In the last few years, the state of geospatial tooling in Julia has significantly improved. We now have first-in-class libraries with native algorithms that are the fastest that exist in the world. Today, Julia has capabilities to some degree or another over the full geospatial stack: file I/O, raster and vector data processing, visualization, and analytics.
This minisymposium is meant for discussion of software projects in earth observation, geostatistics, geometry, or anything else geospatial/GIS related - with emphasis on how they can empower users to do interesting things!
Julia as an ecosystem is uniquely suited to power users, given the ability to easily change upstream behaviours and the expressiveness and power of multiple dispatch, combined with a fast compiler for user-level code.
This has enabled people to use Julia to build software that solves novel problems in a performant way. Some of these projects are listed below. We hope to use this minisymposium to show the new advances that have been made over the last year (both in pure Julia and interoperating with other language ecosystems) and to invite talks about already-existing functionality in the ecosystem which may not be well known.
Areas of particular interest (some of which already have talks lined up) are:
- DGGS and their use in data analysis
- Geometry on the plane and the sphere
- Geospatial visualization and cool projects there
- Remote sensing applications
But feel free to propose any talk that is in the geospatial field! We'd also be interested in hearing about user experiences using Julia for geospatial tasks and how the ecosystem could improve for new users.
Maarten Pronk is a researcher at Deltares and an external PhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology. He holds a MSc in Geomatics and a BSc in Architecture, both from the Delft University of Technology (NL). His research concerns elevation modelling, especially in lowlands prone to coastal flooding. Currently, he works on applying data from ICESat-2, a LiDAR satellite, to global elevation models.
Product engineer for Dyad, the new modeling and simulation language from JuliaHub. Also heavily involved in geospatial (via JuliaGeo and GeometryOps.jl) and Makie.jl, as well as the Documenter.jl ecosystem.