CNG Editorial Board Spotlight – Q&A: Brian Freitag
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?
The pace of innovation in geospatial data is amazing to me. Seeing such an engaged, passionate, and collaborative community working to address challenges and opportunities for interfacing with cloud-hosted data is exciting and inspiring. The development and prototyping of virtualized data, along with proof-of-concept efforts that demonstrate more efficient and cost-effective access to archival data formats are particularly promising areas of research for the cloud-native geospatial community. As these tools mature, they will lower barriers to entry and transform science workflows enabling groundbreaking scientific discoveries with more frequency.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’ve spent a good bit of time researching how to build cloud-based data systems that maximize the capabilities enabled by cloud-native data formats. This includes the full end-to-end system, from backend databases and catalogs to APIs that serve data programmatically, as well as front-end applications. Our team within the Office of Data Science and Informatics (ODSI) at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has developed a platform-as-a-service called the Visualization, Exploration, and Data Analysis (VEDA) platform, which provides cloud infrastructure and visualization capabilities built on cloud-native geospatial data (learn more through our technical documentation). With VEDA as a framework, there is a significant opportunity to scale the availability and accessibility of cloud-native geospatial data, while improving interoperability between cloud-native and legacy data formats.
What is one challenge in cloud-native geospatial that you think the community should focus on?
One of the key challenges in cloud-native geospatial data is achieving true interoperability across an increasingly complex ecosystem of data, disciplines, and technologies. The rapid expansion of commercial and federal data assets has created both opportunity and fragmentation, with vast volumes of information stored in varying formats, standards, and infrastructures. Bridging the gap between modern cloud-native formats and longstanding legacy systems remains a critical hurdle, particularly for enabling scalable, reproducible science. Addressing this challenge will require coordinated efforts to develop and adopt open standards, improve tooling, and foster collaboration across sectors so that diverse datasets can be seamlessly discovered, accessed, and analyzed at scale leveraging commercial cloud capabilities.
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