geoskeptic — Matthew Hanson

I work on remote sensing and open-source geospatial software at LGND, building the infrastructure that makes satellite imagery findable. Lately that has meant embeddings rather than metadata.

I’ve spent most of the last decade on STAC, the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog specification, and serve on its Project Steering Committee. Based in Dover, New Hampshire.

Upcoming talks

2–4 Nov 2026 · FOSS4G North America · Sacramento Into the STACLands abstract
2–4 Nov 2026 · FOSS4G North America · Sacramento Geo Embeddings 101 Models, image chips, and semantic search abstract
2–4 Nov 2026 · FOSS4G North America · Sacramento Visualizing Aggregations in STAC From scenes to coverage abstract
9–12 Nov 2026 · Advancing Earth Observation Forum · Hobart, Tasmania Keynote Title to be confirmed

Past talks

8 Oct 2026 · Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum · Snowbird, UT Into the STACLands A choose-your-own-adventure tour of STAC agenda
8 Oct 2026 · Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum · Snowbird, UT STAC for Embeddings Combining metadata search with semantic search Listed in the program as From Catalog to Content agenda slides PDF
3 Sep 2026 · FOSS4G 2026 · Hiroshima Into the STACLands A choose-your-own-adventure tour of STAC Listed in the program as State of STAC abstract
2 Sep 2026 · FOSS4G 2026 · Hiroshima Geo Embeddings 101 Models, image chips, and semantic search Listed in the program as Open Geo Embeddings abstract slides PDF

All talks →

Writing

2026-02-26 · Element 84 If AI Is Going to Task Satellites, We Need Standards
2026-01-29 · Element 84 AI Coding and the Future of Open-Source Geospatial Software
2025-10-30 · Element 84 The 2025 Geospatial Tech Radar
2025-10-28 · Element 84 STAC: A Retrospective, Part 2 — Why STAC was Successful

All writing →

Podcasts

3 Feb 2026 · MapScaping Vibe Coding and the Fragmentation of Open Source Why machine-writing code is the best, and most dangerous, thing for geospatial episode
Dec 2025 · Great Data Products Matthew Hanson on STACspec Success and Guerrilla Standards Community-driven standards, and why flexibility is the enemy of interoperability episode

Projects

STAC: the specification, and its steering committee
pystac-client: Python client for searching STAC APIs
stac-server: serverless STAC API on AWS
STAPI: satellite tasking API specification