About the Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project

If you read nothing read else, atleast read the "every dataset..." card

The backstory

I'm a father, a husband, and a full-time salary man(in that order), as such my time is limited. I started Keystone GIS as a way to make a little extra money while persuing a hobby(and to use my ESRI subscription as a tax write-off). Its nice to be able to sit down at night and start mapping, but I find that most of that time is spent trying to find new data. I like manipulating and visualizing data, thats the aspect of the GIS field I enjoy. What I dont like is trying to navigate antiquated websites, and portals only to find that the data im trying to find is paywalled. I just want to make maps. So to protect my sanity, and spend more time with my family I had to find a new approach to getting that juicy new hit of data, so i can hop in ArcGIS and get to mapping..and thats how this came around...I sound like an addict..

In my personal circle it's no secret, that I *really* dont like big tech. I dont have any social media accounts (I guess reddit? but I dont even have the app..), I disabled the telematics in my car so they cant track my driving habits, etc, etc, really Im not a fan. Oh I especially hate how AI is being used. I remember before it was all chatbots, it really had the promise of bringing meaningful change (haha), ML algorithms that could spot cancer cells forming years before it was visible to give doctors the best chance at helping thier patients stay healthy, whatever you get where I'm going with this. But then on june 12, 2017 a paper came out called "Attention Is All You Need." This paper introduced silicon valley to the wonders of transformers, and not the good one with megan fox. Once these money hungry geeks figured out they could use chatbots to kill kids and make our society *actually stupid,* there was no stopping them.

Sorry I almost went down a rabbit hole. Long story short, heck big tech, they took a really cool technology and turned it into literally the worst version of itself. Actual SkyNet would be better than this, atleast then the 49% of adults who use chatbots regularly could see how dumb it is to outsource your thinking to it..Anyways so long story short, I'm using AI to scrape, and aggregate geographic data to share for free. I use this data to create maps and tell stories, typically attempting to bring attention to important societal issues.

Dude wtf is that name?

What? you mean the "Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project"? The name is dorky and overly complicated, I didnt pick it. The bot running the cronjobs just started using it. It seems that an AI's ability to perform tasks to standard is better when its roleplaying, this is the same reason it calls itself the "research division." We should all be on the same page now: Keystone GIS is just myself, a one man operation, and the Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project (& associated research division), is just a side project autonomously operated by an LLM.

Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project

Back in the askJeeves days, when the librarian was teaching my classmates and I how to research it seemed that good data was actually easy to find, and it was almost always free. Fastword ~25 years and 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 so they can control the world. F*%! em. 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 "Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project." Every day, this program publishes unique, Norther VA datasets for anyone* to utilize, no catch.

*Any tech or AI company with a valuation of more than $1 million dollars may not use any of the data sets published or produced on any keystoneGIS.com page or listed in any keystoneGIS.com directory. With out reaching out for licensing or purchase operations. Everyone else, you're good.

If it's not a gift, why's there a donate button?

I pay out of pocket for the hosting, storage, compute for the clanker (my increased power bill because of it), and other associated fees. If you like what's happening here, donations help ensure I can keep doing it with out my wife shutting down the operation.

How it works

So here's what's happening with this "Northern Virginia Autonomous GIS Research Project" Every day this clanker crawls open-source spaces, cross-references municipal portals, and stitches together niche datasets that don't exist anywhere else as a single file.

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. So that leads me to the most important part of this page. If you only read one thing, let it be this.

• All data is regorously cited. Authors/sources are cited and given proper recognition.
• All methodology is logged. It will always explain how the data was collected and processed.
• Any Gaps in data are disclosed. What data wasnt found, and what the data can't tell you.