POSE: Phase I: An open source ecosystem for a decentralized geospatial web

Award ID: 2550229

This project explores new ways to make location-based data more trustworthy and useful in everyday life. Location information supports many critical activities, including disaster response, environmental monitoring, infrastructure management, and security. However, most of this data is currently managed through centralized systems that can be vulnerable to failures, manipulation, and limited transparency. This project investigates an alternative approach based on decentralized technologies that allow data to be shared, verified, and managed across distributed networks rather than controlled by a single entity. By bringing together researchers, developers, and stakeholders, the team will design and grow an open, collaborative ecosystem for robust location data. The effort helps ensure that future technologies including agent-based automated systems that rely on location information can operate with greater reliability, transparency, and accuracy. While Web 2.0 technologies enabled volunteered geographic information, interactive maps, and cloud services, these advances have also concentrated control in centralized systems, creating vulnerabilities and a need for a more trustworthy and durable geospatial data infrastructure. Meanwhile, decentralized computing technologies, such as blockchains, peer-to-peer networks, consensus mechanisms, digital signatures, and cryptographic protocols offer advantages that address these challenges in ways traditional systems cannot. Their principles emphasize openness, durability, and user-controlled participation. Applied to geospatial systems, these features enable verifiable provenance while remaining compatible with incumbent standards. This project scopes and designs an open-source ecosystem (OSE) for the decentralized geospatial web to consolidate fragmented efforts into a coherent framework anchored by the Location Protocol, a schema for signed spatial data. This POSE Phase I project supports stakeholder engagement, governance refinement, and roadmap preparation enabling the ecosystem to progress towards maturity and long-term sustainability. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Florence Rabanal