Geospatial technologist working at the intersection of business, engineering, and open ecosystems.
VP of Product & Strategy and Planet Fellow at Planet. Industry Fellow at Taylor Geospatial. Technical Fellow at Radiant Earth. This site is for everything else — talks, side projects, advisory work, and writing.
Chris Holmes is a leading figure in the open-source and cloud-native geospatial community, with over 20 years of experience building standards, software, and developer communities that shape how geospatial data is shared and accessed globally.
He was the original lead developer of GeoServer and later founded OpenGeo (which became Boundless Geospatial), helping establish sustainable business models around open-source geospatial software. His current work focuses on cloud-native geospatial ecosystems — currently Portolan and geoparquet.io, building on past work co-founding STAC, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, and GeoParquet.
A longtime advocate of open ecosystems, Chris has served on multiple open-source and standards boards and is a frequent keynote speaker on cloud-native approaches to geospatial data.
Reference architecture and blueprints for cloud-native spatial data infrastructure built on open standards.
portolan-sdi.org →An open ecosystem for agricultural field boundary detection — satellite imagery, ML models, and tooling to map the world’s ~3 billion fields.
fieldsofthe.world →Open specifications for interoperable vector data on GeoJSON and GeoParquet — fiboa for agricultural field boundaries, Vecorel as the generalized cross-domain framework.
vecorel.org →A hub for the GeoParquet ecosystem — tools, datasets, and tutorials for working with the format in practice.
geoparquet.io →A QGIS plugin for downloading clipped subsets of large GeoParquet datasets directly into the desktop.
plugins.qgis.org →A GeoTIFF profile that enables HTTP range requests, turning a single file into a queryable resource.
cogeo.org →SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog — the de-facto standard for describing geospatial assets on the web.
stacspec.org →An open specification for storing vector geospatial data in the Apache Parquet columnar format.
geoparquet.org →An open-source web platform for building geospatial portals and deploying spatial data infrastructures.
geonode.org →An open-source server for sharing geospatial data — the long-running reference implementation of OGC web services and an SDI workhorse.
geoserver.org →A case for replacing the traditional server-based SDI stack with cloud-native formats — COG, GeoParquet, STAC — and object storage: faster, cheaper, AI-ready, and sovereign. Portolan as a working blueprint.
Opening keynote challenging the traditional Spatial Data Infrastructure model and arguing for a community-driven ecosystem in which governments, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals all contribute.
Opening keynote on building a queryable Earth — how simple catalog services like STAC, commodity hosting, and formats like COG and PMTiles add up to a new kind of spatial data infrastructure.
Best for advisory inquiries, talk invitations, or anything open-standards adjacent.