FOSS4G North America 2026 in Sacramento: our presentations
Dear Reader,
We are back from FOSS4G North America 2026, held in Sacramento, California, from November 2 to 4, 2026, and we want to share what we presented and what we saw.
GeoSolutions was there with Simone Giannecchini and Andrea Aime for the whole conference, at our table in the exhibit area and in the session rooms for our four talks in the Technical track. GeoSolutions supported the event as a Bronze sponsor and also sponsored the Tuesday afternoon break.
Below you will find the slides of all four talks, embedded directly from Google Slides, plus a short video with a live demo of the AI tools we presented.
AI-dministering GeoServer and MapStore
An early look at the Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers we are building for GeoServer and MapStore. They let today’s AI assistants help with real administration tasks, such as publishing layers, tuning caches and diagnosing issues, with guardrails to keep production deployments safe.
Andrea also recorded a demo that shows the MCP servers at work on a live GeoServer and MapStore setup.
State of GeoServer
New features, community updates and recent developments of GeoServer, for expert users, developers and anyone curious about what GeoServer can do for them.
GeoServer VS GeoServer: fight!
GeoServer benchmarked against itself. Each experiment measures the real performance cost of a common operator decision: data formats, security, logging, CRS handling, JVM settings and scaling.
Precision farming with GeoServer: lessons learned and future directions
Ten years of experience ingesting, managing and disseminating drone, Earth observation and agricultural machinery data at scale for the precision farming industry, with GeoServer deployed in the cloud.
What we saw in Sacramento
AI agents for GIS work were one of the main threads of the conference. A good example was the talk by Dara O’beirne and Silas Toms, Geospatial AI Agents in Practice: Sacramento Open Data and Hermes, where the open source Hermes agent framework orchestrates QGIS, GDAL, PostGIS and web mapping tools to automate the creation and management of web GIS outputs, with human approval before anything gets published. It is the same direction we are taking with our MCP servers for GeoServer and MapStore: let the agent take care of the repetitive work, and keep people in control of what goes into production.
Cloud native formats were the other big thread. Zarr, GeoParquet and Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) keep maturing and are becoming the standard way to store and share large raster and vector datasets on object storage, while DuckDB is turning into a go-to tool to query them directly, with no database server in between. GeoServer is already part of this picture, with community modules for COG, GeoParquet and DuckDB, and this is an area we are following closely.
A big thank you to the FOSS4G North America 2026 organizers and volunteers for a great conference, and to everybody who attended our talks or stopped by our table for a chat. We look forward to seeing you again at FOSS4G North America next year!
As always, call on us, the core code developers and experts on:
- GeoServer, the leading open source server to publish geospatial data at scale.
- MapStore, our modular open source WebGIS product to create and publish geospatial data as maps, dashboards and geo stories.
- GeoNode, the open source GIS platform to create a complete and interoperable spatial data infrastructure.
If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you achieve your needs with MapStore, GeoServer, GeoNode and GeoNetwork through our Enterprise Support Services, Professional Training Services and Subscription Services please contact us!
The GeoSolutions team,
