Last week I had a call with Professor Gavin Hollis who is writing about Shakespeare’s use of maps and coining the term mapp’ry – you can read a bit more about our conversation here. That conversation prompted me to think about Shakespeare’s references to places in his plays and what that might tell me about his understanding of the world at the end of the 16th century. I thought this would be quite simple but of course the devil is in the detail!

Ya está abierta en Uruguay la Convocatoria 2026 de la iniciativa “Geoalfabetización mediante la utilización de Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica (TIGs)”, una propuesta formativa que combina curso y concurso para impulsar el uso educativo de la cartografía digital, la georreferenciación y los Sistemas de Información Geográfica en las aulas.

Una de las tareas que realiza el Departamento de Topografía y Geomática del Ayuntamiento de Albacete es la de imprimir las fichas de las nuevas vías urbanas que se van creando en el municipio, tras la aprobación de su nombre por Pleno. Este trabajo se realiza directamente con las herramientas disponibles en gvSIG Online, desde la Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales del Ayuntamiento de Albacete, que lo facilita considerablemente.

En la última Jornada IDE en la Administración Local se mostró el nuevo visor de gvSIG Online, con multitud de novedades. Una de ellas es la de poder filtrar gráficamente sobre la vista, no solo sobre la tabla. De esa forma, se pueden realizar filtros en función de uno o varios campos, y que se muestren sobre el visor solamente los elementos filtrados.

Location: Remote, preferably with at least 4h overlap to CEST office hours

Employment Type: Full-time (80-100%)

About OPENGIS.ch:

OPENGIS.ch is a team of Full-Stack GeoNinjas offering personalized open-source geodata solutions to Swiss and international clients. We are dedicated to using and developing open-source tools, providing flexibility, scalability, and future-proof solutions, and playing a key role in the free and open-source geospatial community. We pride ourselves on our agile and distributed nature, which allows us to have a motivated and multicultural team that supports each other in working together.

Role Description:

From 14th - 17th April, I was fortunate to be able to attend GISRUK 2026, at the University of Birmingham. GISRUK is a regular feature in my calendar and it’s a great opportunity to see what is happening in the world of GIS Research, catch-up with old colleagues and make new connections.

For me, this conference was quite application focused, which I really enjoyed. It’s great to see what GIS can do, as well as learning about new methods and techniques.

Ed Parsons kicked-off the conference with a great keynote, talking about how we, as geographers, can make a difference. He got us thinking about what are the real world problems we can solve - a useful reminder that while the research is important, application is important too.

La agrupación formada por ENXEÑERÍA FORESTAL ASEFOR, S.L., FINANCIERA
MADERERA S.A., FORTOP TOPOGRAFÍA S.L.U. y GEOMATICO S. COOP.
GALEGA. ha obtenido apoyo en el marco de la convocatoria NEXOS 2025,
promovida por la Axencia Galega de Innovación, para el desarrollo del proyecto
CUBia: Cubicación inteligente – Investigación avanzada en cubicación
descentralizada con arquitecturas híbridas LiDAR-SLAM / LiDAR-UAV-ALS / IA y
tecnologías disruptoras cuánticas (Quantum Reservoir Computing, QRC) para un
nuevo paradigma en la predicción forestal.

UPDATE 14th May 2026

Thanks to Harry Wood I discovered that 3,000 of the 45,000 pubs in the FHRS dataset had no coordinates and were not showing on my map. Particularly embarrassing was the omission of the Sutton Arms which is a Geomob after event favourite for geobeers. It was relatively simple to rectify this as all but 6 of the missing records had a postcode that could be used to geocode using postcodes.io. Then I had to rerun the count of pubs per constituency, update the pubs per 10k population and rerun the generalisation of the boundaries – easy enough but an hour wasted.

Learning: Even if your dataset is too large to thoroughly inspect, 5 minutes spent scrolling through it, running a couple of sorts and doing some kind of sanity check is time well spent.

Se você utiliza o QGIS no seu dia a dia, sabe que os plugins são os “superpoderes” que expandem as funcionalidades do software. No entanto, com grandes poderes vêm grandes responsabilidades — e a necessidade de segurança.

Recentemente, a equipe do QGIS anunciou uma atualização vital no blog oficial: o Repositório de Plugins agora conta com ferramentas automáticas de segurança. Vamos entender por que isso é um marco para o nosso ecossistema favorito.

A mudança é fruto da QEP 409 (QGIS Enhancement Proposal). O foco aqui não é burocratizar a vida de quem cria, mas sim elevar o padrão de confiança. Agora, todo plugin enviado ao repositório oficial passa por um scanner automático de vulnerabilidades.

I thought it might be interesting to look at alcohol consumption and production around the world. I expected the data to be pretty easy to find an process – how wrong can you be!

Consumption figures came from the World Health Organization via Our World in Data, which publishes recorded per capita alcohol consumption broken down by beverage type — beer, wine and spirits — for most countries in the world, with data running up to 2020. The WHO figures measure litres of pure alcohol, so Claude converted these to litres of finished drink using standard ABV assumptions (beer 5%, wine 12%, spirits 40%). The total consumption layer uses pure alcohol to allow a fair comparison across drink types.

https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/torchgeo-organization-ibm-research/

The TorchGeo Organization and IBM Research are joining forces!

