Hal Seki
Hal Seki is CAIO and Director at Geolonia, a Japanese geospatial technology company, where he leads AI strategy and the development of GeonicDB, a context data platform for civic and geospatial applications. He is also the founder of Code for Japan, a civic tech nonprofit, and serves as a Senior Expert at Japan's Digital Agency. His work spans open data, geospatial infrastructure, and AI-driven public sector systems, with a focus on making data usable — for both people and machines — across local government and civic contexts.
Session
As AI agents and LLM-based systems become primary consumers of geospatial data, the weak point in most data infrastructure is no longer access — it's meaning. Open data alone doesn't guarantee interoperability; without a shared semantic layer, every new API becomes another silo an AI agent has to be taught to navigate. This talk shares Geolonia's experience building GeonicDB, a context data platform built on the NGSI-LD standard — including why we chose not to simply adopt an existing broker like FIWARE Orion-LD, and built our own instead. We'll cover the reasoning, the trade-offs, and a live demo of AI agents querying standardized context data directly.