thoughtful discussion within the open geospatial community. At issue is the idea of a global identifier system for real‑world geographic entities, which is something that would…

509 BCE - Roman Republic established

46 BCE - Julius Caesar named Dictator for Life

27 BCE - Roman Empire begins with Senate declaring Octavian as Augustus

476 CE - Fall of Western Roman Empire

The Western Roman Senate convened through all of this.

People matter more than institutions.

I had to take most of last year off due to eye surgeries. It’s been hard getting back.

We’ve added a daily briefing feature to GeoFeeds. geofeeds.me/briefings

When the leopards are busy eating their own faces, let them continue.

When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. There was no corresponding spike in public interest, no viral event, and no new feature release.

When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale

In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low…

The most important geospatial app you will see today: www.whereisitfiveoclock.beer

XLSForm with Mergin Maps Not everything I do these days is with AI. Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to do some work with Mergin Maps as part of my consulting work. It is a field data collection application by Lutra …

Doing a little work with Mergin Maps.

blog.geomusings.com/2026/02/17/x...

I haven't needed a single additional feature released since MS Word 6.0.

How OOP Helped Me Understand AI Agents I first encountered the term “agent” more than 20 years ago, when I was working on an agent-based modeling system for simulating infrastructure inter-dependencies. Imagine an agent repr…

blog.geomusings.com/2026/02/11/h...

Github and AWS seem to be in an intense competition to see who can create the most inscrutable permissions management experience.

I tell you what, Ring figured out exactly how to weaponize white people’s empathy in service to a corporately controlled surveillance state.

Tell them it will find your dog.

It’s fun to see this again, @james.fee.fm

Mudpocalypse about to hit the DMV.

“Post GIS” Revisited One of the advantages of writing a blog for nearly twenty years is that you can go back and see how some of the things you wrote about have held up over time. Suffice it to say there are a number of posts that tempt me to hit the delete key. There were times when I seemed to be using this blog more like a Tumblr. Then, of course, there was my “Silverlight Period.” I leave those posts as a cautionary tale for others. Silverlight is dead, but I have no doubt a Silverlight-like thing will arise in the future.

Ten years ago, I wrote about the geospatial landscape as I saw it then. Ten years later, I decided to take another look.

How Minnesotans Faced Down MAGA The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

Minneapolis residents aren’t just pushing back against Trump’s crackdown—they’re undercutting MAGA’s core philosophy, Adam Serwer argues.

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Nye Welch

The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.

We've added 12 more feeds over the last couple days. Check out the updated aggregation at geofeeds.me/view

Scale doesn’t break systems, it reveals the one you actually built.

At small scale, humans are the glue.
At large scale, assumptions become outages.

If your system only works because someone “knows how it works”…. that’s not design. That’s babysitting.

spatiallyadjusted.com/lessons-from...

AI Still Requires You to Understand Your Business I have said repeatedly throughout my career that the effective use and adoption of technology requires a deep understanding of your own business processes and workflows. This is true regardless of the nature of the technology: proprietary or open-source, SaaS or cloud or on-prem, web or desktop or mobile, SQL or not. None of these things can paper over poorly understood processes. As James is currently pointing out over on his blog, technology tends to expose that lack of understanding. It often unfairly shoulders the blame but, in the highly deterministic world of software, getting the wrong answer usually means you didn't understand the question.

AI Still Requires You to Understand Your Business

I have said repeatedly throughout my career that the effective use and adoption of technology requires a deep understanding of your own business processes and workflows. This is true regardless of the nature of the technology: proprietary or…

GeoFeeds: Now with MCP It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from those blogs over the previous year. I've been impressed by the surge is RSS feeds over that time. If you have a blog or feed related to geospatial, personal or corporate, you can simply add an issue to the repo, including the title, and feed URL, and it will get added to the OPML.

GeoFeeds: Now with MCP

It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from…

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95 ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away

One of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. Rest in peace, Dr. West.

thezebra.org/2026/01/18/d...

“In Bid to Dissolve NATO, Trump Raises Prices for American Consumers” - Fixed it for you, @nytimes.com

Weird memory surfaced today. I was a Navy contractor for many years. There was a guy on base with a name very similar to mine, so we were adjacent in the address list. We'd get each other's email/voicemail constantly. Never met him once, but probably talked to him on the phone about two dozen times.

I have used them a lot recently in my dev workflows and they have been really helpful at increasing velocity and quality. This was my first venture into an analytic task and I was impressed.

Spatial Analysis with Claude Code I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to where I am focused on important behaviors, rather than rote scaffolding. I recently wanted to trying expanding beyond code generation to analytic tasks, so I set about building a Claude Code Skill to do point-in-polygon analysis between two PostGIS tables. Truth in advertising: I used AI to help me with this experiment.

Spatial Analysis with Claude Code

I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to…

Notepad++ is my sole use case for Wine on my Mac.