Exploring the potential for a shared geospatial service as a common primitive for Polkadot Products and JAM.

Ecosystem
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Could Polkadot use a native Geospatial Service as a common primitive for Products and JAM?

I have been thinking about a potentially missing primitive in the Polkadot Products/JAM stack: geospatial infrastructure.

I don’t mean building a “Polkadot Maps” application or trying to replace Google Maps, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, Hivemapper, etc.

I’m wondering whether Polkadot could provide a common geospatial service / SDK that applications could use for location-related functionality.

Why?

A growing number of applications need some form of geospatial functionality:

  • local marketplaces

  • mobility and transportation

  • delivery and logistics

  • tourism and events

  • location-based games

  • social applications

  • IoT / DePIN

  • autonomous machines and robotics

  • local commerce

  • asset tracking

  • location-based identity or reputation

Today, each application generally has to integrate its own mapping/geospatial provider.

Could this instead become a reusable infrastructure primitive of the Polkadot ecosystem?

What could such a service provide?

At a basic level, something as simple as:

geo.getPlace()
geo.nearby()
geo.distance()
geo.inside()
geo.searchPlaces()

Potential primitives could include:

  • coordinates and locations

  • proximity queries

  • distance calculations

  • geographic zones / polygons

  • geofencing

  • spatial indexing

  • points of interest

  • location-linked events

The underlying map data would not necessarily need to live on-chain.

The service could instead provide a common interface and verification layer while allowing different data providers to supply the underlying information.

For example:

OpenStreetMap / other datasets
GNSS / positioning networks
DePIN networks
Application-specific data
             │
             ▼
      Geospatial Service
       ├── GeoIndex
       ├── GeoQuery
       ├── Places
       ├── Geofencing
       └── GeoEvents
             │
             ▼
       Products / SDK
             │
             ▼
        Applications

Could this become a JAM service?

This is where I find the idea particularly interesting.

JAM is being designed around the concept of general-purpose services.

Could a geospatial service eventually become one of them?

The service would not need to store the world’s maps directly in JAM.

JAM could potentially provide the computational/state/verification layer, while large datasets remain in appropriate storage systems.

The important question would be:

Which geospatial primitives actually benefit from being part of a shared decentralized infrastructure?

For example:

  • spatial indexing

  • geographic queries

  • geofencing

  • location-linked state

  • verifiable location claims

rather than simply storing map tiles.

A more interesting future use case: Proof of Location

A second stage could potentially explore something like:

“Device X was inside geographic zone Y during time T.”

without necessarily revealing the device’s exact location.

This could potentially be useful for:

  • proof of presence

  • event attendance

  • delivery verification

  • location-based rewards

  • autonomous machines

  • DePIN

  • location-based games

  • anti-Sybil mechanisms

Privacy would obviously need to be a first-class concern.

I’m not suggesting that this should be part of an initial implementation — only that it could be an interesting direction if the underlying primitive existed.

Products seems like a natural place to experiment

Products already aims to provide developers with reusable capabilities rather than requiring every application to build its own infrastructure.

A simple Products application could demonstrate the concept:

“What places / events / users / assets are around me?”

Or a local marketplace could use the same infrastructure to discover nearby offers.

The interesting property would be that multiple independent applications could reuse the same geospatial primitive.

Are we already doing this?

This is actually one of my main questions.

I know there are decentralized projects working on parts of this problem, such as positioning, mapping or location oracles.

And I vaguely remember seeing Products demonstrations involving location-based applications / ratings.

But I have not found an existing Polkadot initiative that clearly corresponds to a general-purpose Geospatial Service / Geo SDK.

So:

Is there already something being developed within Polkadot that I have missed?

If not:

Would a shared geospatial primitive make sense as part of the Products/JAM architecture?

And if it does make sense:

Should this be a Product SDK capability, a dedicated JAM service, an ecosystem service, or something else?

I’m deliberately leaving the architecture open.

The goal here is not to propose a finished implementation, but to see whether this is a useful missing primitive and whether anyone in the ecosystem would be interested in taking the idea further.

Would love to hear thoughts from Parity, developers and anyone already working on geospatial / location infrastructure in the Polkadot ecosystem.