CNG Editorial Board Spotlight – Q&A: Julia Wagemann
Each month, we’re highlighting the community leaders who volunteer their expertise to guide CNG’s direction. Our Editorial Board Spotlight series features a different board member sharing their perspectives on geospatial trends and tools, what’s capturing their attention through reading or their current work, and the challenges they believe our community should focus on.
1. What geospatial trend or tool excites you right now?
Right now, I am excited about the momentum building around cloud-native geospatial formats, particularly what’s happening in the Zarr ecosystem.
For the last year, I had the pleasure of contributing to the EOPF Toolkit project, part of ESA’s initiative to migrate the Sentinel data archive from the legacy SAFE format to Zarr. Working closely with the Sentinel data user community showed me how transformative this shift can be, not just in terms of performance and scalability, but in opening up Earth observation data to a much broader range of workflows and users.
What really makes me excited now, though, is the GeoZarr specification. I see enormous potential in what GeoZarr is trying to accomplish: bringing the benefits of Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) - like internal overviews and standardized geospatial metadata - into the Zarr specification. This is an exciting and powerful step forward.
The discussions happening around this space are lively and evolving quickly. I’m following them closely and looking forward to seeing how the specification matures and gets adopted across different domains.
2. What are you working on right now? What are you reading right now?
At thriveGEO, our focus right now is on training and working closely with organisations to help adopt cloud-native geospatial approaches. What excites me most about this is the opportunity to move beyond the theoretical and get into tangible, practical examples that make the benefits of cloud-native geospatial very concrete. For example, in our training, we do benchmarking exercises between traditional and cloud-optimised formats, explore different chunking strategies and their impact on processing times, and investigate implications on storage space for different formats.
My background is primarily in working with large volumes of raster data, so that’s naturally been a strong thread running through our training content. But as part of developing our Cloud-Native Geospatial 101 course, I’ve been diving deeper into the vector and tabular side of things too, particularly GeoParquet and DuckDB, which have been generating a lot of well-deserved excitement in the community.
All of this means I’m currently reading everything related to practical application examples, best practice guides, and benchmarking studies. Anything that helps translate the promise of cloud-native geospatial into something people can immediately apply in their own work. If you’ve written something worth reading in this space, please send it my way!
What is one challenge in cloud-native geospatial that you think the community should focus on?
The cloud-native geospatial space is evolving at a remarkable pace, with new formats, tools, and specifications emerging and maturing faster than ever before. And yet, when we step back and think about larger-scale adoption - getting organisations to actually embrace cloud-native geospatial concepts, tools, and technologies in their day-to-day work - we are still very much at the beginning of that journey.
This came through clearly at last year’s CNG Forum, where the need for training and educational resources was one of the most strongly expressed themes across conversations. It feels like a real signal from the community about what’s needed to move forward.
I wouldn’t necessarily frame it as a challenge, but rather as an opportunity and responsibility: we need to invest more deliberately in supporting people to make the cloud-native geospatial transition. What I mean by that is developing structured, accessible community resources. Resources that help users build a genuine understanding of key concepts and technologies, share practical best practices, and develop the skills they need to work confidently with cloud-native geospatial approaches.
The technology is ready. The community is enthusiastic. What will unlock the next wave of adoption is making sure that knowledge and capability grow alongside the tools.
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