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Field study 01 · Geospatial intelligence

GeoSynopsis

A continental map you can interrogate: census tracts become visual patterns first, then source-grounded, plain-language answers assembled by a local retrieval pipeline.

82,764tracts in the working corpus
LocalLLM synthesis and embeddings
Durableleases, receipts, and recovery
GeoSynopsis continental tract map colored by median income with its query controls visible
The continental viewEach shape is a census tract, rendered as a selectable evidence-bearing place rather than a decorative heat map.
01 / The map

The same country tells different stories.

Layer controls expose income, unemployment, population, age, demographics, and political context. Filters redraw the tract field without hiding the source grain beneath it.

GeoSynopsis map displaying tract-level unemployment patterns
Unemployment lensA changed measure reveals a new national texture while preserving tract-level resolution.
GeoSynopsis perspective map displaying tract-level income patterns
Perspective viewPitch and rotation turn the map into an explorable surface without abandoning the data controls.

The ingenuity

The visible map is only the last mile.

The hard part was making a large, mixed-speed homelab behave like one dependable research instrument. Work is broken into bounded claims, leased to whichever node is ready, and returned with receipts. If a machine disappears, its lease expires and the tract safely re-enters the water.

Retrieval stays separate from prose. Structured facts, source permissions, embeddings, and generated synopses remain distinguishable, so an answer can be ranked without pretending every derived sentence is raw data.

  • 01Normalize tract facts and attach their provenance before any model sees them.
  • 02Generate local summaries on mismatched workers through a pull-based queue.
  • 03Embed accepted text into the vector store, with license fences carried alongside it.
  • 04Resolve a map question into geographic filters, retrieval results, and a grounded response.
02 / Below deck

The ticker and node logs made the invisible work legible.

A compact operations view showed queue motion across the top and one log pane per worker below. It turned a long-running RAG/VDB injection job into something inspectable at a glance.

Privacy note. This is a faithful interface reconstruction using representative events; private addresses, live credentials, and operational identifiers are deliberately absent.

03 / Shape

A pipeline designed to survive interruption.

IngestNormalize tract records and record their sources.
ClaimLease small jobs to whatever local node is available.
SynthesizeProduce structured, locally generated synopsis text.
IndexEmbed accepted chunks and carry their evidence fences.
ExploreJoin map selection, filters, retrieval, and an answer.