The TerraTorch and TerraKit libraries have joined the TorchGeo Organization! https://github.com/torchgeo is now home to 3 of the most influential and widely used open-source GeoAI libraries:

El espacio no es contexto, es estructura.

Los Sistemas de Información Geográfica (GIS) parecen hoy inseparables de disciplinas como urbanismo, planificación territorial o gestión ambiental. Sin embargo, su presencia en la enseñanza académica es sorprendentemente desigual: omnipresente en geografía, marginal en arquitectura, casi inexistente en sociología, economía o ciencias políticas. Lo paradójico es que el concepto fundacional del GIS no nació de la informática ni de la ingeniería, sino de algo mucho más antiguo y urgente: un epidemiólogo británico tratando de detener una epidemia.

En 1854, Londres sufría un grave brote de cólera. La teoría dominante era clara y científicamente respaldada: la enfermedad se transmitía por el aire —los llamados «miasmas». Pero John Snow, médico con una observación incómoda, sospechaba que la teoría estaba radicalmente equivocada.

I am struggling to come up with an idea for what to map next. A bit of a brain freeze. Have you got an idea? Leave a suggestion in the comments.

Week 15 was my peak week before Quad Rock on May 9. I didn't run a lot, but it was all high quality running.

• 14 hours, 23 minutes all training

• 24.8 miles running

• 6,020 feet D+ running

Tuesday I hiked and ran up and down Green Mountain in Boulder, my first time on that mountain. I went up the steeper east side and down the more runnable west side. The trail is ridiculously steep: in the first mile I gained 1,300 feet of elevation. There's a ladder at one point, that's how steep it is. The second mile has a short runnable section and averages only 19%. I went steadily to the top and ran the downhills of Ranger and Gregory Canyon as fast as I could while sight-reading. Green Mountain is fun, easy to access, and loved almost to death by Boulderites. The Amphitheater and Saddle Rock trails are in sad shape.

We want to share some updates we have made on the QGIS Plugin Repository. In January 2026 we shared QEP 409. The proposal seeks to improve the general working practices with QGIS plugins, adding some optional and some mandatory checks to every plugin that gets published in the QGIS plugin repo. This builds on initial work (see PR) we did to run ‘soft’ checks on every plugin when they are published.

We also ‘back ran’ the new security checks on every existing plugin in the plugin repository (latest versions only) and assigned them a security badge without blocking or removing any plugin from being published.

La versión 2.7 de gvSIG Desktop incluye una nueva herramienta que permite convertir coordenadas entre distintos sistemas de referencia, que facilita por ejemplo el poder buscar coordenadas de puntos que se tienen en un sistema diferente al de la vista desde la propia aplicación, y no tener que acudir a herramientas externas. En el caso de coordenadas geográficas se puede seleccionar formato decimal, o grados, minutos y segundos.

Esta herramienta complementa al capturador de coordenadas, herramienta que ya existía en versiones anteriores de gvSIG Desktop, y con la que se podía obtener las coordenadas de un punto sobre la vista en el sistema de referencia elegido, aunque la vista estuviese en un sistema diferente. Esta herramienta permitía además guardar dichos puntos, para ser utilizados en algunos geoprocesos.

En el siguiente vídeo se muestra el funcionamiento de ambas herramientas:

Se você já trabalha com dados geoespaciais, provavelmente domina análise. Mas deixa eu te provocar:

Você sabe transformar isso em uma solução acessível na web?

Porque existe uma diferença enorme entre:

Gerar mapas
E entregar uma plataforma que outras pessoas realmente usam

E é exatamente aí que entra o WebGIS.

Hoje, quem se destaca não é só quem analisa dados… É quem consegue:

Centralizar informações
Publicar serviços padronizados (OGC)
Criar aplicações acessíveis via navegador
Controlar acesso e usuários
Escalar o uso dos dados

Em outras palavras: sair do desktop e ir para internet.

Agora vem o ponto que trava muita gente:

“Pra fazer isso eu preciso programar?”

Não.

Com as ferramentas certas, você consegue construir um WebGIS completo usando:

GeoServer 3.0-RC is now available, and with it we can celebrate something bigger than a release candidate.

This milestone is the concrete outcome of a successful community crowdfunding campaign.

When we launched the GeoServer 3 crowdfunding initiative in September 2024, the goal was ambitious. GeoServer needed more than incremental maintenance. It needed a full platform modernization, including a new generation user experience, a stronger security foundation, a modern Java stack, improved raster processing, and the engineering effort required to carry those changes across the broader GeoServer ecosystem.

That work is now visible in GeoServer 3.0-RC.

I needed my training to begin to peak in week 14. Quad Rock is in 20 days (at this writing), and I won't get much adaptation to workout loading in the last 13 days. Weeks 14 and 15 would be my last opportunities to get faster and stronger before the race. Fortunately, a return to good health and favorable weather helped make this my best week yet.

