About Keystone GIS

The backstory

I love just about every aspect of cartography & GIS, but I am also a father, a husband, and a full-time salary man(in that order), as such my time is limited. I started Keystone GIS to handle niche geospatial consulting for local businesses, but I also wanted to keep doing creative cartography as a hobby. But i ended up spending all of my free time trying to find good data. In fact my least favorite aspect of the GIS field is trying to navigate antiquated websites, and portals (not a single one following the same file keeping conventions..) to find SOMETHING. I really enjoy making maps, not digging for data. To protect my sanity, and spend more time with my family I had to find a new approach, and its ultimately what lead to this site: to claw back a bit of family time, and to give something back to the open-source community that has selflessly given so much of their time for free.

The Daily Northern Virginia GIS Research Program

Good data actually used to be easy to find, even before the askJeeves days. But now it seems every bit of data is treated like gold, i guess that's because Big Tech wants every last bit of it for their "AI." As a way to give back to the open source community and show that not everything on the internet has to be a grift, i present "The Daily Northern Virginia GIS Research Program." Every day, this program publishes a unique or novel, hyper-local NoVA dataset for researchers, hobbyists, and professionals to use for free.

How it works

For those of you who know me personally, it's no secret, that I'm not a big fan of Big Tech/Big Data, I hate the trajectory of "AI" and I can't stand the fact that these dudes are making literal billions off of our data while we don't get anything except a higher power bill. But at this current point in time the $20 subscriptions are actually losing them money, so I'll give them $20 and take advantage of the situation as much as possible.. After all, I'm pretty opportunistic.

So here's what's happening with this "daily northern Virginia GIS research program." Every day this AI crawls open-source spaces, cross-references municipal portals, and stitches together niche datasets that don't exist anywhere else as a single file. I'm essentially just outsourcing it to do the data aggregation and synthetization so I can actually spend my time inside ArcGIS doing the work I love, which is visualizing the data to tell a story, or answer difficult questions with the power of maps.

Now, I don't really trust the linear-algebra machines to be as intelligent as the technological-snake-oil salesmen make them out to be, therefore, I DO NOT give AI the agency to run unchecked, every row of data is cited and verifiable, and every download includes: