The Hidden Data Crisis in GIS (And How to Solve It)

Spatial Stack with Matt Forrest

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What if you could stop wrangling geospatial data, and just get to the good part?

In this episode, I sit down with Rob Fletcher, Chief Science Officer at Seer AI, to talk about one of the biggest blockers in geospatial today: accessing and integrating the right data, at the right time, in the right format.

Rob shares his journey from doing particle physics at CERN to pioneering spatial data infrastructure, and how Seer AI is building what he calls a “CDN for geospatial data.”

We dive into:

🌍 Why the biggest challenge in GIS isn’t analysis—it's finding and formatting data
💡 The danger of agreeing to analytics projects without knowing what's possible
🛠️ Why Seer AI chose graph technology to organize spatial data across sources
⚡ How a "side project" dashboard became essential to real-time disaster response
📊 Bridging the gap between GIS teams and business analysts

Whether you're working in local government, disaster response, sustainability, or just tired of managing messy spatial data, this episode will change how you think about building modern GIS workflows.

🔗 Learn more about Seer AI: https://seer.ai
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