• 13 hours, 8 minutes all training

• 42.7 miles running

• 8,550 feet D+ running and treadmill

The first block of my training was dedicated to power and pure speed, The second to intense aerobic efforts. This last block is about going up and down technical mountain trails at my race pace or a bit faster. In practice, I push pretty hard for half of each climb, run the downhills as fast as I can, and otherwise keep it easy, but not slow.

GeoServer 3.0-RC is now available, with downloads for ( bin, war ), along with docs and extensions. We are working with OSGeo for the windows installer download, and will update this post when it is available. Windows users are asked to test out the bin download while we wait. Release available as docker image docker.osgeo.org/geoserver:3.0-RC .

É oficial! É com muita alegria e entusiasmo que confirmo minha participação no FOSS4G 2026 em Hiroshima! 🇯🇵

Para quem não está familiarizado, o FOSS4G é o maior evento do mundo dedicado ao software livre geoespacial. Organizado pela OSGeo, é o lugar onde desenvolvedores, usuários e entusiastas se reúnem para moldar o futuro das geotecnologias.

Antes de falar das apresentações, quero expressar meu profundo agradecimento à comissão organizadora. Sabemos que realizar um evento desta magnitude exige uma dedicação quase sobre-humana. O o trabalho de vocês é fundamental para fortalecer o ecossistema global de software livre geoespacial. Obrigado por tornarem isso possível!

At OPENGIS.ch, we believe that the long-term health of the QGIS ecosystem depends on more than just adding new features. Critical work like bugfixing, code reviews, codebase maintenance, and quality assurance often goes unnoticed, yet it is essential to delivering the stable, reliable software that thousands of organisations depend on every day. That is why we launched the QGIS Sustainability Initiative (#sustainQGIS). For every support contract of more than 10 days, we donate development time to the initiative. In addition, all unused hours at the end of the year of each contract are also donated. This ensures that buying an OPENGIS.ch support contract directly helps enable the long-term, sustainable development of the QGIS and QField ecosystem.

At OPENGIS.ch, we believe that the long-term health of the QGIS ecosystem depends on more than just adding new features. Critical work like bugfixing, code reviews, codebase maintenance, and quality assurance often goes unnoticed, yet it is essential to delivering the stable, reliable software that thousands of organisations depend on every day. That is why we launched the QGIS Sustainability Initiative (#sustainQGIS). For every support contract of more than 10 days, we donate development time to the initiative. In addition, all unused hours at the end of the year of each contract are also donated. This ensures that buying an OPENGIS.ch support contract directly helps enable the long-term, sustainable development of the QGIS and QField ecosystem.

Warning It was discovered after the PROJ 9.8.0 release that several EPSG updates introduced after EPSG v12.033 – notably the introduction of national realizations of ETRS89 (ETRS89-XXX […] where XXX is the 3-letter ISO country code) – caused backward...

Est. reading time: 2 minutes

It’s my pleasure to announce the release of PROJ 9.8.1!

The release includes a few updates, bug fixes and a major regression fix for ETRS89-related coordinates operations.
See the release notes below.

Download the archives here:

At OPENGIS.ch, we create open-source software.
We are contributors, maintainers, and in the case of QField, the team that builds it.

That comes with a responsibility we take seriously: giving back.

“Give back” is not a slogan. It is our first core value, and the very reason the sustainability initiative exists.

Open-source is a garden. If you eat from it, water it, and keep seeding.

QGIS.org is pleased to announce that we will be using some of the funding that is donated to us by our users and sustaining members to fund a dedicated administrative role for the project. 

Principle duties:

David Bann and Liam Wright have put together a great guide to Generative AI Tools for Quantitative Research on the NCRM resources site. This is a great overview of what Generative AI is, how it works and all of the potential different models available, both commercial and open source, as well as how to run some models locally rather than relying on the cloud.

They are also very focused on the practical elements of how to actually use the tools in your work, discussing the different approaches as well as highlighting the importance of making sure you do not share sensitive data with cloud services.

They also have a great selection of videos for setting up both cloud based and local LLMs for working with Stata and R scripts in a number of tools including VS Code:

In week 12, I started to get things back on track after being sick. I ran five days, biked one day, and took Saturday off to take my family to a Nuggets game in Denver.

• 12 hours, 9 minutes all training

• 34.8 miles running

• 5,800 ft D+ running (and treadmill)

My energy level was low to mid until Friday, when I rallied for a good interval workout on a 12% incline treadmill indoors and a sauna session after. My fitness didn't advance much in week ten, but I didn't lose a step. According to the machine, I went "up" beyond any of the Quad Rock climbs, and at a pace that I'd love to hit on race day.

Listening to the news about the impact of the current war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, I was prompted to think about critical minerals that could also have massive disruptive impact in geopolitical turmoil.

I asked Claude “Can you build a dataset of the most critical minerals, where they are mined (mine sites or countries), shares of world production, price changes over 5-10 years, main usages so that we can build a map of these commodities. Build it in a way that we can extend if we find more data” and it found me some data using these sources: