Author Archives: Alberto

POI Intelligence for Urban Asset Analysis: assetIQ

When analysing urban assets, there is genuine value in moving beyond generic neighborhood scores. The density of a coffee shop cluster, the proximity to a financial hub, or the concentration of accommodation around a transport node are signals that traditional datasets flatten into averages — or ignore entirely. assetIQ was built to change that. assetIQ is an R application powered by DuckDB and Overture Maps that extracts, classifies, and scores Points of Interest (POIs) for any location on Earth. You define a city and a search radius — from 100 meters to 25 kilometers — and the tool queries the Overture Maps Places dataset in real time, classifying each POI into thematic groups: Food & Drink, Retail, Health, Education, Transport, Accommodation, Financial Services, Leisure & Culture, Sport, and more.

The core output is an attribute value called POIQ: a normalized 0–1 score assigned to every building footprint within the area of interest, derived from a Kernel Density Estimation of the selected thematic group. A building in a dense retail corridor scores close to 1. An isolated residential block far from any commerce scores close to 0. This transforms thousands of individual points — which in raw form tell you very little — into a single, interpretable attribute per building, ready for downstream modelling, valuation, or site selection.

Mapterhorn + R: LOS analysis in seconds! 🚀

The analysis of LOS (Line of Sight) in telecommunications is the study that determines whether a clear, unobstructed path exists between a transmitting antenna and a receiver. While this calculation was traditionally reserved for large microwave links over long distances or in rural environments, the arrival of 5G networks and the horizon of 6G have turned it into an absolute priority for urban deployment, completely transforming how networks are planned in major cities.

Detecting Potential Mobile Coverage Gaps Using OpenCellID, GHSL and Overture Maps: Case study over TUNIS

Mobile connectivity has become a fundamental component of modern infrastructure, yet significant spatial inequalities in network access still persist across both urban peripheries and rural environments. Using openly available geospatial datasets, this analysis explores potential mobile coverage gaps by combining OpenCellID cellular infrastructure observations, GHSL population layers and vector data extracted from Overture Maps. The objective is not to reproduce real telecom propagation models, but to generate a simplified spatial estimation of coverage capable of identifying populated areas potentially located outside the influence of nearby cellular infrastructure.

CHANGE DETECTION ARCGIS PRO AND LIVING ATLAS 2017-2025

The quantification of land-use dynamics necessitates a spatiotemporal framework that ensures categorical stability over long-term observation windows. The ESRI 10-Meter Global Land Cover time series, accessible through the ArcGIS Living Atlas, provides a harmonized baseline for this purpose, derived from the dense temporal stack of the ESA Sentinel-2 mission.

Who Gets to See the War? Satellite Imagery Censorship and the Copernicus Alternative

A private company, operating under a US federal license, was effectively told by the Trump administration to go dark over an active war zone. Planet complied. Vantor and BlackSky — both heavily dependent on US defense revenue — said they hadn’t even received such a request, because they were already tightly controlling access. The selective pressure lands precisely on the most open, most commercially accessible provider. That is not a coincidence.A private company, operating under a US federal license, was effectively told by the Trump administration to go dark over an active war zone. Planet complied. Vantor and BlackSky — both heavily dependent on US defense revenue — said they hadn’t even received such a request, because they were already tightly controlling access. The selective pressure lands precisely on the most open, most commercially accessible provider. That is not a coincidence.

From Overture Maps to GPKG in minutes: Building a Geospatial Data Extractor with R and DuckDB

Modern geospatial workflows increasingly depend on fast, reliable access to city-scale vector data — building footprints, road networks, land use polygons, points of interest, address databases. Whether you are designing a 5G radio network, modelling urban heat islands, planning last-mile logistics, or simulating emergency response coverage, you almost always start from the same question: “How do I get clean, structured geodata for this city, right now, without spending two days on it?”

The Overture Maps Extractor is my answer to that question. It is a Shiny application written in R that lets any GIS professional extract multiple thematic layers from the Overture Maps Foundation dataset — for any city in the world — in a matter of minutes, with zero command-line interaction and zero manual data wrangling.

Latest projects developed by Alberto C. by 20260417

1. Precision Agriculture: NDVI/NDWI/ECI/SAVI. GEE /Javascripthttps://geovisualization.net/2026/03/20/agricultura-de-precision-ii-app-para-integracion-con-catastro-rural-en-espana/2. Remote Sensing. From 10m to 1m (x100 times in few lines of code). Python /Colabhttps://geovisualization.net/2026/03/18/super-resolution-1-m-a-cadalso-de-los-vidrios-madrid-avec-sentinel-2-10m-magique/3. Handling High resolution Terrain models in Mapterhorn. Rhttps://geovisualization.net/2026/03/17/setting-up-mapterhorn-terrain-in-rstudio/4. RADAR Flood assessment. GEE /Javascripthttps://geovisualization.net/2026/02/23/flood-assessment-using-radar-sentinel1-srtm-v3-and-ghsl-pop-estimation-in-spain/5. From Lidar to DTM/DSM in using code. Rhttps://geovisualization.net/2026/02/16/from-lidar-usgs-to-dsm-in-a-few-lines-of-code-the-magic-of-r/6. Big Data analysis of any subject (running). Rhttps://geovisualization.net/2026/01/27/con-r-de-running/7. Flood assessment and Open Data.Continue reading “Latest projects developed by Alberto C. by 20260417”

1656 followers in LinkedIn is something (updated 20260529)

Una red con nombre y apellidos. A veces, las métricas de las redes sociales nos hacen olvidar que detrás de cada clic hay una persona. Ver este camino de 1531 profesionales a vista de helicóptero no es un ejercicio de ego, sino de gratitud.

AERIAL SURVEYOR SIMULATOR: Reimagining Aerial Photography

For three years, my office was thousands of feet in the air. As an aerial photographer, I spent my days capturing the world’s textures, layouts, and topographies from a cockpit—a masterclass in perspective that I am now transforming into a Aerial Surveyor Simulator.