Geospatial Sovereignty in the Age of AI | Javier de la Torre at OGC Connect Helsinki

Spatial Data Infrastructure and open portals are becoming more relevant than ever, but their requirements have changed a lot. In this talk from OGC Connect Helsinki, Javier de la Torre, Founder and CSO of CARTO, makes the case for what the next generation of geospatial infrastructure needs to look like: AI-ready, cost-effective and fast, interoperable, and sovereign. To prove it, Javier ran a live demo. He asked an agent about new data centers being built in Finland (potentially by Microsoft) and their impact on electricity, energy, and forests. With no geoportals and no dataset names, the agent searched the web, found three declared locations, and connected to three Finnish and European data publishers (the National Land Survey of Finland, the Finnish Environment Institute, and Copernicus) plus Statistics Finland and Eurostat. It discovered the right layers, queried them, and returned an assessment: locations near power and water with low flood risk, but with deforestation impact that needs review. Every number linked back to its publisher, dataset, and query. The bigger shift the talk argues for: this is disintermediation. People will expect to ask questions, not activate layers in a portal. AI removes the need for experts or middle layers to discover authoritative data, perform analysis, and act on it. And the technology is ready, on standards the analytics industry already supports: Apache Iceberg, GeoParquet, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs, STAC, and OGC APIs, served from cloud storage with no live servers. All of this ran on European infrastructure at very low cost: UpCloud (Finnish cloud provider, data center in Helsinki), DuckDB (Amsterdam), Mistral (France), and CARTO (Spain). Sovereign technology end to end. Catalogs in this model are not static either: when agents find bugs or metadata errors, they can submit a pull request back to the publisher, creating a feedback loop that makes the data better over time. The thesis: the technology is ready, and users will not wait. If geospatial publishers do not put their data infrastructure to work, someone else will. Learn more about CARTO: https://carto.com #OGCConnect #Geospatial #SpatialDataInfrastructure #SDI #GeospatialAI #DataSovereignty #SovereignAI #CARTO #CARTOforDataPublishers #ApacheIceberg #GeoParquet #STAC #Helsinki